Lizz Brady hopped on the TransPennine express (sort of) over and up to Newcastle to visit me for a couple of days. Lizz is the founder of Broken Grey Wires – An ongoing investigation into art and mental health, developing a dialogue between contemporary artists.
We met when Henrietta Armstrong and myself (aka Madam-X and Lazy Susan) travelled over to Manchester to DJ at their website launch last November. They wanted DJs that were also artists and my good friend Paul Stanley, who had recently moved back to Manchester, recommended us. Now we are the house DJs for Broken Grey Wires – having recently played at their latest Exhibition opening Make Windows Where There Are Walls at Notting Hill Arts Club in London.
I have been interested in J. Robert Oppenheimer for quite a while now and had mentioned him to Lizz and she also found him intriguing, in fact she seemed to have a slight feeling of affection towards him. We talked about how his irrational behaviour sometimes took over (leaving a poisoned apple on his colleague’s desk over spring break…dropping a suitcase over a bridge onto a woman in front of whom he had embarrassed himself by trying to kiss, even though her partner had just left the train carraige) which seems a character so at odds with his work as a director of Los Alamos Laboratory in WWII. Such a contradictory character. Lizz was telling me about SteppenWolf by Herman Hesse, which I am about to read for the first time. Our conversations meandered on and on, from the duality of man to the Bentham theory – (a circular placement of inmates or patients with one guard watching over everyone from the centre position) how this would effect the inmates and the guard, eventually leadin full circle back to the atom. I like the way Lizz thinks and connects her different interests and ideas together. She’s like an alternative Wikipedia, the Lizzipedia (she’ll love that)
We decided to work on creating a gif as this was something we could develop together in separate locations after her visit had ended. We both are also drawn to subliminal imagery and installations, so how the gif will be displayed has become an important aspect of it.
I’m excited to see how it will turn out and will post up some more W.I.P. pics soon.
