Review & Reboot

This morning we were here to generate ideas. We focused on portraits of people who intimidate us in our neighbourhood, and thought about how we could make this project look as weird as possible.

Our temporary home for our second self-prescribed creative sabbatical is one of the newly converted small ceramics studios run by East Street Arts, at Barkston House in Leeds. We’ve been here a week, and yes we’ve thrown a few pots (not at each other) on the potters’ wheel, and we now appreciate that ceramics has a kind of magic.

This afternoon my mind followed up the mornings work by meandering through possible cognitive interview techniques, trying to imagine what it would be to don the responsibilities and skills of a forensic facial reconstruction practitioner (or do we just employ one), via ruminating on a movement analysis report made with Alex Baybutt on Ryan Giggs’ goal against Arsenal in 1999 FA Cup Semi Final.

It’s hard to put a price on a day like today. Financially, we’re on about £90 per day as per our ACE budget. But that measure doesn’t really compare with value I’m feeling at the moment – we’re we’ve had a whole studio day to think, research, head scratch and develop on a bunch of self-generated enquiries not prompted by another. Time and space to wander are a valuable commodity, and I’m reminded of a tutor on foundation at Northwich College of Art in the late 80’s who declared something similar to the new intake I was part of.

Last week, we were asked to sort and put a price on second-hand bric-a-brac and clothes when we volunteered at the Emmaus project – a charity here in Leeds that helps the homeless, providing jobs and accommodation and support via secondhand retail and a hostel. Sorting through boxes of dead people’s possessions, we’re had to judge whether anyone would buy it (if not scrap), or imagine how much ‘you’ would pay for it (between 1p & £5). Sad to say there was not much ‘retail’ value in the stuff I sorted with lots of 5p plate’s, except for a beautiful deep purple hand blow vase (£3.50), and a 1930’s make-up mirror with curvy legs, a mint condition glass, and an authenticating dust patina (£1.50).

The artist Grayson Perry spoke of a patina of different kind during his Reith lecture last week. Whilst his pieces go for over £100,000 a pop, he spoke of the art world’s ultimate commodity to be bestowed on an artwork is a patina of ‘seriousness’, developed through a consensus of curator and critic validation and the good prices over time.

Seems that value is not all dictated buy how much you yourself put into it…

Comparing Bubbles

It became apparent during our conversation with Nina Pope that keeping a balance between self-directed projects and working to an invited or open commission, has been a long-term struggle for many artists, and will continue to be so. We’re not alone.

Nina is an artist/filmaker, who runs a collaborative practice Somewhere with Karen Guthrie. We’re talking about how Somewhere operates, and it’s one of several discussions we’re holding with artists over the coming months to help review our own setup. These will all be artists that appear to be further along their respective career path’s, and each has a wealth of individual experience, which we’d like to learn from.

It turns out that Somewhere themselves conducted a similar ‘review’ a few years ago, and like us they take on site-responsive projects and don’t have a studio-based practice (though this is something we’re beginning to establish). So we had a good discussion about: learning how to say no to offers because it’s not truly what you want to do; different ways of negotiating collaboration, managing the creative and admin workload; balancing family commitments with works ambitions; the importance of networking (we could all do more); the pro and cons of taking on interns, and how important it is to get the right person if your working with project managers, producers, techies, etc. She thinks it’s a beneficial process of learning and trying out new things, some of which stick, others morph or are dropped, and can help you extend beyond a feeling of complacency in your bubble.

We spoke of an ideal that we envisage for ourselves, where we’d have a producer who was an integral part of the creative process, who’d establish a lot of the groundwork for us to build on later – something we’ve seen with Tino Seghal. Nina wasn’t sure about this dynamic because as the artist you lose out not having a face-to-face experience through the lifetime of a project. Indeed she spoke of her joy of maintaining a connection with participants “The Fans” through twitter and blogs. Taking an audience of regular people with you – not curators, or other arbiters of taste – is to her an important part of the legacy of a project.

Nina houses Somewhere’s admin and archive at her London studio, whilst Karen lives elsewhere, with her laptop is her studio and she visits London regularly. They team up for research visits, residencies, get face-to-face as often as they can, but often deal with things over the phone. They have no fixed weekly work meeting, trying one out didn’t feel right. There’s is a close-knit practice, not suited to doing short, small projects. There currently programming The Floating Cinema, but the main focus of their practice is love of making films – there’s a super description of their Bata-ville project in an article here – and these can take years to come into fruition or just be shelved.

What’s interesting about Bata-ville is that it developed from an invitation to do a £5k public art project for the Council, when Somewhere said they’d help fundraise to make something bigger! Nina says they’ve had bespoke funding approaches for their 3 films so far, often writing dozens of funding applications in order to get the one’s that are successful. Different funding bodies have different distribution expectations, and distribution of films can be pretty frustrating. “If you don’t crack the fixed circuit, then your films is not going to be shown”, she says.

We left with a feeling of uncanny kinship, not only did we discover we live a few streets away from each other, but we’ve arrived at some similar solutions to situations with our practice and how to keep a healthy perspective on what it is that we do. It’s a coincidence, but Nina, like Rebecca, is part of a long-running [but different] all-woman artists group that meets monthly to have a good ‘moan’ about the state of things.