Tickets booked, passports found… In a month’s time Rebecca Ilett and I will be heading off on a fact-finding foray to Europe to meet like-minded artists and see if we can create new opportunities to show work in the UK and abroad. We’ll keep you posted with news of our exploits and endeavours as our project unfolds, but in the meantime, whilst we’re waiting for June 26th to arrive, let’s begin at the beginning and say a few words about how we got to receive this lovely travel grant from a-n…
[Tom Hackett in Cambridge for ALL2015: photo Jonnie Howard]
In 2012, a group of Cambridge School of Art post-grad artists got together to create a pop-up exhibition of art, text and place. Cambridge is desperately short of exhibition spaces, so the name of the game – placing text-based art in appropriate locations around town – in fact started out as a pragmatic response to the local situation as much as a desire to show work in alternative spaces (though that is very important to us as well).
The original exhibition was called Text&Context, and since then it has morphed into Art Language Location (ALL) and grown a fair bit in size, but the aim is the same: we want to create opportunities for innovative, exciting contemporary art to be seen not just in gallery settings but in amongst the everyday world too.
So far we’ve always had Cambridge as our main focus, and bringing new art to the city has been an intriguing challenge. We’ve shown work not only in institutional spaces such as libraries, colleges and museums, but also in alternative venues such as pubs, post offices and the park and ride depot. Last year we even had permission to film a work inside the Cambridge nuclear bunker.
But there is no necessary reason why the ‘location’ aspect of ALL needs to be limited in scope to Cambridge. Of course it makes life easier for us as organisers in many ways, but we have always been interested in the possibility of hosting works further afield. With global connectivity a reality, it makes sense to explore this further. We have had artists from as far away as Canada, Europe and Australia participating in ALL, so why not see if we can reciprocate and extend our boundaries too?
It was with this in mind that we applied for our a-n grant. Rebecca and I will be visiting artists and ALL supporters Elisa Vladilo in Italy and Sara Lerota in Bosnia Herzegovina to make connections, compare ideas and see what transpires.
Stay tuned for more updates – exciting times!
