Trading Station

I’m back using Artists Talking, as I’m on another intensive residency, this time in Shanghai. But I thought I’d tell you about the continuation of Trading Station since the last blog.

We published issue 2 of our newspaper, and managed to get about half of the copies back to Liverpool from Istanbul. Our Turkish guests Nancy Atakan and Gulcin Aksoy came to Liverpool and exhibited at Curve Gallery during the Liverpool Biennial. We talked, debated, discussed, made art, walked around the city, went (nearly) to the beach and ate together.

Nancy and Gulcin have gone home, Robyn Woolston has been to Istanbul for her residency period, and we’ve worked together to create our third issue of the newspaper. It was a push to get all of the content together before I left for China (I’ve got the skills to do the page layouts, so we needed to be sure that it was finished before then), but we did it, and it should be being printed today.

We decided to profile the work that was exhibited at Curve Gallery, along with some contextual background provided by the artists, plus some of the outcomes of the discussion that we held at Curve on the 22 September.

The online edition of the paper is here: http://issuu.com/claireweetman/docs/tradingstation…

You can see all of the newspaper editions to date on our TRADING STATION page: http://www.postliverpool.com/tradingstation.html

Here’s the piece about Watermark that I mentioned a few days ago. Taken from my personal blog:
Watermark, how an idea became a piece of work.

I’m currently out in Istanbul working as part of a residency for POST Liverpool. It’s the second time I’ve been here (the last time was March 2012) and I came with a plan to re work the ‘Watermark’ piece I made. Well, today that happened.

‘Watermark, an intervention in Four directions’ took place on Barbaros park, which is a public square in Besiktas. It’s quite a transport hub with ferries, buses and Taxis galore and as a result there’s lots of people passing across the square; the sort of place that I love to work in response to.

I’ve been looking at pavements for the past 12 months and thinking of them as a canvas for my work, so when I originally found this space it was perfect to make a piece of work on. The courses of paving stones run from corner to corner of the square, and this is the predominant direction that people move across the space. As I had no permission to make work here I needed to find a way of making a drawing on the floor without leaving a mark when I was finished.

I think I was influenced by seeing lots of water traces around, pavements being cleaned, mechanical sweepers leaving a wet trail behind them, so I decided to paint water onto the floor. The basic method was trialled in March, using a small paintbrush, a Jam jar of water and a touch of bravado. At that point I only travelled in one direction, and having worked on some sketches back in my studio in St Helens I decided to make a better version of the work while I am here in Istanbul again.

I’ve had a 30cm paintbrush made (this involved me, a man in the market who makes sieves out of wood and mesh, a verbal language barrier, a diagram and some hand signals), bought a big roasting tin (not your typical souvenir) to hold the water, am probably the only person ever who’s travelled with gel filled knee pads, and arranged for a filmmaker to document the while thing.

So that brings me to today, when I made my work following the paving stones in four directions, using 20 litres of water, avoiding a world peace day celebration with international folk dancing, getting filthy feet, a bit of a suntan, and very sore knees. 9 hours after starting (only 4 of those were performance hours) I painted the final square, and now you’ll have to wait to see the film, which gets edited tomorrow…

This residency is part of TRADING STATION, a POST artists exchange. It is funded by Arts Council England and UK trade & investment. Thanks also to all my assistants today, Dilek, Dilek’s friend, Mandy and Sue.

I’ve returned to this blog after a 5 month gap, as I’ve also returned to Istanbul after a 5 month gap. I’m here for 2 weeks so thought I’d post a quick update.

Since I left Istanbul in March, POST have worked together with our artist partners in Istanbul to produce one newspaper that was distributed through Liverpool. That paper charts the beginnings of our artist exchanges and was featured in Liverpool Art Month, a series of events and exhibitions profiling what artists in the city are up to.

One of our members Cecilia Kinnear came to Istanbul as part of our exchange in July and started working with Nancy Atakan, Gulcin Aksoy and Atilkunst on a second edition of the newspaper. That newspaper has just gone to print in Istanbul yesterday, so will be released at the weekend.

