Coupling is an expanding series of curatorial projects, collaborations, or artist pairings, where two artists/ practitioners are introduced to one another for the first time and show together because of some common concerns within their work.

In this second edition, Finnish artist and musician Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen) couples with London-based artist and publisher David Blamey, both responding to the invitation by taking time to share with each other around their practices, culminating in two new bodies of work relating to the walls, floors, sights and sounds within and around PUBLICS space and to elsewhere. Each artist taking account of the everyday publicness of their materials, where the properties, modalities and interstitialities of the interlude, the pause, the quiet gaps offer the premise for both their works and their co-mingling.

Please join us for the opening event on Thursday 31st of March, at 6–8pm, where both artists will perform live music sets back-to-back. The Coupling exhibition is open during PUBLICS Library opening hours on Wednesdays between 12–6pm and by appointment.
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David Blamey’s Substrates is a selection of collages made from small painted objects displayed on PUBLICS walls next to a scattered floor installation made up of permutations of specific colour schemes. Blamey’s Substrates are composed of various commercially produced plywood stretcher wedges, both painted and in their natural colour before being arranged into a grid. Each tableau is rationalised as a chromatic reference to a particular place at a specific time; a hotel in Tiruvannamalai, an autumn street in Lambeth, a garden in the south of France, or a bank under a bridge on the river Thames at low tide. The intention is to organize the components so as to capture the dynamic moment of seeing them for the first time. There is a combination of unsettled visual elements combining discord and harmony, order and disarray.

To make art from canvas stretchers, or from the materials of paint-making follows a conceptual trope extending back to artists preoccupied with how these basic support structures are ‘carriers’ of the conventional substance of art: Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvases, Lygia Clark’s expanded paintings, Imi Knoebel’s misappropriated stretcher bars, Richard Tuttle’s dyed canvasses and so on. Here, the wider ‘substrate’ of this body of work is a conceptual reveal, an exposing of the preparatory methods, protocols and production techniques underpinning the act of making art.
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Work by Lau Nau is a spatial sound piece examining the relative closeness of work and play. Just as a child practices by playing, it is never solely about the learning of life skills: it is about joy and discovery. With some vanishing moments a creative work is a captivating play of associations.

Work is made for a reel-to-reel tape player and a motion sensor player. It’s a combination of analogue and digital techniques. The tape loop plays the sounds of a modular Buchla 200 synthesizer that has patched together in a creative play. The motion sensor player activates when detecting movement, filling the space with various sounds: of someone building the frames for the exhibition, whistling, playing with water drops. Sonic traces connect these activities with the listener to other geographies, sites, and times and with the immediate surrounding of PUBLICS library shelves.
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Lau Nau is a Finnish composer and performer who work with analogue synthesizers, acoustic sounds, voice and field recordings. Her compositions comprise a range of solo albums under the moniker Lau Nau, multi channel sound installations and scores for films and performing arts. Lau Nau’s albums have received acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork and The Wire. To date Lau Nau has released seven albums in Europe, USA and Japan, garnering prize nominations like Teosto-, Emma-, And Jussi- and Femma prizes. Besides Lau Nau plays in an improvisational group Kiri Ra! and as a duo with Matti Bye. She has been playing in various improv bands as IAX, Maailma, Hertta Lussu Ässä, Kiila, Avarus, the Anaksimandros, Päivänsäde, Kemialliset Ystävät, Chamellows and others.

David Blamey is a London-based artist and proprietor of the independent publishing imprint Open Editions. His work encompasses several activities – including exhibiting, curating and publishing – which overlap to form a multidimensional practice that resists conventional categorisation. To this end, his work is consciously positioned within a range of public situations, both inside and beyond the art gallery. He recently released an edited book, ‘Specialism’ (2016) and a record, ‘Rural’ (2015) and The Wire described his ‘O.K.’ sound project for My Dance the Skull’s ‘Voice Studies’ series as ‘something quite strange, creepy and good’.
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PUBLICS Coupling began in 2021, after months of the now familiar rescheduling, with first two solo shows by renowned artists Maryam Jafri and Dave McKenzie as the result of a new collaboration between PUBLICS and PALO art productions, who co-produced Dave McKenzie’s work for the exhibition and with whom PUBLICS will publish a book Banners and Letters with Rooftop Press, 2022.