Trading Station

Sustainability of international female artist led exchange

Our main aim during this second POST project was to see if we could develop a way of working that is sustainable in the longer term. This was in the light of our first project riPOSTe taking a lot of time to manage given the logistical conundrums involved in 14 artists working together for a large-scale exhibition in 3 venues in 2 European cities. With TRADING STATION we wanted to step away from the formulaic, one-size-fits-all basis of exchanging work and create a more rewarding conversation between the artists involved to enable longer term benefits to develop.

The TRADING STATION model was developed to be responsive to artists’ life commitments whilst still providing high-quality artworks and developing genuine, useful professional relationships. The methods employed to achieve this were:

· Less of a focus on the physical exchange of things. By developing a modular 4-publication and 1-exhibition project alongside a series of in person meetings, there was more time to develop relationships and understanding between the artists involved. The process of exchanging ideas and conversations, whether over the internet or in person has led to more in depth exploration of ideas within each artist’s practice and where that crosses over with the work of other artists. Cecilia Kinnear talks about how her extended periods of time in Istanbul has led to her developing work around national identity, influenced by conversations with, and the work of Turkish artist Gülçin Aksoy around ‘red tape’. As Amanda Oliphant states:

“Trading Station is and has been more about an exchange of experience, a natural conversation of life, a progression of chance and coincidence made possible by developing relationships further afield. It has been another way of working, not necessarily about the production of an idea into material objects but about ‘developing’ an idea of a shared connection, being virtual or physical.”

· A more relaxed attitude to the physical exchange of people. Our working methods accommodate a variety of approaches and therefore retain a flexibility in terms of how investigative strands are realised. Robyn Woolston notes:

“RIPOSTE explored and defined a set of working methods that would allow 7 UK artists to exchange with 7 Austrian artists. Looking retrospectively I now realise that the formulaic basis of exchanging work and people between two countries, and two exhibitions, dictated pragmatic responses to logistical conundrums and therefore solutions.”

Within TRADING STATION we adapted our schedule of exchange visits to the availability of the artists. This relieved the pressure to visit within strict timescales and the schedule for publishing the newspapers has been able to be adapted around that, ultimately complementing the exchange schedule. We did not aim for the exhibition at Curve Gallery to be the ‘big finale’ as it was in riPOSTe (with the stresses that comes with). The exhibition was followed by two further further residencies by Robyn Woolston and Cecilia Kinnear and subsequent newspapers that reflect the ongoing development of the project

Added Benefits

There have been outputs by individual artists in POST that have stemmed from or been supported by their work in TRADING STATION including:

· Robyn Woolston was awarded the Liverpool Art Prize, which resulted in a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery March – June 2013. It features images taken during her residency in a publication that will form part of the permanent Artists Bookwork collection at the Walker gallery. They are also brokering a relationship with the Royal Society of Artists in terms of further acquisitions.

· Robyn Woolston has been commissioned by Eden Arts, with the work she is producing there being influenced by the working methods she is developing during TRADING STATION.

· Claire Weetman was awarded the METAL international residency to Shanghai. Her proposal for this residency included an idea to develop Watermark in a public square in Shanghai, and was supported by critical research that she had carried out at the libraries of SALT art gallery in Istanbul.

· Claire Weetman was selected to exhibit in Trace, an exhibition by Context Arts at Motorcade/Flashparade in Bristol. At that exhibition she produced three new manifestations of Watermark to audiences in both the gallery and to passers by on the street.

· Susan Meyerhoff Sharples exhibited her Altered Images at 5533 gallery in Istanbul during her residency in the city.

· Robyn Woolston provided the cover image to the Green Party magazine as part of a special Arts and Ecology issue. This work has been directly influenced by the research and development period completed during her residency in Istanbul

· Claire Weetman has been invited to exhibit her work ‘Watermark’ as a 4-channel video installation at Neo:Gallery 22 in Bolton.

· Claire Weetman has been approached by two artist curators to be included in their proposals for future exhibitions as a result of them seeing her ‘Watermark’ work.

· Susan Meyerhoff Sharples had her video work ‘Unpick/Graft’ selected to be shown during the Deva Shorts events in Chester in March 2013.

· Cecilia Kinnear will be moving to Istanbul and settling up her art practice in June 2013, having left her management job at John Lewis. The project has had a profound impact on her practice and overall life. Though other things have contributed to this significant change, it is a result of TRADING STATION and the relationships developed that have led her to choose Istanbul as the place to develop the next stage of her practice.

Work produced & development of individual & interdisciplinary practices. Part 2

How this has affected interdisciplinary practice.

Aim 3 of our project was to ‘Develop Individual Practice & Interdisciplinary methods’. Here, the artists involved discuss how their practice has developed through the process of TRADING STATION.

