Reciprocity

Back from Jamestown, NY a week, and am still processing.. hopefully over the next few days I will be able to begin to articulate some of the experiences, encounters and conversations which made my time there, and being part of the COLONIZE project so valuable.
Fellow artist and SCI organiser Wendy Williams has been much better at me than documenting our time in Jamestown while we were out there – her excellent blog can be found here www.a-n.co.uk/p/1534479
As I try to marshall my thoughts into some kind of coherent form of words as to what the Jamestown experience meant for me and my art practice, in the meantime I wanted to publish a response to the project from a fellow Bradford based artist, Edward Mortimer. Edward and I had a brief conversation on Facebook yesterday with Edward commenting positively on the project: “Congratulations on the America thing working out with the other artists. That’s some achievement and statement in a recession.” Edward said he had some other thoughts on the project and I was interested to hear these and asked him if he would like to write a response, which he kindly did:

Dear Jean,

It was good news that the artists and their work got to Jamestown New York. In an era where many liberties or the institutions that support them appear to have a shadow over them financially and morally there was enough support to go ahead.
Just to take some schools for example, sport is under threat from being axed along with the arts. So mental and physical health and creativity for current or future generations cannot be taken for granted. Its almost as if they may be considered a “supplement or luxury” in a time of austerity and lacking in apparent purpose or justification.
Knowledge in its many forms be it visual and conceptual art, reading, and connected experiences are valuable and not everyone has access to them. They cannot be taken for granted and it is a use it or lose it situation.
I doubt I could argue this with a politician or economist, but my head is buzzing and alive with thoughts when I go to an Art show or read an intriguing book, and I feel centred and more genuinely alive. In some quarters these experiences may be frowned upon ultimately.
I was glad to see crowd funding support because this reflected that areas of “the public” (as tabloids would have it)who were serious enough about the value of the project to put forward whatever limited funds they were able.
Again I was glad to see a cosmopolitan reflection of the Yorkshire scene with artists being supported and welcomed wholeheartedly in New York. Yorkshire can all too often seem to limit itself into falling into “patronisingly dubbed” “Home grown scene” and “Internationally Seperated Scene.” So that was that taboo broken. Possibly the idea of a fiefdom that might be kept in the dark was challenged. And creativity and communication between places flourished.
Many interesting strands appeared in “Colonise” but the Art justification squad never arrived. Transporting ephemeral paper works in suitcases helped, but no one screamed “you’d better be carrying a good sales product that you can market in America and to hell with the concept or creativity.”
So altogether hard work but an assertion of “freedom” and “choice” if we may call it that.

Best

Edward Mortimer.

Edward Mortimer and
“I would say I am a versatile quirk sculptor, I am influenced by Jan Svankmajer and Edward Kienholz. I dabble in live art, puppetry and projections. I regard myself more as a thinking artist as”conceptual” has connotations. I find the process of making as much an adventure as a finished show, and often people do enjoy watching me work as I pull faces, come into a piece from funny angles and poses. My relationship with theatre and lense based media is strong.”