Breaking Ground

Beginning to pick up the threads from where I left off before the Easter break. In the meantime I’ve been making the most of time available to get on with some personal, non-collaborative work. But continuing with my research on collaborative working, I’ve booked a ticket to go & hear Gilbert & George speak at Tate Modern on the 30th April and I’ve started reading the articles in issue 3 of “Dialogue” on the Axis website entitled "Inside the interview: Exploring the workings of the artist interview." There is a lot to read, and I don’t suppose all of it will be relevant to us, but as Roz and I are about to embark on the part of our project which involves us “interviewing” each other, it is useful to have some idea of the context and history of the artists’ interview.

The image used on the opening page of the Editorial by Jon Wood is by Dave Ball, entitled “Interview with a House Plant”, 2005 and depicts a scene in an interview room with two chairs. On one of the chairs sits a man obviously engaged in interviewing the potted plant which “sits” opposite him on a second chair. It reminded me of Roz’s work, “Interview (pig)”, 2006 (see http://www.roz2.co.uk/ani08.html )

Two more polaroids – table and chair – found on the allotment today. The old wooden chair i took up a couple of winters ago, split in two as I turned to put these into my bag.

Hello to everyone we met at Fabrica on Thursday at the AIR Open Dialogue event. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of new people and to put faces to names of people who we felt we already knew through visits to their web-sites or blogs.

Roz and I, along with Elpida Hadzi Vasileva and Rosemary Shirley had been invited to talk about key issues for our future practice – a subject which has been consistently used at AIR events to open the dialogue between artists.

We took along Roz’s three legged stool which Roz used to explain how she visualises our collaboration. She talked about the “wobbliness” of being an artist and the need to operate at the edge of stability, and how she sees the collaborative relationship as providing a third leg which might provide steadiness at the edge. She went on to expand on this notion, saying that if we two collaborators are then viewed each as three legged stools, between us we have a grand total of not just four legs, but six legs on which we could cover a lot of ground. It all conjures up a slightly comical image, but describes how we hope the relationship will work for us.

My issues, as an artist still in the early “feeling my way” stages of my career, revolve firstly around “support”; how to build a support network through which I can get appropriate advice for all the different aspects of my practice – professional, creative and developmental, and then, secondly, how to maintain a balance between the development of all those separate areas of my practice while still retaining the integrity of my work as well as generating income to support my practice.

Roz focused on the immediate issues concerning our new collaboration. How will the collaborative process work for us? Will there still be time and space for us to maintain our individual work? How will we work together? What if our strengths and weaknesses are the same? Will we become too stable, too steady and lose the excitement of "the edge"? What will we gain from the collaboration, and what will we have to give up? These were some of many questions raised.

Elpida and Rosemary, artists at different stages of their careers, raised other issues, and a foundation was laid for an evening of very interesting and informative discussion where a whole range of subjects were covered.

One thing which came up almost incidentally was that several people expressed slight frustration at not being able to add a comment to the a-n blog, so for the time being, if anyone wants to communicate with us about our blog, we would love to hear from you via the e-mail addresses which can be found on our web-sites at http://judithalder-live.co.uk/contact.html or http://www.roz2.co.uk/contact.html

We have been awarded a NAN New Collaboration bursary to support the development of Breaking Ground, our project in 2 parts. Judith and I raised a glass to this success on Monday night and are planning our next steps. We have a busy week of art events, AIR Open Dialogue on Thursday night and then my Henweekend 3 day seminar starts on Friday. We finalise our joint presentation tomorrow afternoon and then it is full steam ahead for Part 1 Writing articles about each other’s practice. High excitement.
We have chosen this sketchbook image by Judith as appropriate to the unfolding of the collaborative experiment.

It’s almost exactly a month since we posted our first blog entry and so far we’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the whole idea of “collaboration” – what we might gain through it, as well as what we might have to give up for it. However, we’ve also been spending a lot of our time working towards commitments within our individual practices.

This week sees a sort of tying up of loose ends, culminating at the end of the week with our talk at the AIR event at Fabrica on Thursday, and Roz’s almost immediate departure after that to take part in the "Hen Weekend" at the De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill from Friday to Sunday this weekend. (http://henweekend.org)

After a short (?) recovery period, Roz and I will be meeting up next week to plan a timetable for the first part of our project. We will be setting aside time to make presentations about our work to each other and will then individually write articles about each other’s practice which we will publish here through our blog. We anticipate that this activity will have all sorts of benefits for us, both through the process of analysing and articulating another artists’ practice, but also gaining an insight into our own work through someone else’s subjective view.