Connecting

Seems like ages ago now, but on the last weekend of October, two of us (myself and Jackie Kerr) from the Liverpool section of our group headed over to Nottingham to see the Harrington Mill Open Studio event, including an exhibition by Artemis Potamianou  http://www.axisweb.org/p/chriswright/event/5141-harrington-mill-open-studios-and-searching-the-unknown-masterpiece-artist-artemis-potamianou/

To re cap, we met the artists from Harrington Mill while we were in Athens….  and it was like one of those clichéd holiday moments, when you meet someone, get on well and they say ‘ hey – you must come and visit us sometime’ … and next minute, we turn up on the door step. Ha Ha

Joking apart though, we had an amazing, really productive time with lots of talking and planning for the future.

Lead HMS artist Jackie Berridge,  met us at the station and took us over to the studios.

I’d been to quite a few open studios, but I must admit, I’d never seen any as organised as this one!  We were welcomed with a huge food and drink spread before being shown round each of the artists spaces.  We immediately recognised a few artists from Athens, so it was great to catch up with them and see what other work they had.

I loved the way cards, magazines, books and other publications were neatly spread out for visitors to browse through.

They’d produced  a few books (as a group) and they looked so professional. We were going to go down that route at one time, but had to scale back our plans because of our budget. Just producing one book though, rather than a stack to give out, would work well.

That’s just one of the ideas we are going to pinch from them!

I chatted with studio artist  Chris Wright – who told me she had received an a-n bursary to write a review of the Neon exhibition at the Grundy.  https://www.a-n.co.uk/reviews/neon-the-charged-line  We exchanged cards and have been in touch with each other since.

After an overnight stay with  artist Alison Whitmore , we headed back to the studios, to greet the Sheffield  members of our group who were just visiting for the day.

It was such a huge achievement to get us all together like this – to make so many connections in a relatively short period of time.

Plans for a joint exhibition between the groups are already underway…

Links

https://sciartistprojects.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/SCI-170190669682733/

http://harringtonmillstudios.co.uk/

Me and Michael Borkowsky in Jackie Berridge’s studio.

It was only while I was mindlessly scrolling through twitter , that a tweet made me sit up and realise – OMG I am so behind with this blog!

I’m supposed to be accounting for what we are doing with the ACE funding we received but I just …. I wouldn’t say ‘forgot’…. I’m just a bit …overawed with everything at the moment.

The tweet was by a group we met in Athens, about the organiser of the Platforms project we attended back in May : https://www.a-n.co.uk/events/searching-the-unknown-masterpiece and it just summed up how many connections we have made ( thanks to the funding) over the last 6 months

We’ll be travelling across to Harrington Mill at the end of the month to see the exhibition and the open studio event.  Why? Because we met and became good friends with the artists from HM…they came to our exhibition opening in Sheffield at the weekend (N0, I haven’t blogged about that yet….. :/  )  and we had a good catch up.

This is the thing about the funding we applied for… on paper it was a case of listing what we were going to do. We will exhibit, we will hold an event, we will publicise etc etc…. but there’s just so much more ‘in between’ that you couldn’t possibly plan.

Things just flow.

Does that may sense?

For example, we went to the Manchester Contemporary Art Fair a couple of weeks ago and  chatted to loads of the artists there.  Because we’ve been connecting so much lately, we were able to find that ‘common link ‘ that we wouldn’t have had before. We know people, we’ve been places, we’ve done stuff.

So yes, Sheffield… A member of our group (Michael Borkowsky) now lives in Sheffield, so was able to hunt out a venue (The Holt) that was good for an exhibition space, but also open enough to hold events and for people to sit and meet up.

A couple of doors down from The Holt, is Bloc Projects… and just by sheer chance, another artist we met in Athens – Vincent James (represented by Paper Gallery)  was showing work : http://www.blocprojects.co.uk/bloc-billboard-vincent-james/

Sorry about the airhead image, but we were both so delighted to see this! 6 months ago we didn’t know this guy.

So that was October…. September we exhibited our ceramics at Tate Liverpool.  By writing about this would just be repeating myself, so its easier to just say – click on the website for images and text.  https://sciartistprojects.wordpress.com/

Images from Sheffield will be added as soon as possible to the website

Phew… hope that’s up to date now. Sorry Arts Council – its just been a whirlwind. (But Thank You!!)

As we all finish off our works for the forthcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool, discussions and last minute signing off of details for the next stage in Sheffield, are under way.

Its been really challenging to get so many exhibitions rolling one after another, but its also exciting and you get that real sense of achievement in pushing yourselves to the limit.

More details on the group website: https://sciartistprojects.wordpress.com/2016/08/27/relics/

Its hard to say how many people actually attended our exhibition at the Atrium as there were so many events on during the few weeks it was open.  We know how many events were on and have a rough idea of the attendees for each, but visitors to the cafe and exhibition……..we’ll have to take a guess for statistics sake . We’ll go with 400 in total .

With that one over though, its time to move on.

We’re very fortunate that Tate Liverpool give us a space to exhibit every Biennial and although the original intention was to exhibit ‘traditional’ work from each member of the group, the opportunity to collaborate with  another establishment occurred.

One member – Louise Waller, has a studio with Baltic Clay  and as we’ve kept an open mind to suggestions and accepted any deviations to the original plans, we’ve now found ourselves working with donations of discarded ceramics.

Each member will take a piece of pottery and alter it by any means.  Its quite a challenging task and will take a lot of people out of their comfort zones, but its getting ideas flowing and people are working together in a way they wouldn’t normally.

Along with the planned workshops, I think it will make for a much more interesting and intriguing exhibition .

Many thanks to Andrew from Baltic Clay

Yesterday,the first of several of our exhibitions that respond to our time in Athens, opened in Liverpool. It was ready in time for the opening of the Liverpool Biennial  and its parallel Fringe , but as there were too many Private viewings  happening, we thought we would delay ours til next Thursday.

The exhibition is in a gallery space inside the atrium of Liverpool’s small cinema. An old courthouse.

We chose the space because of its diverse audience… a criteria of the Arts Council funding.

Examples of the mixed audience –  As the building was an old courtoom with cells,  a local paranormal group have used the opportunity to explore for ‘activity’ on the first weekend of the exhibition …..  there will be an Ann Summers party next week  (not organised by us I hasten to add  – but set up a while ago by the cafe) There will be a zine workshop by a Manchester art group and of course there are  several International and art house films running.

Then of course, lots of people pop in just to eat.

If it had been a gallery space, we  wouldn’t have had such a mix.

We’re also able to use so many resources to publicise   this exhibition- the Biennial booklet for example as well as the cinema and cafe social media sites.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to do regular updates on how this first event unfolds. It is a relatively small exhibition, but it took a lot of work to set up and I’m sure it will be worth it.

Links:

http://www.biennial.com/2016/partner/biennial-fringe

Small Cinema: http://liverpoolsmallcinema.org.uk/events

Courtroom cafe event: http://www.deadlive.co.uk/event/court-room-cafe-ghost-hunt/