December 2011: ∆E =W at Tate Modern

November 2011: Community Without Propinquity at MK Gallery

Exhibition: October 6 to November 27.

Community without Propinquity* is a project exploring the roles of contemporary art and communities in New Towns across the globe. The project included an exhibition, a video programme, six new artist’s commissions, a research laboratory, publication and symposium on the 26 November.

I was commissioned to make a new piece of work for performance on the 26th November. The work is a short play called ‘Community’ that is based on a series of interviews and research into the policy, strategy and delivery of community in Milton Keynes. The play is 4 acts long and is to be enacted without announcment during a social occassion within the gallery. Written for a solo actor the protagonist enacts the work through conversation with people, embodying the perfect community member as constructed through city planning doctrine.

This work was performed at MK gallery on 26th November by professional actor John Jack.

November 2011: Department of Overlooked Histories

September 2011: PLAYBACK in Latvia

July 2011: The School For Tourists at Grizedale Arts

June 2011: PLAYBACK at The Showroom

Exhibition Opens 21st June and continues until 30th July.

January 2011: Residency at Kuona Trust, Kenya

 

September 2010: Artist Fellowship at The Showroom

For the last 5 months I have been co-ordinating the pilot phase of the Communal Knowledge programme at The Showroom gallery, a new programme that aims to develop a collaborative body of knowledge on local issues and to re-think established norms, values, codes, roles and relations within the locality. Working on projects with Dutch artist Mieke van de Voort and Ricardo Basbaum, from Brazil, the pilot phase concluded this month with an exhibition of both artist’s work at the gallery. This opened with a pannel discussion between Sophie Hope and I, Mieke and Ricardo, exploring the nature of both projects. The discussion questioned the gallery as a problematic site for radical action in its framing of the work as perfromative, explored the terminology and illusory constructions of ‘collaboration’ and questioned heirarchies and agendas of empowerment. 

Leading on from this programme and by means of further developing the research that this has entailed I am now commencing a one year fellowship with The Showroom to produce new work, programme a series of discursive events and develop research. The work will explore the relation of gallery to place through research, pedagogy and practice developing processes that mobilise froms of tacit knowledge held within the neighbourhood.

September 2010: Waterbeach Artist in Residence

This month I begin a two year residency in the village of Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire. Commissioned by the Waterbeach Cultural Collective the residency is to curate and deliver a programme of activity in collaboration with local partners.  

Through this project I wish to explore the location of art in society, its function, role and value, looking at collaborative forms of production and processes inherant in the every day.

July – August 2010: Grizedale Arts Residency

 

Hedge Cutting at Yewfield

For two weeks in July and two in August, I have been working on the research phase of a residency at Grizedale Arts.  The work I have been developing looks at the connectivity of people to place, what happens to a sense of community, ownership, responsibility and belonging in an environment so heavily populated by a transient tourist population? What is the relationship between the ‘tourist’ population and ‘resident’ and what meachanisms might enable a more meaningful, collaborative and contributive experience of place?

As part of my reseach process I have been investigating existing models of contributive tourism in the Lake District including the Woofing Scheme and National Trust Working Holidays. Through active engagement in these schemes, having cut hedges, practiced my topiary, cleared pathways, built a footpath and landscaped a fell, I have been exploring the potential usefulness of being a visitor as well as the limitations of voluntary unskilled labour. 

Through this work I wish to explore the role of the artist in relation to what is useful, who defines what usefulness is, and to place in question a process of amateur contribution through response and understanding of site to the contribution of undemanded but professionalised expertise.

This research will lead on to a performative Tourist Training Camp, I am currently developing, to be hosted by Lawson Park in 2011 to train ‘super tourists’ and to match make incoming skill sets with local demand.

12th & 13th June 2010: International Camp For Improbable Thinking

On the weekend of the 12th and 13th June I presented a performance exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre, in Cambridgeshire, and in the surounding area of Bourn. On the Saturday the gallery space was converted into a costume and information centre where members of the public were invitd to join me to dress up and embark on a performative walk. The walk took us on a pre-determined route around the village and included a number of interactive communal actions to explore the history of the particular locations we visited. These included a public appologies in the woods, the blessing of the village sign and a choral rendition of the old 100th psalm on the village bridge.

On Sunday the old village hut was re-instated at Wysing with a day of local music performances and the presentation of a puppet show by a local pupeteer working from the stories I have been collecting.

This weekend was based on a piece of research in progress that I have been working on over the last few months, looking at communal actions, and will continue to do so for the next year in collaboration with local historians. 