Working with professionals in a different field.

All five members of POST have broadened their practice through working alongside another professional to realise their work, whether that be Cecilia, Susan and Claire working with filmmakers or Mandy and Robyn working to produce limited editions. Working with others extended the life and impact of the artists’ work giving it a greater reach in a more sustainable way, as limited editions and video works are often more portable than sculptures, original drawings, installations or temporary interventions. As Claire Weetman notes:

“It was a great opportunity to work with a professional filmmaker in Istanbul. That experience has allowed me to see the documentation of a temporary, site-responsive, intervention in public space realised as a four channel video, which has had a far greater response from galleries and curators than if that event had not been suitably documented.”

New skills and working methods

Each of the artists has developed new skills that they can personally employ to produce work, whether that be improved page layout skills learnt through the production of the four newspapers, a step into a new field such as collage, or experimentation with hand-held domestic media technology. In making her works ‘Unpick/Graft’ Susan Meyerhoff Sharples says:

“I have made connections with businesses working within the realms of retail clothing, wedding paraphernalia and discovered a wealth of information about fabrics and methods of construction. I am learning basic skills working with the medium of video. “

Develop a practice of collaboration and exchange

Through the process of TRADING STATION each artist in POST has come to better understand how their practice fits into a collaborative exchange project. Robyn Woolston has realised that she operates efficiently when reacting and responding dynamically within social media settings, actively enjoying the ‘trading’ element of the immediacy. Cecilia Kinnear found the spending physical time with the artists in Istanbul to be beneficial to enable her to integrate with their way of working. This collaboration brought an energy that inspired her to collaborate in new ways and has led to her establishing her practice in Istanbul from June 2013. Amanda found that a collaboration with artists from outside the 8 artists in the project better fitted her practice, finding common interests with a writer from Liverpool and an artist from Istanbul.

A more ambitious practice

POST artists have aimed to be more ambitious in their practice in this project, including engaging with difficult issues within their work or in the staging of the work that they make. Robyn Woolston notes:

“The residency has encouraged me to be more ambitious in terms of the scale and scope of my output by allowing me to draw comparisons between European narratives related to ‘waste’ and ‘waste management’ systems.”

Claire Weetman has a history of staging interventions in public places, but Watermark was her biggest challenge yet. The opportunity to travel back to a city and the learning from our previous riPOSTe project led to her developing this piece of work in a more ambitious way.

Cecilia Kinnear’s involvement in POST has furthered her experience and knowledge in relation to her thinking on organisational structures/models, she notes:

“Having worked in the co-owned company John Lewis and been heavily involved in it’s democratic elected bodies, I have long been fascinated by what makes for successful ownership models and structures for organisations or businesses. Both TRADING STAION and previously riPOSTe have extended my knowledge and experience in a different way and scale to that of John Lewis. As I look to setting up a business in the future this has been vital in feeding my ambitions.

Work produced & development of individual & interdisciplinary practices

The artists involved have produced the following works during the TRADING STATION project.

Susan Meyerhoff Sharples

· ‘Careful what you wish for series’ ‘

· Altered Images – I’ve always known not to trust a camera’, a series of hand edited magazine prints, images of models wearing wedding gowns.

· ‘Unpick’, a video performance of deconstructing a garment.

· ‘Graft’, a video performance of reconstructing/recycling a new garment.

· ‘Size minus zero’, a silk christening gown.

· ‘A sense of loss’, a collection of defiled original wedding photographs.

Claire Weetman

· Watermark, an intervention in Istanbul March (test)- developing a new drawing process using water onto stone floors.

· A series of developmental works that are realised using book works, drawing, print and sound

· ‘Watermark’ an intervention in four directions, Barbaros Park, Istanbul.’ A four-hour intervention of Watermark in Barbaros Park Istanbul.

· ‘Watermark’ four channel video documentation of the intervention.

Robyn Woolston

· A series of photos of her immediate location using a Psychogeographical approach and questioning ‘what does home mean?’

· A series of over 300 documentary images taken during her residency in October to understand how Istanbul’s unofficial recycling mechanisms operate.

· Waste. Product. Istanbul. A self-published limited edition Artists Book work of the photographs taken during her residency. Exhibited during her exhibition at the Walker art gallery

Amanda Oliphant

· ‘We will go to the mountains’, series

· A limited edition collection of altered postcards.

· Small prayer boxes

· Large Prayer box

· Bee hive

Cecilia Kinnear

· ‘HOŞ GELDİN/WELCOME/HOŞ BULDUK.’ flash mob in The Bluecoat Gardens.

