HARRINGTON MILL
OPEN STUDIOS 2018
With Contre-Courant and ThirtyfiveGamble
You are invited to the launch of HMS Open Studios 2018
We are delighted to welcome Neil Walker, Head of Visual Arts Programming at Lakeside Arts who will give an introduction to the event.
Launch: Friday 26th October 6:30 – 8:00pm with yummy food and drinks
Harrington Mill Studios
Turret H, Leopold St, Long Eaton, NG10 4QE
Saturday 27th October, 11am – 4:40pm
Sunday 28th October, 11am – 4.30pm
ThirtyfiveGamble,
35 Gamble Street, Nottingham, NG7 4EY
Saturday, 27th October, 11am – 4:00pm
ThirtyfiveGamble and Contre-Courant
This is the return visit of the Honfleur artists so this will be a really good open studios. Am working hard to finish my work and prepare my studio as well as creating a live art event with Louise Garland for the occasion. This will be the third performance we have created for the studios. For my own work, I am using sound from a huge project I did last year. The project consisted of recording everyday sounds in similar locations in four cities and I have been working on how to use them in an installation rather than just playing them. I still haven’t managed to extrapolate all there is from it. So lots more fun to come!
Several projects on the go and skipping from one to the other. I think they link up in an obtuse way: sound work and writing a journal article about holes; of building a performance space in the old toilet and writing a paper on interdisciplinarity, of getting rejections and making new proposals.
Time is no longer slow or fast.
I am running.
Pushing things to do into available time.
Time doesn’t expand.
Fixed, immoveable, immobile.
Measured by energy not hands of the clock.
I dreamt last night a complete-with-dialogue film, in colour and fully cast script and woke up in tears. It makes one question ones brain sometimes, just where did it come from? Wish, however, I had dreamt a completed paper! It would make today simpler.
I have not had much time in the studio lately but now realise that what I thought was wasted time is erroneous. Subconsciously, ideas and thoughts wander round your brain wherever you are. The studio, for me, is a place of all emotions and activity, not just creativity. It is where I write, build, play, do nothing much, read, plan, apply, research, in no particular order. I can still do my photographic series, draw everyday, write my blog and read, they don’t need the studio space. Karen Barad writes ‘Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject, object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth’ (Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaningp.85).For me, it inspires a broader outlook, more abstraction and, my favourite saying, the what-if’s. The other quote which I cannot place is ‘Artwork that works calls one to encounter’. Beginning to build installations this week, I keep these two quotes close by to continually question myself but also to take leaps into the unknown and remember what I am trying to do beyond my immediate actions.
With the Aspects of Interdisciplinarityconference coming up at the University of Wolverhampton (October 8th), I have been thinking about how artists use ideas. It is not simply a borrowing, it is more a deep excavation – in all directions. Generally, it is about the interweaving of concepts from different disciplines rather than a wholesale use of one idea from one discipline and, in the end result, it is probably hard to pull things apart and put back in their own place. My thoughts, which I will present in a performative paper called Glorious Corruption, are that this amalgamation creates new ideas that could feed back to their origins and a new way of looking. Artists such as Katie Patterson are so adept at pulling out ideas and presenting them in such a beguiling way that make you question and think long after the exhibition has finished.
I class myself as a practicing artist which means I have interests in ideas around the actual production such as the way artists work, methods of display, materials and processes and finding a way to reconcile practice and research – in a way of presenting material that is rooted in research, or research that is rooted in practice especially when the two are so closely intertwined. I find this incredibly difficult without almost presenting an essay to accompany the work.
Went to photograph a dead thrush, almost perfect. My original idea was to dress them in baby clothes highlighting their vulnerability but I don’t always have them accessible. Today, I went with intuition and used petals and herbs. Not quite sure what this means in relation to the other images and I definitely don’t want to create a shrine. Perhaps when all the images are put together, I will be able to evaluate the series and maybe decide they have no value whatsoever as a photographic series.
After three years of trying, I have eventually managed to fill in and submit an Arts Council funding application, the DYCP, not the big one! Although I know my chances of success are minimal, getting to the end of the form makes it seem a huge achievement. But, having done one….. Rest of the time has been spent at Manchester Museum and The Museum of Science and Industry. There is such a sense of scale in both, looking at skeletons and taxidermied creatures and realising our human size. Repeated in Science and Industry with aircraft, some are so small. The Kamikaze plane with pilots volunteering to fly it and end their lives, what was their mindset? War is such an emotional and terrible thing. How all this relates to my art, I don’t know but it is always good to try and experience the emotions and sensibilities of others even when you cannot understand them. Stood in the remains of the Roman fort with an eight year old and saying, you are leaning on a wall that a Roman has leant on. It all becomes connected, your place and time inserted into the spatiotemporal universe.
Small amount of play time in the studio. This image is of a gifted acrylic sheet which had been lying in the dust. Loved the abstract images created with the surreality of my reflection.
