As part of Norwich Arts Centre’s Against The Grain season of events, celebrating the diversity of modern life and culture beyond the mainstream, local artists get a chance to delve into the leftfield in ‘6 Against The Grain’.

The six artists have been commissioned by Norwich Arts Centre as a result of an open submission, and have produced brand new work for this exhibition. Each artist explores a different aspect of anti-mainstream culture, using documentary, illustrative or conceptual approaches. They were chosen for both their response to the subject matter and their innovative creative techniques. The featured artists are Jenny Allison and Rosie Arnold, Philip Cooper, Libby Double-King, Holliday Kedik, and Marcus Williams.

Jenny and Rosie have photographically reproduced album covers that were banned or controversial when they were first released. The work has been posed using models of a different age or gender to the original to examine why the images were controversial, and whether they are still offensive today.

Jenny explains “The purpose of our work is to explore the nature of censorship of images used on album covers. We have both always been interested in freedom of expression whether this is artistic freedom, freedom of speech or lifestyle choice.”

She gives an example; “the cover of KT Tunstall’s debut album ‘Eye to the Telescope’ was changed for the US release because she was wearing rainbow striped braces and this was seen as supporting Gay Pride. It was replaced with a supposedly safer image of a close up of her face.” Also altered was the Beatles original cover for 'Yesterday & Today' (featuring the band in butchers’ smocks, smothered with raw meat and doll parts) which was released, then withdrawn, and then repackaged with a different cover. “The idea of the Beatles being baby killers was obviously too much for the public to handle.”

Philip’s animations incorporate fragments and layers of found imagery from magazines, bills and personal documents. The work explores the conflicting role of information in today’s mainstream media culture, where content is often trivialised in favour of style. In the work “the personal, the trivial and the sensitive” is removed to leave the viewer  “confounded and overwhelmed by the aesthetic.”

Libby will produce documentary photographs following a stay in a commune as part of her research which will explore the lives of people living there. “Within contemporary culture, little is considered alternative as society is so diverse. However, ideologies concerning family living arrangements have barely changed. We believe we have the freedom of choice but often choices are silently made for us. Modern houses are built…dictating the ideology of the nuclear family.”

Holliday has produced carefully posed photographic portraits. Each portrait is a combination of multiple shots using different exposure and focus, to create a “hyper-real” image of an individual stand against the mainstream. The work is illustrative, with a simple concept and a complex technique.