Visual Arts South West Annual General Meeting 2014

I've had some great support from Visual Arts South West over the past couple of years, and today I had the pleasure of saying thanks, and talking for five minutes about what I've been with the support over the past twelve months: Attended a Reith lecture by Grayson Perry. Wrote about it on an application and was selected for the wonderful Critical Writing for the Visual Arts residential course at Arvon in Devon where I met a great bunch of creative people, who could write, laugh and cook like rascals. I was selected for the AA2A at University of Central Lancashire and I'll install my work, inspired by being at the University, and by the Al Mutannabbi Street project, next week. It will be exhibited 3 - 19 December. I was awarded the New Opportunities Award commission which has supported me to be mentored by artist Lyndall Phelps, and attend the Folkestone Triennial. I'll leave you to decide which image goes with which project... (except Lyndall's excellent work for the London Canal Museum is the hanging piece made of circular structures www.physics.org/superposition I've had to leave one image out as its copyright lies with Bridport Museum, but it will be shown in May 2015 at Bridport Museum.

Radio is a sound salvation

Today's blog is in oral form.

First it's Tara, my sometime collaborator, and me, being interviewed by the fabulous Angie. Some of best friends are antipodean.

http://listenagain.canstream.co.uk/bridport/index.php?id=41

and for some context regarding the Sanctuary Collection and Bridport Museum, here's Emily Hicks, Curator of Bridport Museum

http://listenagain.canstream.co.uk/bridport/index.php?id=42 

Bridport FM is an annual part of the town's cultural life, feel free to listen to lots of the programmes to get an idea of how an active, interested community that thrives beyond the reach of motorways and train stations does its thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_Off4T88Tc&feature=youtu.be

Matthew Collings

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04gv5kl/the-rules-of-abstraction-with-matthew-collings#group=p025v15l



These programmes are very exciting on many levels. I love the balance in production, content and presentation.

I also remember Matthew Collings launching a new studio environment for artists with the optimistic thought that it would be fine once there was some paint on the floors…

He's was champion that evening and he still is.


Enjoy.

'Cause unity is powerful…' The Jam.

It’s been a busy week and I can’t stop.

I suspect all blogs go the same way. The momentum of the task in hand overtakes the times to sit, reflect and write anything of interest. But I’ll give it a go in the time I have before I leave the house and drive to a place to do a thing before I drive back to meet and update curator Emily.

Luckily for me Lyndall Phelps is, officially, my mentor for the NOA commission, and unofficially one of my great friends whose practice has recently developed beautifully into...

http://www.artcitieslandscape.com/socialinclusionproject_gallery_details.php?id=189

which all makes the best sense when you look through

http://www.lyndallphelps.com

In the land of making, a critical friend is a wonderful asset. An artist whose knowledge, skills, experience and opinion are all greatly respected and valued, is the best person to share a couple of Sunday morning telephone hours discussing art/life and materials.

So my week began with conversations about fabricators, rigidity, cord, string, rope, sites and paints and has rolled on through experiments, play, tests, revisions and more exploration. Lyndall is amazingly generous with her knowledge, time, contacts and wit. I’m a lucky rascal.

Now it’s Friday and I find myself with a four panel screen frame which seemed to be waiting for me in a local second hand shop. It was definitely one of the fastest purchases I’ve ever made. You can see its current, dishevelled state on Twitter, @BridportKnots.

I’ve stripped the frame down ready to make it marvellous, attractive and inviting enough for any game bird to come and have a go at contributing a knot for Bridport Knots. All the knots made and donated will appear in the final work to be exhibited in the heart of Bridport next year.

I hope you’ll come and tie the knot with me in Bridport soon. And while I’m talking about people getting involved in making art, did you catch this? ...

1. BBC Front Row

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025nwmq

Artist Michael Sailstorfer on his interactive work at the Folkestone Triennial, 7 minute interview

...I’m glad I stopped, it’s been fun.

Father Ted would just tell you they're big and close by.

Hours and hours in the Duveen Galleries. Hours and years from the age of thirteen, walking around soaking up the materials, skills, stories and execution of artists' ideas through the ages. For most of those years the works exhibited were only as human-sized as me. Animate and inanimate, we all rattled around together, mute and humbled, hanging in the vast universe that was the Tate Gallery.

