mima Senior Curator, Elinor Morgan talks at the NewBridge Project as part of Practice Makes Practice

Last night I attended another Practice Makes Practice Curators talk, an event in which an invited curator speaks about their work and then answers questions. This week Elinor Morgan, Senior Curator at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima) spoke to us about some of the different art institutions she has worked for, specifically OUTPOST, Norwich, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire and Eastside Projects, Birmingham. Elinor then focused in slightly more detail on her current work at MIMA.

Morgan is passionate about art that has a social role, and it was the vison of Alistair Hudson, MIMA's last Director, that attracted Morgan to work at mima. "His new vision for mima is based on the concept of the Useful Museum, as an institution dedicated to the promotion of art as a tool for education and social change."

Hence, the 'about' section on the website reads

"Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, part of Teesside University, is moving forward with a civic agenda, to reconnect art with its social function and promote art as a tool for changing the world around us. With this vision, we see ourselves as a ‘useful’ museum.

We wish to have an influence on society, taking a leading role in addressing current issues within politics, economics and culture. Our programmes encompass urgent themes such as housing, migration, inequality, regeneration and healthcare.

We offer changing exhibitions, collection displays, learning activities, projects, and community-focused initiatives that involve multiple artists and publics. These programmes promote creativity for everyone in ordinary life, through education, activism and making.

We have been developing relationships with constituencies in Middlesbrough and beyond. Our ambition is that these help us shape who we are: a public site, open and accessible, diverse and inclusive, and used by all."


Elinor suggested reading Toward a Lexicon of Usership by Stephen Wright.

She gave some excellent examples of the ways in which mima is going about achieving their aims, from working with and developing the collection to ensure that underrepresented voices are recognised to providing a free community day lunch once a week for anyone and everyone, allowing people from all walks of life to come together over a shared experience (a meal) and talk. If anyone ever asks "what good is art?" then they should go to mima to find the answer.

David McLeavy talk at The NewBridge Project

As part  of the Practice Makes Practice programme, The NewBridge Project invited David McLeavy to give a talk.

David McLeavy is a curator and writer who lives and works in Sheffield, UK. He is currently the Director of Bloc Projects, Sheffield and the founder and editor of YAC | Young Artists in Conversation. Previous positions have included being the Co-Director of the international residency and exhibition programme Picnic Picnic, Sheffield, Co-Founder of art and design focused clothing brand Curbar Cycling Apparel along with working on numerous independent curatorial projects. He was previously the chair of the board of trustees for Turf Projects, Croydon and currently sits on the Steering Group for Making Ways, a development project for artists and makers initiated by Sheffield Culture Consortium.

David began by demonstrating how his practice has shifted from being an artist, to an artist and curator, to what he now identifies as; a curator and writer.


He spoke about some of the works/projects that he has worked on, starting with his older work and moving onto his most recent activity with BLOC Projects.

YAC | Young Artists in Conversation was set up in October 2013 to provide critical conversations and interviews with the most exciting emerging artists currently working in the UK.

YAC now work with a growing team of writers who have the opportunity to interview the artists that they are interested in and to ask the questions that they want answering.

YAC continuously aims to provide critical and compelling interviews along with helping to uncover some of the emerging talent currently working in the UK. 

http://youngartistsinconversation.co.uk/

Work! Work! Work!, Primemover, Sheffield (Part of Art Sheffield 13 Parallel Projects programme)

This was a solo project in which David invented a new sport to be played in front of a live audience by artists from around the UK. He was interested in bringing people together in a kind of alternative networking event.




Funhaus, Toast, Manchester, 2014

This was a solo project by David McLeavy taking the work of an interactive re staging of the CITV children's television show Fun House.





Putt Putt #2, Turf Projects (offsite), Croydon, 2014


David worked with Alice Cretney to curate a group exhibition of new sculpture in which the work took the form of crazy golf holes of varying difficulty. Participating artists were AV CO-OP, Natalie Finnemore, Iain Hales, Holly Hendry, Nicolas Henninger, Mark Scott-Wood, W A V E Y B O Y Z, WELCHWHITAKER and Liz West.


Picnic Picnic, Sheffield, 2015

Along with Pippa Cook, David was the co-founder of Picnic Picnic; a year long, fully funded international artist residency programme and contemporary art exhibition. Artists from around Europe were invited to live and work in a house in Sheffield resulting in public exhibitions of their work.

Along with exhibitions and events by Internationally renowned artists, Picnic Picnic also presented a series of exhibitions of regional artists work based around a number of current themes.