Susan Meyerhoff Sharples and Amanda Oliphant arrived in Istanbul late on Monday night for their short one week residencies, so hopefully further opportunities for us all to work together will happen this week.

And I’ve re-worked my ‘Watermark’ work that I trialled here in March. I’ll post a write up about that in a separate post, as I’ve already written it for my own blog, and there’s no point in doubling the amount of work to do in a short time here. But when you do read it, I’ll just add that the aches and pains from doing that work are phenomenal, I just want to sit still for a while…..

So today i’ve visited the galleries that I wanted to visit but hadn’t. AKBank gallery (there’s quite a few galleries linked to banks here) have a show called Aftermath. Really good 2 channel video about 2 places on the Caspian Sea (one russian, one middle eastern). Lovely pairings of images from both places – same features, different countries, and you can’t tell the difference. Sea, oil rigs, oil drilling and a female performance artist with Foxes on her arms mimicing the movement of the oil drills.

I’ve been around Misir Apartments which is a classical apartment building with galleries on several of the floors. Highlights included Meltem Isik’s “Twice into the Stream” at Galeri Nev- huge photographs of people of all ages, naked except for a cloth printed with a close up of a part of their body, with the image on the cloth positioned carefully – some are parts of the body that initially look suggestive, but on closer inspection are folds of skin under the arms or is a carefull placed belly button.

In the same building was Nesrin Esirtegen Collection, which felt quite commercial, but was worth mentioning for the local connections I noticed – A small Jaume Plensa Sculpture (I can see his ‘Dream’ sculpture in St Helens from my front door) and a video piece whose soundtrack was ‘You’ll never walk alone” sung by football fans (I’ve been telling people who ask that I’m from Liverpool, and at least 2 told me that I’ll never walk alone)

Also in Misir was Pi Artworks with a show made out of knitting. I’ve taken some photos for Carys Anne Hughes in Runcorn as she does some exciting things with knitting and I think she’ll like them (She’s also working like a trouper to set up Hazlehurst craft studios in Runcorn – keep an eye out!)

A small diversion for some shopping and lunch before visiting Salt Beyoglu, who have got an exhibition in partnership with a dutch organisation and one in partnership with Tate modern. Some interesting works in a lovely space (an old bank, but still supported by the bank itself). Really liked some works about ‘walk for 2 metres in the direction of *city name* <-included Chicago, Belem, Shanghai, Khartoum, Marrakesh to name a few. Only I couldn’t find the label for the artist’s name, and the security guard only seemed to do security and couldn’t help me.

Then onwards to Salt Galata – again in a big palatial old bank building. The exhibition there had finished yesterday, but they have an excellent research library, so I picked out a couple of books about town planning and public use of spaces and had a read, made some notes and have some further reading to do (Lefebvre, Gornick, Goffman). Really great resource, I’ll definitely be back there when I return to use it again – and you can do your photocopying for free!

Staved off falling asleep in my book (because of the 3 hours sleep last night) and recharged in their cafe with some caffine and cake, while looking out at the Suleymaniye Mosque through shelves of Vodka. A bit more retail therapy and an experiment with the metro and I’m back at the studio to pack and maybe get a drawing made before bed. I leave for home in the morning, so any further updates to this blog will be sparse I expect.

I’m looking forward to coming back to Istanbul, got a better Idea of what and how I can make work myself and of how we can work together with the Turkish Artists – to see how we are getting on visit our website www.postliverpool.com or our tumblr blog tradingstation.tumblr.com

Last day in Istanbul (for now)

And I got the funding application written last night – it was a stay up until 4am, get up again at 7am job, but it’s been emailed to my fabulous husband back home, who is going to post it special delivery this morning. Fingers crossed that yesterday’s run of good luck rubs off onto the application.

Today I thought about returning to the square where I made my work on Thursday to do a second line, but I’m too tired, so, I am going to take in some of the gallery spaces in Istanbul instead. I might then finish off the day with a drawing if I get time before I have to pack to leave in the morning.

Here’s some photos of me collecting objects to take home to trade with the artists back in Liverpool.