A cast from the past...

I was recently contacted by a friend in Glasgow who had purchased a piece of my work a number of years ago. He kindly sent me the above photo of the work displayed in his house. It was a lovely reminder of a past body of work that was exhibited at 1 Royal Terrace, and an example of how the work now lives on in many different people's homes.

Another new home for BRIMMING unit

Following my BRIMMING exhibition last January, the units that were installed in the bookcase have been distributed amongst friends and people who have bought them.

I have asked each individual with a unit to take a photo of them with their unit and another photo of the unit it its new home.

I've just received photos of another unit in its new home:

Making moulds in readiness to get casting!

Having being inducted in the wood workshop, and now that my wood order has been delivered, yesterday I was able to make a start on making a number of moulds which I will then use for casting.

I've started off making a number of simple 15cm x 25cm x 15cm boxes, which I will cast using various colours of plaster, and then want to experiment with the display of them. Moving on from the BRIMMING bookcase installation at 1 Royal Terrace, I intend to make work which brings the work out of a bookcase, and into a space which you can walk around the work and see it from all angles.

The making of the Barrowland Park album pathway

I've just found a fascinating article about how Jim Lambie's 'Album Pathway' was made.
I'm drawn to the photos of the casts and see similarities between how the colours mix in this piece with my casting process for 'BRIMMING'.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2014/july/barrowlands-album-pathway-jim-lambie















Jim Lambie, Untitled 2014, coloured concrete, 103m x 3m. Public Artwork in Barrowland Park, Glasgow. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Commissioned as part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme. Photo: Stephen Hosey

Arranged like records on a shelf, artist Jim Lambie's 'album pathway' in Glasgow lists the names and dates of thousands of bands that have played the city's famous Barrowlands venue since 1983. Russ Coleman, the sculptor who worked on the Comedy Carpet in Blackpool, tells us how he turned his hand to coloured concrete...

Unveiled in the new Barrowland Park, a 'temporary urban greenspace' opposite the venue, Lambie's 100 metre long walkway cites 2,000 appearances by a range of international musicians. The artist has described the work as a homage to the famous venue and the nearby Barras market where he would often scour for records.

Commissioned as part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme, the pathway was developed by The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd with Lambie and landscape designer, Greg White (LOCI Design).



Jim Lambie, Untitled 2014, coloured concrete, 103m x 3m. Public Artwork in Barrowland Park, Glasgow. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photo: Stephen Hosey

Made from coloured concrete, the path – as with Gordon Young and Why Not Associates' expansive Comedy Carpet – contains thousands of individually made glyphs created by Coleman in his North Shields workshop. For the Barrowland Park project, Coleman worked with graphic designer and art director Kirk Teasdale to realise Lambie's original idea – their part of the process taking just twenty weeks to complete, in time for the Commonwealth Games.

Coleman has an interesting back story. Originally a 'monumental' mason and hand letter-carver, he trained in bricklaying and construction, later enrolling at art school to study sculpture. His approach to type involves thinking of it "in the wild – as physical objects," he says, and his recent work has combined these more traditional methods with new technologies; from water jet-cutting machines to digital software.



Jim Lambie, Untitled 2014, coloured concrete, 103m x 3m. Public Artwork in Barrowland Park, Glasgow. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photo: Stephen Hosey

"The Comedy Carpet was the culminaton of a year's work with Gordon and Why Not Associates," says Coleman, "and I developed techniques on that which afterwards I'd thought would be end of the road, really, with granite and concrete type. With the Carpet, this was type as solid objects that needed arranging in a particular way – the water-cutting maching unleashed a whole new world."

In 2013, Greg White, the landscape designer working on the Barrowland Park project was describing the pathway project to a friend who then directed him to the Comedy Carpet. White tracked down Coleman as a potential fabricator for the new pathway in Glasgow and Lambie's art production company Voidoid then contacted him about the idea – with one aspect of the proposal standing out in particular.

"What interested me was the colour," says Coleman, "because I have this long-term thing called the Concrete Foundation where its mission is to alter people's perceptions of concrete – to see it as ultimately flexible, as there are a thousand ways of using it. So this was a 'polychrome' approach to concrete. I'd Googled Jim's work and thought, 'that'd be great to work on'."