Bloc Projects

Bloc Projects is an artist-led project space in the centre of Sheffield, UK, which presents exhibitions, events, residencies, exchange projects and educational activities. Established in 2002, the organisation provides a platform for early-mid career artists, encouraging experimentation, collaboration across disciplines and critical dialogue among artists, audiences and partners in the city and further afield.

The Bloc Projects Open Residency provides audiences with a unique perspective on how artists work. By turning the gallery space into a working studio and inviting the public to engage in open conversation, the Open Residency programme aims to break down the formal barriers between artist and audience.

Bloc Projects’ Test Bed series is focused on providing artists with a publicly facing gallery space to experiment with new approaches, and techniques and to engage with audiences in new ways.

Against Everything - Mark Greif as part of Reading for _____ at The NewBridge Project

On Monday, at the first of what is intended to be a regular series of sessions at The NewBridge Project, Daniel Russell selected Against Everything by Mark Greif as the text to be shared and discussed.

"Against Everything is a thought-provoking study and essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism. He challenges us to rethink the ordinary world and take life seriously."

Dan chose to focus on the first essay within the book, Against Exercise because he had noticed a similarity between the behaviour and mentality applied when going to a present-day gym and that of production line employees in the industrial society. Has our change of working conditions i.e. less manual labour, had an impact on the way we want to exercise? Are we nostalgic about factory work?

Rather than operating the conveyor belt, we turn to the gym to walk on the conveyor belt.

We employ a personal trainer to punish us in order to liberate ourselves.

We track progress by focusing on numbers - output = kilometres walked, weight lifted, calories burned etc

We criticise those who don't partake in the gym culture

The need to go to the gym is another example of the desire to be productive, doing something worthwhile with our time and even manage to do two things at once at the gym, workout while catching up on the latest television, listening to music etc.

The gym is a public space where private activities are carried out. Acts that previously would be regarded as private actions are now done in front of others, we puff, pant and grunt as we put our bodies through hard labour.

And the reason for these efforts? Greif argues that our actions are intended to prolong our lives, yet argues that in doing so, we are forgetting how to live.

I do not necessarily agree with this argument. He fails to consider the enjoyment that many people yield from participating in exercise and the social aspect of going to the gym.

Reading for _______ at The NewBridge Project

On Monday evening I attended Reading for _______ , a Practice Make Practice event at The NewBridge Project. It was programmed with Nathaniel Whitfield, who is currently undertaking Practice Makes Practice – A Social Residency at The NewBridge Project.

“The purpose of Art” James Baldwin wrote “is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers”.


"With the aim of provoking discussion, engagement and even disagreement with each other, we hope this space will shed light and provide us with new ways of seeing and articulating ideas."

This was the first of what is intended to be a series of sessions "where we can come together to share each other’s ideas through the texts we are reading individually."

The sessions take the following format:

• A group member brings to the session a text / essay / book / podcast / film that they are currently engaging with 

• The group member briefly presents to the group the reasons they are reading / listening / watching them and how they are finding them

• The group reads from / listens to / watches some selected sections of the item to be discussed

• The group has a discussion, shares ideas and opinions and makes suggestions of other sources that are related and could be of interest

"In listening to one another we are able to engage in a process of unlearning which opens up a space for re-articulation and re-materialization of ideas. We are 'undone' by one another, as Judith Butler would say."

Catherine Bertola, Jo Coupe, Cath Campbell and Jen Douglas, in conversation with Bryony Bond, Creative Director of The Tetley, Leeds at The NewBridge Project

As part of The NewBridge Project's Practice Makes Practice programme, artists Catherine Bertola, Jo Coupe, Cath Campbell and Jen Douglas, were in conversation with Bryony Bond, Creative Director of The Tetley, Leeds.

The artists presented and discussed their recent exhibition In and Out of Sight at UH Galleries, in the context of their individual practices and wider group activity.

Catherine Bertola

Catherine Bertola creates installations, objects and drawings that respond to particular sites, collections or historical contexts. In her new work she will use film and photographic processes to re-animate photographs of empty domestic interiors through the inclusion of her own presence.

Cath Campbell

Cath Campbell’s work encompasses drawing, photography, sculpture, digital printmaking, installation and large-scale architectural interventions. For UHGalleries she is making a new architectural work that will house an ongoing sound installation exploring traditions of social singing and collective voices, using found film footage to provide the lyrical content.

Jo Coupe

Jo Coupe’s work is rooted in a fascination with impermanence. From photography to installation, video, objects and sound, she creates works which investigate transience, precariousness and unpredictability. For In and Out of Sight Coupe will use the human voice to create an immersive sound installation.