The weekend was curated by Christina Green.

June 2010: Artsadmin Bursary Award

I have just been awarded an Arts Admin bursary to support the development of new work over the next year. The award also includes advisory and mentoring support as well as the opportunity to work with a writer.

30th January – 1st April 2010: Wysing Arts Centre

For the next two months I will be working in the live/work space at Wysing Arts Centre. During this time I will be taking part in the National Networks Annual Conference held on site, participating in Escalator: an artist retreat programme, organised by Wysing Arts Centre and the Royal College of Art, and staging a number of events as part of mine and Delta Arts’ practice.

2010-2015: ACME Fire Station 5 Year Residency

I have recently been selected to receive a 5 year residency, in the form of a live/work space at ACME Fire Station in Bow, London, from April 2010 – 2015. I move in on the 12th April.

29th November – 19th December 2009: Visual Arts Tour India

As part of the selection process for the British Council’s Young UK Visual Arts Entrepreneur of the Year Award, myself and 4 other shortlisted candidates were taken on a tour of the visual arts scene in India. Traveling to Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata we spent ten days meeting artists, gallerists, curators, wirters and designers and visiting a variety of art spaces. Staying on for a further week, I visited Varanassi and Agra before returning to Delhi and Mumbai for further meetings.

Places and organisations of particular interest were Sarai and Khoj in Delhi, BMB GAllery, Volte Gallery and Gallery Maskara in Mumbai and Experinmenta and Khoj in Kolkata. The tour was highly productive and I will be taking a number of collaborations with people I met during this trip forward through Delta Arts, including hosting Mumbai based artist Tejal Shah in the UK in June 2010.

13th – 23rd September 2009: China 400

I was selected to attend this 10 day visit to China, hosted by the All Chinese Youth Federation, through the British Council’s Exchange of Future Leaders Programme. Visiting Shanghai and Shaanxi Province our group met with numerous cultural innovators, shared practice and learnt about China’s cultural infrastructure. Visits included the Oriental Pearl TV tower, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Shanghai, and Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts and Xi’an Film Group in Shaanxi Province. Highlights of the trip included a day spent with local families, a visit to the Terra Cotta Warriors and painting with farmers in Donghan village, Hu County.  I was overwhelmed by the extraordinary generosity with which our hosts welcomed us.

13th – 17th July 2009: engage International Summer School

This one week peer-led event took place at Kilkenny Castle, Ireland and included a day trip to Dublin to visit Hugh Lane Gallery and IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art). The week included a number of key note speakers and break out sessions that took as their starting point the theme: Shifting Perspectives: giving participants the opportunity to consider the positioning of their own work in relation to contemporary gallery practice.

As one of the break-out sessions I ran a workshop: Crossing Professional Borders: Points of Duality, Separation and Convergence to explore the boundaries between job roles in the sector; in particular the recent proliferation of artist-curator, educator-curator and artist-educator roles. This practical session questioned the significance of professional categorisations and raised discussion on the positive and negative elements of an interdisciplinary approach.

13th February – 12th April 2009: Triangle Trust Fellowship to Mauritius

This residency was hosted by pARTage, Mauritius, and supported by Gasworks Gallery, London UK. 

This residency began with an interest in the connection between particular geographic locations and human spiritual activity. Hosted by pARTage, the residency was scheduled to enable me to take part in Maha Shivatree: a Hindu pilgrimage from your place of residence to Ganga Taloa, a sacred lake in the middle of a volcano. Following the pilgrimage I focussed my research on collecting stories about this sacred site, using the local libraries, university resources, and speaking to members of the public and Hindu priests. Through this process the importance and prevalence of a strong oral tradition emerged that I wanted to explore further. In order to do this I curated a series of 5 performance events for which I invited local musicians, rappers, poets, writers, dancers and artists to share a meal, perform to each other and use these performances to explore the processes and issues of telling through different disciplines, in different languages and cross cultures. Performances were presented in French, Creole and English. The evenings were focussed on peer critique and the act of sharing food as a platform for connectivity, discussion and production. 

As a result of these events I then developed a performance work with 6 of the Mauritian artists who had attended the events. The performance deconstructed the processes of telling, riding itself of narrative and playing with the cyclicality of the narrator and the listener. The audience became the subject, reflected back upon themselves through voice, sound, text and movement but through which process they could assume control and take on the role of author. 

This performance was presented at the Alliance Francaise on April 3rd 2009.