Jim Lambie, Untitled 2014, coloured concrete, 103m x 3m. Public Artwork in Barrowland Park, Glasgow. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow. Photo: Stephen Hosey

The practicalities of working in coloured concrete, however, are a little more complicated. Coleman explains: "Using colour and concrete had obvious parameters: it's cement-based and alkaline; [the pathway] would be outdoors so would have to be UV stable as well. And there are only certain kinds of pigments [you can use] such as metal oxides – that's excluding organic and chemical pigments.

"Most of the coloured parts in the work are oxides of cobalt, titanium, iron and so on. Some of the colours, like the lilac and the turquoise, are very new colours that have only been developed in the last two years." These particular colours are also very expensive to produce. Ordinary pigments are around the £2 or £3 a kilo mark, while the turquoise, says Coleman, might come in at £60 or £70 for the same amount.



Coleman also cast many of the fonts used in the pathway, as opposed to cutting them out with the water jet (the latter allows more flexibility in that the fonts to be cut at any size). "There was some old traditional stuff in casting certain fonts such as Bryant, which has a rounded edge without any serifs and is easy to do," he says. "Whereas Optima or Baskerville are difficult to cast, you can't remould them as easily, they're too delicate to handle, particularly as there's a brittleness to concrete. Locked into the surrounding concrete though they're very strong."

The project used used nine fonts in 14 colours which made for a total of 126 possible combinations – and a mammoth twenty-two thousand separate glyphs.

"Normally, you might design something on the computer, then someone cuts it out," says Coleman. "But here, from start to finish, there were around 50 different processes, lots of checks and balances. For one, you have to arrange the letters upside-down and back-to-front and then cover them in concrete. It goes from 2D to 3D, then back to 2D again. It's almost like creating chaos."





Teasdale says the team made templates of the path as though it had been flipped over in the workshop. "We used tape to stick the letterforms on the templates wrong way round," he says, "and then poured coloured concrete over them, which made the stripes."

"It was about designing processes and procedures to achieve what the artist wanted, their vision," says Coleman. "It needed to look like the spines of records; like you were walking along a collection."

Coleman, who talks animatedly about the properties of concrete, points out that it was in the process of turning a PDF of type into physical lettering that then allowed other elements to come out. "In the workshop it becomes something else, it's not the precious thing on paper – but the 'process' dictates another thing. And that's the hit of the real type that’s bigger than on the page. It has its own life."

Even when put in place and cleaned of all the dust, the path was transformed once again. "We used a clear crystal quartz as an aggregate," says Coleman, "so when you cut through – they act like mini prisms."

Gathering from above

This invite to the current Martino Gamper exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery made me think about the floor installation I recently exhibited at 1 Royal Terrace.

Following my exhibition at 1 Royal Terrace, one of the things I have been thinking about is if I want to re-exhibit any of the works. I know I do not want to exhibit Brimming anywhere else as it was made especially for that bookcase as a site specific work. I am happy with the individual units being displayed individually in different places as it becomes a different work when they are separated.

I am playing with the idea of re-working 'Gathering', the floor installation. Again, this was a site specific piece, made with the same floor tiles that the gallery floor was covered with. I would like to try removing the floor tiles and exhibiting the blocks in the same arrangement but on a plain floor. I would also like to try making the work on different types of floor, maybe using different tiles.

I would like to make a work on the floor that, when viewed from above, the work blends in with the floor.

Playing, Filling, Mixing, Brimming Exhibition text by Petter Yxell

Playing, Filling, Mixing, Brimming Exhibition text by Petter Yxell
http://www.1royalterrace.co.uk/brimming.html















1 Royal Terrace Committee member, Petter Yxell has written a textual response to my BRIMMING exhibition and the process of assisting me in the production of the work.

