Less than a week now, and I’m in the midst of pre-going away tidying, organising, finishing off and preparing. The house is tidy for the first time in months and a small pile of things I need to pack is growing in the spare bedroom.
I thought I share my plans for Shanghai by sharing the proposal that I submitted as part of the application process (inspired by the generosity of Rosalind and Annabel who shared their practice and offered to share proposals at a recent http://www.zeitgeistartsprojects.com/ presentation in St Helens.)
So here it is:
From experience I have found that my work moves on in large leaps when I have the luxury of a concentrated working period away from home. This has been exemplified on a previous residency/production opportunity in Schiedam (NL) where my work Motus:Immotus was developed and performed. Such an intense working period allows me to create work on a more ambitious scale, and brings strands of past work together. This happened in Motus:Immotus, where concept (using video camera to capture movement in a live situation, the Bluecoat 2009), drawing support (transparent layered surfaces forming a performance space, Novas CUC 2008), and drawn traces (calligraphic marks, Investigations, Arena Studios 2004) were realised in a new intervention that made sense of my practice to date.
Watermark is an intervention that was realised during an intense one-week working period in Istanbul (TR) in March 2012. Watermark follows a line of movement across a public square by painting a course of paving stones with an evaporating trace of water and was produced in the context of reading about public squares as an ideal type of public space (Tonkiss, Space the City and Social Theory). This forms the starting point for my work in Shanghai. Movement of people on a small and medium geographical scale are the basis of much of my work, and I’d like to see how this is influenced by being based in a city with a population of 23 million people. I would like to develop my research by using the time to explore the work produced during the 7th Shanghai Biennale, when the curatorial focus was on public squares and their small scale relationship to population migration and transition in relation to Chinese society. Introductions to archives, artworks, artists or curators who I can discuss my work with would extend my practice and research. The 2008 biennale focused on the People’s Square in Shanghai, and I would want to receive support from local partners to realise Watermark in this location.
Motus:Immotus, like many of my earlier works features calligraphic marks that trace movement. I would like to take some of the month in Shanghai to work alongside traditional Chinese painting practitioners, developing my skill with this medium, so that I can employ it’s emphasis on motion and instinctive responses (Stanley-Baker, Ink Painting Today, 2010) in my future work.
As part of the residency I would regularly update a blog, as I did in Schiedam and Istanbul. I found this a useful way of reflecting on my practice and of communicating the work I do to a wider audience. www.a-n.co.uk/p/1492785
Outcomes of residency
– Intense period of research and development of my practice
– develop Watermark in a Chinese public square
– research into the public square as a reference in art, based on the focus of 2008 Shanghai Biennale.
– research and practical skill development in response to Chinese Painting techniques
– blog charting the progress of the residency (see a-n artist talking blogs from previous intense working periods)
Wiki (Stanley-Baker, Joan (2010/05) Ink Painting Today
Chinese painting and calligraphy distinguishes themselves from other cultures’ art by their emphasis on motion and charge with dynamic life. The practice is traditionally learnt by rot. The master showing the ‘right way’ to draw items, which the apprentice has to copy strictly, continuously until the movements become instinctive. In contemporary times, debate emerged on the limits of this copyist tradition within the modern art scenes, where innovation is the rule, while changing lifestyles, tools and colours are also influencing new waves of masters.