· ‘HOŞ GELDİN/WELCOME/HOŞ BULDUK.’ video installation

· ‘How far away do you need to be…’ a series of collages.

Atılkunst

· Pan-Soccer, an Installation at Curve Gallery, Liverpool

Gülçin Aksoy

· Red Tape. Video Installation at Curve Gallery, Liverpool

· Get off my eyes. Poster at 5533 Gallery, Istanbul

Nancy Atakan

· Ters Göç/Backwards Migration. Video Installation at Curve Gallery, Liverpool.

· Mirror Mirror on the wall. Video, created at a hair salon in Liverpool during her residency.

Collaborative output

· Tumblr blog: http://tradingstation.tumblr.com a collaborative website that shares inspirations and ideas as the project developed.

· Four newspaper publications. We estimate that our newspapers reached 5000 individuals in their physical form. We reached a further 1837 readers via our online versions of the publications.

· www.postliverpool.com – a new section featuring TRADING STATION, it’s artists, publications, exhibitions and projects. We reached 1400 unique visitors to our website during the project.

· Our news page http://postliverpool.blogspot.co.uk/ has taken a lesser role as we have developed our use of tumblr/twitter/facebook, although during the project it has received 350 visits.

· Retaining People, Circulating Objects. An exhibition by Nancy Atakan and Gülçin Aksoy at 5533 gallery, Istanbul in April 2013.

· While thinking about all this. A poster and discussion event involving Nancy Atakan and Gülçin Aksoy at 5533 gallery, Istanbul in April 2013.

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Watermark, An intervention in four directions. Claire Weetman.

Public Facing events

We have held a range of events that engaged TRADING STATION with the public including exhibition, discussion events, intervention and socially engaged practice. These took place in public spaces and arts organisations in Liverpool and Istanbul throughout the project.

Liverpool Art Month

TRADING STATION was programmed as part of Liverpool Art Month, and the newspaper publication was distributed during the month of May.

TRADING STATION exhibition at Curve Gallery

This exhibition opened 21 September to 13 October 2012. The production period of the exhibition encouraged conversation, exchange of ideas, critique and development of artworks and their presentation and personal development of artists. The exhibition featured 8 new works made by the artists during the exchange. These works included installation, sculpture, and video works, some of which were new methods of working for several of the artists. The two newspapers that had been published at that point formed an installation in the gallery and throughout its entrance.

The exhibition was a point part-way through the exchange, so some of the presentation of works was at an ‘in progress’ stage. We had hoped that the exhibition could be placed somewhere between a traditional object-based exhibition and a more flexible space for trading and exchange to occur. On reflection, the pressures of producing ‘an exhibition’ bypassed the more subtle requirements that a development space allows. In the context of using the publications as an exchange point, this exhibition did provide a useful static counterpoint.

Open Conversation event

We planned 2 discussion events during the exhibition at Curve Gallery; ‘TRADING STATION in open conversation’ was publicised through the Liverpool Independents Biennial and was open to the public. Our intention was to invite guest speakers, but time pressures on each of the artists meant that this did not happen. The first event featured four of the Liverpool artists, Nancy Atakan, Gülçin Aksoy and gallery curator Lisa Who, with 3 members of the public attending. In the end, not having an invited guest speaker meant that this proved to be a really useful point for some of the deeper conversations about the value of trading as artists to take place. It led to greater understanding of each other’s practices and how they are placed in the wider European context.

The second of these open conversations did not take place. This was due to timetabling conflicts with higher profile biennial events meaning low audience figures for the first event translated into no members of the public for the second.

If planning such an event again, it would be good to have the backing of a more high profile organisation, as we did with our ‘Stammtisch’ event at the Bluecoat in our 2010 project which was more widely promoted. Programming such an event when the exchange artists are in the country is essential if we do this in future. Timetabling so as to avoid clash with other events will be neccessary, although not completely avoidable.

5533 gallery, Istanbul

Susan Meyerhoff Sharples exhibited a series of images at 5533 gallery in Istanbul during September. This was presented in an ‘engaged practice’ manner, with the assistance of the intern at 5533, who asked the passing audience at this conservative Turkish shopping centre to comment and respond to the work she has created. Engagement was limited, but was of high quality, with considered and through provoking responses to the work.

Watermark Intervention

Claire Weetman made a four-hour performance intervention into a public square in the Besiktas area of Istanbul in September 2012. This engaged and intervened in the lives of around 500 people, with around 30 of them actively participating and altering their movements in response to it.

Welcome (Flash Mob)

Cecilia Kinnear created a flash mob in the process of making her video installation ‘HOŞ GELDİN/WELCOME/HOŞ BULDUK. This flash mob involved approximately 65 participants and took place in the gardens of the Bluecoat, Liverpool.