Listen to BRIMMING Recording - Helen Shaddock in Conversation with 1 Royal Terrace

The recording of the In Conversation event that was held at 1 Royal Terrace in conjunction with my BRIMMING exhibition is now available online.

http://www.1royalterrace.co.uk/brimming.html











I talk with 1 Royal Terrace committee members Ruth Switalski and Petter Yxell, covering topics such as the relationship my work has to sculpture and painting, my use of colour, working methods and site specificity. The conversation was then extended to questions from the audience.

Selected images of BRIMMING exhibition now on 1 Royal Terrace website

A selection of images from the recent BRIMMING exhibition at 1 Royal Terrace have been added to the gallery website.



http://www.1royalterrace.co.uk/archive.html

I will be adding further documentation to my website shortly.

Mapping the Brimming Units

I am delighted that I have sold some of the individual units from my Brimming installation. I will never exhibit the installation in a different context as it was made specifically for 1 Royal Terrace, but I do feel happy to let the work live on in a different way, as individual units.

I have kept a detailed log of the work, and am mapping where each of the units ends up. 

I have requested that anyone who owns a unit, sends me two photographs. One photograph of the owner with their unit, and another photograph of the unit in its new home.

It is going to be very interesting to see where each of them go to, and I look forward to receiving the photos.

If you are interested in owning a unit, please email me
helen.shaddock@yahoo.co.uk

My aim is to rehouse each of the 49 units and track where each and every one gets to!

Better late than never...BRIMMING Preview in The Herald

So, I know that my BRIMMING exhibition at 1 Royal Terrace has been and gone, but I've only just managed to get my hands on a copy of the Preview that was printed in The Herald (Scottish newspaper) the Saturday before my exhibition opening on 12th January.

Wrapped and moved

Today was the final day of destall of BRIMMING at 1 Royal Terrace. All the casts were wrapped in bubble wrap and transported out of the gallery, into my friend's car and then driven to my studio. We then loaded the casts into a number of shopping trolleys and wheeled them into the studio. 

Unfortunately, the lift that connects the ground floor with the main lift is not operating at the moment, meaning that I had to transfer the casts from one trolley, up a few stairs and into another trolley.

With over 100 bricks being moved, it was rather a time-consuming and laborious task, but I am pleased to report that all work arrived safely without any breakages.






















As I was filling and emptying the trolleys, I was reminded of a performance I did called Helter Skelter (video documentation can be seen on my website http://www.helenshaddock.co.uk/portfolio/index.php?sub=performance&link=helter-skelter) in which a similar cyclical process was followed, this time it being one of creation and destruction.



I was also reminded of a work by the artist Liz West in which she filled shopping trolleys with products of the same colour.

http://www.liz-west.com/index.aspx?sectionid=1206216

Image share

My good friend Gary regularly sends me images and examples of work by other artists that he thinks I will enjoy and have a reationship to my work. Receiving such hand-picked images is a real treat, and Gary's choice shows how well he knows me and my work. Please keep them coming Gary! Here is one of the most recent images I received.

I'm always delighted to receive recommendations and suggestions, so please do let me know if there is something you think I would appreciate.

Destall commences

Today was the final day of 'BRIMMING', my solo exhibition at 1 Royal Terrace. I am delighted that it attracted over 160 visitors, and the responses have been so heart warming.

As I had been using the gallery as a studio prior to the exhibition, there was a lot of my equipment, materials and tools that were stored in one of the spare rooms in the flat.

My parents came to Glasgow this weekend to see my exhibition, and whilst they were here, they offered to help me move some of my belongings from 1 Royal Terrace to my studio at South Block.

Last night I sorted out what was going where, some things were for the bin, some were to go to my studio, and there were a few items that were to stay at Royal Terrace e.g. my camera and tripod

This morning, before the gallery opened, we collected everything at Royal Terrace that was destined for the studio, and then made the trip to Osbourne Street to drop things off at the studio.

We also sorted through things in my studio, and made a pile of items that are to be kept in storage, a pile for rubbish and a pile for staying in the studio. We had a shuffle around in the storage area, and fitted new things in.



This evening I took further documentation of the exhibition and made a start with destall. The laser cut pieces have been removed from the walls and the blocks taken from the bookcases. I will finish destall over the week.