Jennifer Douglas

Jennifer Douglas creates large-scale paintings, sculptures and installations to explore relationships between inherent function and renewed significance. A new series of paintings will explore the physicality of mark-making and reference the working environments of heavy and light industry and their painterly equivalents within the history of modern and contemporary art.

This group of independent female artists all have their own established successful careers, but come together to exhibit alongside each other and discuss their work together. This form of working together does not have a name as such - they are not collaborating and are not a collective, but support each other and work together on exhibitions. There are links between their work, both formally and conceptually, but these are not forced to produce coherent themed exhibitions. It seems that the group trust each other and know that the work will gel together in the way that they co-operate so well together as a group.

I do not think it is a coincidence that the artists are all of a similar age and have families. Yes, their individual practices have been affected by such factors, but I am eager to refrain from dwelling on these circumstances for too long. I feel the work deserves to be discussed and talked about for what it is, and I do not get the impression that any of the artists are making work about being a mother or because they are a mother.

Naturally the topics of discussion did include gender and parenting, and I began to think about whether this would have been the same if it were a group of 4 artists who were in the same circumstances but were male. Would we have been asking them how they manage their working lives as fathers? Indeed, would their practice have shifted since having children?

Practice Makes Practice at The NewBridge Project: ‘the listening room’ – conversation with Jez Riley French

This event took the form of a discussion about the role of located and performance-based sound in the contemporary sonic arts.

Jez Riley French gave a presentation/talk on some of aspects of his work with extended listening along with anecdotes, and he shared some key artists working with located sound including:

Klara Lewis

Signe Liden

Sally Ann McIntyre

Dawn Scarfe

Halla Steinunn Stefansdottir

Julia Holter

Manja Ristic

and Jana Winderen.

This lead us into an open conversation where we discussed topics such as

How does fit recording sit with the idea of nature and the idyll?

The role of misogyny in the distorted histories of sound cultures

The act of listening

I really appreciate Jez' way of working and highly respect his approach to making work. He likes discovering and sharing existing sounds, as opposed to manufacturing his own. He uses a range of microphones including hydrophones, electromagnetic, ultrasonic and contact microphones to record sounds that are beyond our normal hearing capabilities. His use of photography adds another element to the audio rather than illustrating the sound.

A delightfully unexpected encounter with Claire Hignett

Earlier in the year I signed up to participate in a Practice Makes Practice weekend event organised by The NewBridge Project in which NewBridge members could engage with a group of artists from Islington Mill, Salford. Unfortunately the event had to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances, but it is due to be rearranged in the future. After doing some research into Islington Mill, I had ear-marked it as a place to visit.

Last week I made a visit to Manchester for a variety of art related events, and ended up spending most of my time in Salford. As I waited for entry into the exhibition at ArtWork Atelier, I got talking to a woman who was also waiting to see the exhibition. It turned out that I was talking to Claire Hignett, an artist with a studio at Islington Mill who had also intended to attend the NewBridge Project/Islington Mill weekend event earlier in the year. Claire kindly offered to show me around Islington Mill (see earlier blog post) http://helenshaddock.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/islington-mill.html and introduce me to her work.



Claire writes,

"I am fascinated by the effect time has on memory. How memories start to fragment and merge with others. How, as we move through time and gather new experiences, our perception of our memories changes. I am particularly intrigued by the way we attach memory to objects and how we keep things that are broken, useless or were cherished by someone else to try and hold on to our memories and to stop them fragmenting any more."

In 2012 Claire began working on a project "to find out more about a group of Basque refugee children who came to Salford following the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War."

In June 1937, 4000 Basque children arrived in Southampton as refugees and were dispersed around the country in “colonies”. One of these colonies was in Salford at Harold’s Memorial Orphanage, now demolished but only five minutes walk from Claire's current home, and they were taught at the Local Quaker Meeting House, now a British Legion building just a little further on. Claire mentioned the children to her friend’s Mum (age 83) and she was delighted to be asked. She remembered being 9 years old and leaving hospital after a bout of mumps. She went with her friends to look at the refugees because “we thought they would be exotic but [we] were dead disappointed because they looked just like us!”



Claire is in the process of preparing for her exhibition at Ordsall Hall from July 18th to 24th September 2017. Her exhibition will be based on the story of the Basque Children in Salford. "Finding stories in old newspapers and talking to people who still remember them, she will create the exhibition to tell this hidden story."

While in her studio at Islington Mill I saw some of the work that she has been developing for the exhibition, and I look forward to going to see the end result in the Summer.



