In the second of my collaborator profiles I’ll talk about working with Gareth Houghton, who is a motion graphics professional. Gareth and I studied fine art together 11 years ago and have been friends ever since, although our practices have diverged as I’ve followed a fine art route and he has developed his work in the commercial world.
I’ve called on Gareth’s skills a number of times over the years to help me with editing video/animation work, starting with editing together my commission for Liverpool Biennial’s Art for Places project in 2010. That experience of working with him led to me picking up some skills in video editing that have proved useful so that I can try things out and create simple works by myself. I also had Gareth’s help to edit the footage for ‘a remarkable architecture of stairs’ which was shown at the Bluecoat last year. With each new project I work on, the process gets more complicated as I understand more about what can be done, so for this exhibition I wanted Gareth on hand as all three new works had a video element to them.
As he works with the software (after effects) on a daily basis, it means that Gareth knows all the shortcuts and processes which I don’t and would lead to me spending HOURS making the work by myself and to a much lower standard. For this show he edited, masked and tweaked the timelapse footage from the New Mills pavement installation and we worked together to work out how to create the animations that form Residential mosaic. As time was tight he also showed me how to edit the footage together for the projected hands bit of ‘Displaced persons’, giving me a test version that I could base the final work on. It’s this process of learning, watching and developing solutions to my ideas that helps my work to progress.
Here’s the showreel for Gareth’s company Clinic Motion Media (the new work gets on there too – keep an eye out for ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Merthyr Tidfil’)
I had a lot of help from a number of collaborators to realise the work in the current exhibition, which was made possible by the Arts Council funding that I received. It means I can pay other artists and professionals to help me out, something that I value greatly. I’m going to post a number of profiles about those collaborators this week as the exhibition draws to a close on Saturday 9th August.So, for the first one:
Karen EdwardsLetterpress collaboration
Whilst I was in Southend on my residency with Metal I came up with the idea to create Monopoly-style ‘chance’ cards to share some of the research that I’d been doing into the forces that cause people to need to move home (or not). The combination of an economic situation (e.g. limited availability of affordable housing) along with an action (miss a turn) seemed to be a way of communicating some of the ideas I’d been looking into. I mocked some up on the computer, but as a digital print they were lacking some of the handmade quality of the original Monopoly cards. I’d used a letterpress machine to print some single letters whilst I was on AA2A at Salford in 2011, and had seen letterpress used in various situations to good effect, so thought it would be a good method to use in this context.
I’d met Karen, who’s based at Bridewell studios, during the planning of Liverpool Art Month a few years back, and had seen her letterpress works at an artist fair recently, so approached her to ask for her advice and assistance. Karen was interested in the project and we met to see how the work could be produced. I brought the digital examples and had sourced some suitably coloured card whilst Karen had done some research into the font that was used by Monopoly.
Karen has a lovely collection of type, and the closest font she had was a sans serif font, but when she tried setting the text that I wanted she found that she didn’t have enough. This is where I would have floundered, but Karen knew that it was possible to get dies cut with each individual phrase on it. This cut down the amount of time that it was going to take for her to set the type and meant that she could press on with pressing the cards. I’ve ended up with 10 different cards in an edition of 20 that Karen printed on her Adana press (which is a magical little press with a rotating ink pad, levers and a lovely mechanical feel). Apart from the content and the overall look of the cards I didn’t have a hand in the actual printing, which still feels a bit odd, but is something I’ve learnt to live with since my ‘Asking for help’ review bursary.
You can have a look at Karen’s work on her website where you’ll see some of her prints, books and pictures of her press.
http://www.karenedwardscreations.com/page4.htm