Of course Henry Moore's rounded and grounded figures stood as comparative giants, but even if they'd yearned, and reached, for the stars, their arms wouldn't have bothered anything like the ceiling. Despite their substantial presence and cool, comforting polish, the most prolific element in the building was still air. The Tate Gallery was stiff with air, stuffed with air. Art had its work cut out trying to compete with the monumental, hanging, space.

Henry Moore said 'Monumentality doesn't have to do with scale, its the vision behind the work'. The vision behind air is undeniably monumental, given its integral part in our lives, but nevertheless I have been incredibly inspired by its diminishing presence in the Duveens over the past five years. 

Eva Rothschild began the encroachment with 26 triangles of aluminium tubing which brushed the height of the stone walls, and nodded at an ambition to venture beyond. Fiona Banner fulfilled that ambition by suspending from the ceiling, a whole Harrier fighter plane, and reclining a highly polished, Jaguar aircraft on its back as though it had just skidded through the door. I spent ages looking up and down in wonderment at the installation of Banner's works, much as I many years before in front of a big fairground wheel. 

Martin Creed thinks its good to look at museums at high speed because it leaves time for other things. I agree with him, I don't expect to be stopped in my tracks often, but on the occasions when my jaw drops and my breath is taken away, it makes me grin and feel excited.

This summer Phyllida Barlow's 'dock' in the Duveen, and 'Gig' at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, provoked my wonder and delight. It made me feel generally mischievous, and specifically like I was playing chicken by standing directly under enormous, precarious structures which could fall on me at any moment. If you've ever reached up to pull a half forgotten item off an overstuffed high shelf you'll know the feeling. 

Barlow's managed to displace a lot of air in the reverential Tate Britain, and connect to my senses and memories by turning carpentry inside out, and rolling a nostalgic wheel of Monet colour over my brain. For me, the artist has achieved a monumental vision with monumental forms, and she knows what she's talking about: 'Things aren't just visual. They are sensations of physicality'. 

Hands

And twenty-three boxes later I was increasingly amazed at the stamina and output of past generations, the dedication Mr Sanctuary showed to conserving the many and the various facets of the industry, and to the fact that this ongoing rock of Bridport’s employment and production had barely shown its modest ankle to the public over the preceding five years.

I’d been to Bridport Museum often enough to know the town’s historic wealth was built on turning hemp into rope and flax into netting, and I was, until recently, under the very common misapprehension that the long, narrow gardens came about because of the outworkers’ rope and net making work, rather than the more historically accurate facts of the burgage system.

However, I'd had almost no knowledge of what went on in Bridport’s contemporary rope and net industry, beyond the odd, mysterious job advert in the local paper, a fellow gigrower journeying to fit a net into a plane, and discreet talk about defence industry contracts. Clearly it has a mighty form connected to that demure ankle.

For me, the donation of the Sanctuary Collection to the Museum seems to be a marker of Bridport’s past and present uniting, and over my weeks of research it’s become dazzlingly, glaringly, gloriously and scarily clear that what I have the chance to do, is grasp the moment, and the modest budget, to celebrate the skilled work of each and every one of our named and un-named knot makers. But what exactly is involved? It was time to roll the sleeves and attempt at least a knot or two myself.

The word on the street, after Bridport’s unbelievably inaugural and successful 2014 Ropewalk Fair, was that Dee was the person to track down for expert tuition. So I did, quite swiftly. Bridport’s population is around the thirteen thousand figure, and there is no train station. Given this context, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’d known Dee in another capacity ever since I moved here. And now, yet another of her superpowers had been revealed.

If anyone could teach me how to make netting Dee could, and luckily for me she would. On a sunbleached, Saturday afternoon standing outside the History Centre with our twine tied onto the park railings. Traditional, and a very public challenge for a shy knotting newbie whose fingers were revealed as too slender and tapering for robust knot making. To be fair though, I've always aspired to be an Aye-Aye. 

Naturally a passing policeman turned out to be an ex-netmaker, keen to chat and observe the newbie losing a wrestling bout to over-twiddling twine. I believe that’s a technical term. Antique, natural fibre. Vintage some might say. An eccentrically over-twiddling material I’d say.

I can still sense my old BA sculpture tutor smiling wryly and walking slowly into critical analysis position. Ideas and materials indeed Douglas. Ideas and materials.

ps. 23 is nowhere near the total number of boxes.

Splicing

And then I opened my first grey, cardboard, archive box of Sanctuary treasures. Box Number 5 contained black and white photographs from various eras, but the 1920s shot of three women dressed solely in white, wearing black boots and eyes cast down at the same table of work, while two men sit with the same focus at a neighbouring bench, in dark jackets, flat cap and what looks to be a Homburg, caught my eye and stirred memories recent and distant.