For more about Claire's work visit her website:

http://www.clairehignett.co.uk/

and her blog:

http://www.clairehignett.co.uk/blog/

Claire is a member of the Islington Mill Art Academy, "a peer-led experiment into alternative modes of art education. Founded in 2007, IMAA emphasises shared responsibility, and its nature changes with its membership, with each member bringing their own ideas and energy. Within IMAA there is no differentiation between professor and pupil, and there are no set courses, but rather a shared propensity to learn and to strive for understanding. The group seek out and utilise the resources which they can find around them, and employ 'art method' towards diverse, and not necessarily artistic, outcomes. Whilst the nature of IMAA is fluid and subject to change, it is always crucial to share ideas, and to embrace the skills and knowledge of members."

For more information about the Islington Mill Art Academy visit:

http://islingtonmillartacademy.blogspot.co.uk/

PMP | Forever Together - M I L K, Seize Projects, Pester & Rossi, McGilvary/White

M I L K, Seize Projects, Pester & Rossi, McGilvary/White
Discussion Chaired by Lloyd & Wilson

The objective of this event was to explore means, mediums and modes of artistic collaboration. Artists discussed collaborative efforts, successful and not. What went right, what went wrong and the joys of a shared creative process.

This event was programmed with M I L K alongside their exhibition This Is It, Isn’t It? the first of 3 exhibitions they have curated as part of their takeover at Workplace Gateshead. This Is It, Isn’t It? Explores ideas of self-doubt, self-awareness and self-reflexivity as a core of artistic practice.

M I L K were joined by Pester and Rossi, Seize Projects and McGilvary/White, and a discussion will be chaired by Lloyd & Wilson.

Ideas around collaborative practice quite often occupy my thoughts. This event yet again prompted me to think about 
- the difference between collectives and collaborations
- individual and collaborative practice and how artists can operate in both fields
- the audience as a collaborator
- friendship and collaboration - does it make it or break it?
- authorship
- identity, ego, 
- committees and collectives

Living Out Ideas – A Scratch Night Curatorial Studio at NewBridge Studios

Current artist in residence at NewBridge Studios, Gordon Douglas invited members of Curatorial Studio to The Newbridge Project to develop their upcoming publication ‘Living Out Ideas’ outside the familiar context of Scotland. Borrowing the performance terminology ‘the scratch night’, the group presented content, correspondences, references and concerns from previous discussions as well as new work devised for the event.



“Curatorial Studio is a peer-learning environment for fifteen early-career curators from across Scotland, conceived through conversations between Scottish Contemporary Art Network, the curator-led Framework programme, CCA Glasgow and the MLitt Curatorial Practice, Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow.

The aim is to create a supportive peer-learning environment for curators in the early stages of their career through a programme of weekend seminars and workshops focusing on specific areas of practice as well as public talks and events with international guests. Curatorial Studio encourages cooperative learning by bringing group discussion to the fore as a means of engaging with contemporary art theory and extending a network of support to those participating.

Curatorial Studio are: Frances Davis, Gordon Douglas, Cicely Farrer, Rachel Grant, Marcus Jack, Grace Johnston, Maria Lanko, Gemma Lawrence, Kirsteen Macdonald, Emmie McLuskey, Katherine Murphy, Rosie O’Grady, Frances Stacey, Shireen Taylor, Nick Thomas and Claire Walsh.”

It was a really interesting event, with Curatorial Studio performing and introducing a number of texts and films which was then followed by a discussion about the group and whether there is potential for a similar model based in the North East. Watch this space!

http://framework.parallellines.org.uk/curatorial-studio/

Practice makes Practice at Newbridge

Tonight I joined the other graduates who have been selected for the graduate programme at NewBridge Projects and we were taken through what the graduate programme has in store. 

In addition to my studio at NewBridge, one of the benefits of the programme is that I will be supported by an artist mentor with whom I will meet once a month. I met my mentor, Luke, who is a studio holder at NewBridge and runs the Left Leg Gallery.

One of our roles within NewBridge is to help form the Practice makes Practice programme, and so we spent the second half of the session discussing ideas about what this programme could include.

Practice makes Practice is an artist development programme run by artists for artists, initiated by The NewBridge Project.

Practice makes Practice focuses on developing artistic talent and equipping artists with the necessary skills to manage their practice, bridging the gap between art school, studio practice, the gallery and beyond.

Practice makes Practice is a regular programme of events, workshops, opportunities, talks, field-trips, exchanges and mentoring, creating a forum for shared learning, critical conversation, space for networks to cultivate and alternative models of practice to develop.

Practice makes Practice is open to all through a membership scheme. Creating a supportive cohort of artists to shape the programme ensuring it develops in response to the needs and interests of its members.

We have plenty of ideas, so its sure to be an exciting and eventful 12 months.