Continuing Conversations

Project up at VARC was great – I love really intense working sessions, partly I think, because you can really feel a sense of achievement by getting a lot of work done, something which often seems remote possibilty most of the time.

I set up a dark room in an old coal shed, which I used to process a series of pin-hole photographs of architectural details which seemed embedded in their surroundings. Sometimes this was because the buildings were old and weathered, in other cases this was due to the growth of moss, lichen and weeds growing on window frames and around door ways.

The piece was presented as a looped DVD, projected against the old stone wall in the interior of the coal shed I used as my dark room.

The video is at the bottom of this post, so just keep scrolling down to see it…

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Embedded Architecture

Up to Northumberland next weekend, for an exchange project with VARC. Myself and another four artists from the NewBridge Project are involved in a project called Response: A Rural / Urban Conversation. (http://www.varc.org.uk/news/2011/05/28/response-a-…) Bascially, this involves camping there for three days (yes, I know, I’m a bit stunned that I’m going to be doing this too) and making work on-site to show on the Sunday evening.

I’ll be making a series of pin-hole photographs of the surrounding landscape, which is really gorgeous – wild, sparce and open – which will then be projected in one of the old outhouses there. The walls in the outhouses are pretty rough and crumbly, which the photogrpahs will be projected directly against, kind of so the exterior landscape is becoming part of the interior space. This will be following on from the pin-hole work I was doing in the snow back in December. Looking forward to this, as I get to run around with a load of customised sweet times, and set up a darkroom in a old coal shed.

In September, Jenny Purrett, the current VARC artist-in-residence will be coming to work at the NewBridge studios with us for part two of the exchange. The work from High Bridge will be re-thought / re-worked in relation to the urban location before we show it again. 

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Finally gotten an edited version of the piece I made down at PVA up online. Bit of a bugger to to this, as surprisingly enough, listening to it via the web is always going to be a much lesser experience than via a 5.1 set up. It’s really difficult to get across the richness and detail on the quiet bits whilst not getting to the stage that people’s ears are bleeding during the loud bits. So what’s up there feels more like a work in progress at the moment – it doesn’t quite sound how I really want it to via the web, but I really want to get something out there.

Here’s the link:http://soundcloud.com/lauren-healey/audio-collage. If you’re listening via headphones – great – if not, I would suggest turning up the volume. To 11 :)

26^th March protest march yesterday. The reason I got up at the ungodly hour of 4am to take a 6 hr coach ride to the capital is that I fundamentally believe that the public sector cuts the government are imposing are driven out of ideology rather than necessity; that they disproportionally hit the weakest in our society the hardest; and I’m really fed up with being incredibly angry about it and feeling powerless to actually do anything.

What struck me the most was despite the small amount of violence which unsurprisingly got most of the mainstream media attention, the atmosphere for the four hours I was walking was kind of akin to a giant walking street party. There was several bands playing, people with others in costume (Robin Hood and Fat Cats being my favourites), parents with children in pushchairs, nurses dancing to the music provided portable PA systems set up on tricycles in Trafalgar Square. What was also really lovely were the people representing others who couldn’t physically be there, such as pensioners and the disabled. It was exhausting, but with that sense of camaraderie you get at big events when everyone is there for the same reason.

With a crowd this large, (400,000 – 500,000 most estimates agree) I had to give up trying to meeting up with the AIR group within about 10 minutes of arriving (they were about 2 hrs further along the designated route), but instead got to do the walk with a couple of other people coming down from Newcastle on the coach. This was great, because one of my favourite things is meeting interesting strangers and having intriguing conversations with them.

With everyone taking photographs, videoing and tweeting, I thought it would be interesting to record the demonstration another way – having just gotten back from the PVA residency, and just doing the final touches to the piece I made there, recording the sound seemed an obvious way to do it. I’ve tried to get different levels and details in what I was recording, from talking of the person next to me, the chants of groups of people, the waves of whistle and vuvuzelas being blown, to the brass band playing. My inability to walk very far today means I’ll be listening to these tomorrow in-between meetings and proposal writing, so I’ll be thinking of ways to use this audio then. If nothing else, I think it’s an important document to add to all the visual and written accounts of the event.

Back from residency and in a world of playing catch-up. So much so, that the 11-13 hr days I was working at the studio last week are beginning to feel a bit like a holiday.

The time down in Dorset was really good – very intense working, but I like it when project run a bit on adrenalin. The project I did at PVA ran pretty much to what I proposed, with the main exception being that I sourced recordings from all over the town, rather than just one particular side street. It actually worked out quite nicely, following the microphone around, and recording those little incidental sounds that drift past almost un-noticed sometimes. I also found myself getting really excited about recording snatches of overheard music – someone practicing piano, a band rehearsing, something like Xylophone from someone’s open window.

I’ve got to do a bit more editing (mainly because the stereo goes 100% in either direction which could be a bit of a head screw if listened to on headphones), but The Plan is to get it up onto Soundcloud this week. I’ll post a link up here when that’s done.

Had another visit to the Oceana yesterday with Taryn Edmonds (http://www.aa2a.org/artists/taryn_edmonds) who I’ll hopefully be collaborating with on a project there. This will require some funding being sourced (next week’s job and then some), but as there’s some distinct crossovers in our work, I think something pretty interesting could be achieved.