Last chance to see BRIMMING at 1 Royal Terrace

It is with sadness that I remind you that this weekend is the last time you can visit my BRIMMING exhibition at 1 Royal Terrace. I am going to miss the place, but will, of course, be back to see how the other artists in the programme respond to the space, if they choose to at all.

These photographs show the room as it was when I was first invited to exhibit, prior to becoming a gallery.

The next artist to exhibit at 1 Royal Terrace is Nick Thomas, and the exhibition opening will be on Sunday 9th February from 4pm-8pm.

Individual 'units' are finding new sites

The work 'Brimming' is a site-specific installation. It was made in response to the bookcase in the gallery and is made to fit the exact size of that particular bookcase.

As I said at the 'in conversation' event, I do not want to rehouse the whole installation in another pre-existing bookcase, and I do not want to manufacture a new bookcase in which this collection of casts could be housed. I think that this work as a whole exists in that one bookcase at 1 Royal Terrace, and moving it into another site changes the work.

I feel that in order for the work to live on, the various elements (casts) can be dispersed and seen individually as units, and therefore I have chosen to sell them as units.

I am charging £150 - £200 per unit, depending on size etc.

If you are interested or have any questions, please do get in touch.

My email address is helen.shaddock(at)yahoo.co.uk

If you would like to see them individually, I am more than happy to arrange a viewing.

Video documentation of Brimming

I'm delighted that the conversation yesterday was documented on video by the wonderful Talitha Kotze. It will be an excellent reminder for me of what we discussed and I will then be able to follow up certain topics.

Hopefully, it will also be interesting for you. I intend to produce a podcast of the entire conversation, allowing those who were not at the event to hear what went on.

The video footage is going to be edited, selecting particularly interesting areas of discussion.

Today, Talitha filmed a couple of minutes-worth of footage to act as a short introduction to 1 Royal Terrace, the exhibition, and then the in conversation event that accompanied my exhibition.

So, keep your eyes peeled for the video and audio file becoming available online.

May the conversations continue...

Thanks to 1 Royal Terrace for organising and hosting the 'artist in conversation' event. It was a thoroughly enjoyable Sunday afternoon which has left me with lots to think about and things to follow up.

Thanks to Ruth and Petter for putting so much thought into the questions they asked and structuring those in a manner that generated, what seemed to me, a free-flowing discussion rather than question and answer session.

Thanks to Talitha for documenting the event and offering to edit the footage to enable us to share what happened today with a wider audience. Keep your eyes out for us putting this online as a podcast, video clips etc.

Thanks to everyone who came to the gallery this afternoon and contributed to the 'in conversation' event. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Lots of things were covered and my mind has lots to process, but here are a few things that I want to think further about.

The relation my work has to music - how the works can be 'read' musically e.g. volume, pitch, staves, rhythm, tempo

Installing work in a way we construct language - punctuation, pauses, capital letters, commas

The relation my work has to water - ebb and flow

The notion of 'prettiness'

Whether a site specific work can exist in a different site?

I hope that the conversation we began today can continue, and would appreciate any other thoughts and open up the debate online via comments on my blog or facebook

Brimming featured on Glasgow Craft Mafia

My exhibition, 'Brimming', at 1 Royal Terrace gets a good mention on the Glasgow Craft Mafia website.

Read it here...

http://glasgowcraftmafia.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/whats-on-in-glasgow/comment-page-1/#comment-1

All welcome

I am still brimming with joy following the wonderful preview of my exhibition at 1 Royal Terrace on Sunday.

It was a dark, wet and cold Sunday evening outside, but inside the gallery there was a real sense of optimism, enthusiasm, cheerfulness and fun. It was great to see a mixed audience. Yes, there were plenty of Glasgow School of Art staff and students, but the exhibition also attracted numerous visitors from outside of the art world, all of whom seemed genuinely interested in the work regardless of their age!

I enjoyed watching the youngsters interacting with the work.

Exhibition Preview

Many thanks to everyone who came to 1 Royal Terrace for the preview of my exhibition, Brimming.

Huge thanks also to Ruth, Petter and Grace (the 1 Royal Terrace committee) for their continued support and hard work.