The women may have been examining finished rope for imperfections, the men are perched on stools, with what could be hessian sacks, as cushions. They’re definitely checking their laptops. No, they really are. Emily has agreed that I can put together a slideshow of my favourite Sanctuary images, as part of my exhibition next spring, so you can let me know what you see.

My memory was sparked in at least three directions. Immediately, in relation to a day in June this year when nearly all the phase 3, New Expressions artists and curators gathered at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery to share individual lines of commission enquiry. While I look at this photograph filled with white walls, coils of rope and piles of hemp, the strong shaft of sunlight beaming onto the be-bunned workers reminds me that artist Tim Shore, in the north of England, is currently researching how time/light ruled the working day of a mill. I’ll be watching out for his final work at Strutts North Mill, and interested to see if images of millworkers in sunbeams also engender the air of Canova’s ‘The Three Graces’ for me, however incongruous that may seem.

In addition the scene of studious, grafting employment in this photograph reminds me of the steady gazes of unemployment, poverty and hunger found in Walker Evans’ work during the Great American Depression, 1935 - 1936. Having curated the Hayward/Southbank Touring exhibition of Walker Evans’ images in Ely, Cambridgeshire 2006, and filled the gallery full of lindy hop dancers, infant and ancient, I had a great drive to install the same works at my newly rented Dorset farmhouse home in 2010.

I was privileged to be given permission by my landlords and the Southbank, to live with 53 of Walker Evans’ finest photographs nestled in bucolic isolation for a month. 500 intrepid visitors shared the poignancy, quality and intelligence of Evans’ Farm Security Administration work with me while combine harvesters pulled in the surrounding rich harvest by day and night. I don’t think the contrasts were lost on any of us, especially an ex-tenant who visited the farmhouse to remember his impoverished boyhood 65 years prior.

Finally in this echo chamber I am transported to the engine room belly of a ship where my grandfather is working, with his flat cap on, his white sleeves rolled and the churning quease of oil filling every part of my system.

I like to see where things join, where they connect. Where they knot together.

http://www.newexpressions.org/New-Opportunities-Award/

Pulling in the right direction

So this New Opportunities Award adventure really began when I moved to Bridport in 2009. One of the things I noticed fairly quickly was that the town was referred to with righteous pride as a ‘working town’, as distinct from being a ‘second home’ or ‘tourist’ town. However, the live and serious industry of my new home remained a mystery to me up until my work on this commission. Although I’d spent five years getting familiar with Bridport Museum’s exhibits, and the town’s critical links to rope and netmaking, I hadn’t experienced any of this history in the making in my local community.

But I knew I wanted to discover more about the twists, the fibres, the knots and the people who made it happen. Since I began working freelance with Emily Hicks, Curator at Bridport Museum, over three years ago, I’ve been expressing an interest in working with the Museum’s rope/net Collection, and then this year, suddenly we’d submitted our New Expressions application and had it successfully selected for the national programme.

Bridport has a great allies in the Museum. Emily as its Curator, has an ambitious vision for the organisation and its visitors, which is backed up not only with her own hard work, great skills and warm sense of humour but that of the whole team too . So it’s not surprising that, undeterred by being in the middle of a huge funding bid, Emily was still keen to support me with my ideas. I’m still not sure if this was despite, or because I’d already roped her into delivering pop-up, classroom based exhibitions with me during Hutliving Here & There, which explored the historic and contemporary state of Dorset’s shepherds’ hut industry. Few things can be more instantly team-building or hilarious than a fresh classroom of primary children interrogating visitors as to which of them is due to marry the teacher (Reader, neither of us.).

Since Bridport Knots was selected by the New Expressions panel back in the spring, Emily and her team have welcomed and accommodated me in the History Centre and at the Museum. I’ve been allowed not  only to explore boxes, antiques ledgers and string vests, but also to share in the volunteers’ discoveries, and the gloriously civilised elevenses. Complete with biscuits. Really good biscuits.

Although I haven’t begun my blog until after spending months researching, thinking, discussing, evaluating and sifting ideas for the work which will be made for public exhibition May 2015, I’ve gathered a tome’s worth of incisive ponderings which I’ll share with you over the next few months. But only if your biscuits can keep me in the luxury to which I’ve become accustomed.