Making It

About us

'Making It' features the work of international artists Leonor Antunes (Portugal), Eva Grubinger (Austria), Alexandre da Cunha (Brazil), Christopher Baker (USA) and Antony Gormley (UK).

As well as referencing Plymouth's history as a city of makers and crafts people, the show aims to compare and contrast the different ways we can 'make it', from the labour intensive process of manufacturing and fabricating new artworks to the '15 minutes of fame' and wannabe culture that often define our age of social media.

'Making It' also includes 'readymades' - works where artists have re-appropriated existing objects in order to reveal overlooked form, beauty and mystery, inviting audiences to see them with a new perspective.

Leonor Antunes' installation in St Luke's highlights her pain-staking approach to work, offering a perspective into forms of labour that retain human and cultural value and providing a counter-balance to our increasingly digitised, fast-paced world.

Since the early 1900s, artists have been selecting day-to-day relatively mundane items and reinventing them through subtle interventions, Eva Grubinger and Alexandre da Cunha do this to monumental effect on The Box's ground floor.

Christopher Baker's large-scale audio-visual installation on The Box's first floor features 5,000 video diaries gathered from the internet. Social media has given us a multitude of new ways to communicate, but have these platforms helped us to any listen better?

Antony Gormley's 'LOOK II' is a figure made from 22 blocks in one cast iron form, stacked like a house of cards but, at the same time, substantial. As it looks across the horizon from its location on West Hoe Pier, the work expresses the tensions between going and staying, between making roots and yearning for adventure and a life free from the constraints of history. Read Less