The holiday season is upon us, yet the work is never done for an artist. Last week BaseNorth started writing our funding application to the arts council. We are hoping to get enough money to finance a research and work trip to Berlin. We are busy researching possible places to work and live and also contacts that we may wish to make while there. We have given ourselves until the end January to finish up our application. If all goes to plan we should be heading off to Berlin this spring for about three weeks.
A few weeks ago we were asked to make a short film relating to the sunniside area in some way for a film project. It was all quite last minute meaning we didn’t have long to plan exactly what we wanted to do. However as we have been working in the area and making work relating to regeneration we felt we could bring together out thoughts and ideas to produce something relevant. This also presented us with the challenge / opportunity to work collaboratively something which is quite new to all of us. After an initial discussion of ideas for the film we set a day a side to buy some materials, film and see what the result was. We decided from out initial discussion to primarily use text as we all use text in our own work in some way and we felt it was a quick direct way of communication.
On the day of filming we each brought with us words and phrases to use. We decided on a small white board each which we could write on the wipe off quickly which we wrote on and held up to the camera. We also wanted to make something which was spontaneous so for the first go at filming we didn’t know what each other was writing. The words and phrase created their own narrative and worked very well together in an energetic way. We did try another second version in which we planned out the text resulting in a methodical feel which was quite dull. So the first film was chosen and named sexing up the whiteboard.
As we have struggled for many months to find a venue for out exhibition we now feel that this work will fulfil the part of the project we intended to complete in Sunderland. We are all ready to move on to the second part of the project in another city in the U.K or abroad.
