End of an era for Lyres of Lemniscate

Last night's Drone Ensemble gathering became a bit of a Lyres of Lemniscate debrief.



Unfortunately we do not have enough storage space to keep all the instruments, and so we had to dismantle the two lyres that were created specially for our Lyres of Lemniscate exhibition at Workplace Foundation. This action inevitably marked an end to the Lyres of Lemniscate 'project', which in turn lead to some discussions about future Drone Ensemble projects.

We have decided that, after the past few months of intense Drone Ensemble activity, we are going to have a bit of a break for a little while. But fear not! This is not the end of Drone Ensemble. We are going to give each other a little more time to focus on some of our individual projects. Also, rather than rushing into planning another gig with little time, we want to spend some time simply practicing and becoming more familiar with playing some of the instruments. This experimentation and rehearsal time is vital, and should lead to us developing some exciting new material for us to perform to an audience.

We have some tentative plans for performances next year, and so do keep your eyes peeled for these to be announced.

Thanks to all who came to the Drone Ensemble performance

Thanks to all who came experience Drone Ensemble launch TUSK 2018 with their Lyres of Lemniscate performance at Workplace Foundation last night. It was great to see so many people crammed into the gallery, seemingly 'enjoying' being in the 'Drone zone'!

The exhibition continues until 27th October, and there are instruments that we did not play yesterday that come alive in the exhibition, so go back to have another Drone Ensemble experience.

Drone Ensemble Performance & Artist Talk at TUSK Festival - Lyres of Lemniscate - WORKPLACE Gallery

Drone Ensemble Events during TUSK 2018   Drone Ensemble are delighted to be kicking off TUSK 2018 with a live performance at WORKPLACE Gallery as part of their current Lyres of Lemniscate exhibition.

FRIDAY 12TH OCTOBER 4pm - Workplace Gallery – TUSK Festival + Fringe opening performance by DRONE ENSEMBLE SATURDAY 13TH OCTOBER 10.30am - Workplace Gallery: DRONE ENSEMBLE in conversation with John Bowers about their TUSK Festival Lyres of Lemniscate exhibition Exhibition open: 29th September – 27 th October Opening hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm TUSK Festival weekend (12/13/14 th October) – 10am – 6pm   Workplace Gallery The Old Post Office 19-21 West Street Gateshead NE8 1AD

Thanks to all who joined Drone Ensemble for the opening of Lyres of Lemniscate

After weeks of hard work and planning, and a very hectic final week installing the exhibition in the gallery, on Friday night Drone Ensemble presented our first exhibition, Lyres of Lemniscate, at Workplace Gallery. We would like to thank everyone who came to the exhibition, and hope you will be back for some of the other programmed activities throughout the exhibition.

The work is a slowly evolving sonic meditation of drone tonalities and hypnotic visual stimuli using hand-made instruments, objects and electronic circuits to produce an installation that plays with the interaction between electronic and acoustic sound production.

Initially the sound emanates from two 18-string lyres whose strings are activated by magnetic induction. The vibration of the strings is relayed by coil pickups into a computer and can be re-routed using a games console into vibrational speakers that play upon suspended bone china ceramic disks, bringing another acoustic sound into the space.

In conjunction with the sonic element, the gallery is presented as a space in flux; altering visually as the exhibition progresses and new elements are included. The ceramic materials are employed to alter state when exposed to sonic vibrations and differing frequencies; cracking and breaking to activate percussive sounds. Traces of the evolving nature of the work are evidenced further in film, presenting an examination of the delicate material from fluid to solid, brittle and sonorous.



We will next be performing on Friday 12th October at 4pm as the opener to TUSK Festival. 

The exhibition runs 28 September - 27 October 2018
The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-5pm

Making ceramic discs for Lyres of Lemnicate

On Friday Bex and I made real progress making the ceramic discs. We loaded 6 shelves worth of discs into the kiln and left them to fire over the weekend. The discs are extremely fragile, and even transferring them from the work surface to the kiln shelf can break them. Inevitably, we lost a few during this process.

In the evening I got mastered the art of untangling guitar strings. I then looped them at the end and attached them to the lyres.

We then spent a long time attempting to get the e-bows in the correct position so that they would create the vibrations necessary for the Humbukkers to pick up the sound. Unfortunately by 10pm we had not succeeded, and we decided to call it a day, hoping that we would be fresher in the morning after some sleep.

Working on the Lyres with Drone Ensemble

Last night Drone Ensemble had a studio visit from Paul from Workplace Gallery and Lee from TUSK. We showed them the lyres and talked through where we are at in terms of making the ceramic discs, the film and our plans for the curation of the exhibition.

Afterwards, we worked on getting the e-bow mechanism positioned correctly so that when it is in contact with the string, it is activated and makes a sound. 



Jamie showed us the system he is building that will enable manipulation of the signals going to each speaker. This introduces an aspect of interaction, and the audience will be able to use a joystick to control the vibrations of the different speakers.



We tested different ways in which the ceramic discs could be installed so that they vibrate over the speakers enough so as to make a sound and have the potential to fall off, but not too much so as to immediately fall off and smash. This is something that requires further thought and experimentation!

Women Artists of the North East Library at Workplace, Gateshead

Throughout the Great Exhibition of the North 2018 Women Artists of the North East Library are resident at Workplace Foundation in Gateshead and available to the public as an evolving exhibition, library, and platform for events and discussions. Works by Phyllis Christopher, Tess Denman-Cleaver, Kate Liston and Harriet Sutcliffe are also exhibited in the gallery.

The project aims to use the premise of presenting artists work as an opportunity to explore the act of building such a library;

In what ways do artists make work in relation to, or with, other artists?

How can a library of women artists associated with a region, exist for a community?

How do we find our role models?

Can archival strategies contribute to intergenerational conversations and art making?

I enjoyed looking at the range of material included in the library, and appreciated how the gallery has been set up so as to encourage visitors to spend time with the items and choose their own path through the contents, rather than being presented with a selection of texts pinned to a wall.

It was as I was flicking trough one of the publications that I came across the following text by Lydia Davis that really resonates with me.

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

Jacob Dahlgren - Kung Fu Panda - Workplace Gallery, Gateshead

Kung Fu Panda is a new video work by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren in which he films the reflected ambient light on an adjacent white wall at home, whilst his children are watching the eponymous animated feature film. Filmed in High Definition from a fixed camera position and projected as a single work in a gallery context Dahlgren’s Kung Fu Panda becomes an absorbing and constantly changing digital colourfield painting that manifests a subtlety at odds with the apparent chaos of the original film dubbed in Swedish, and the surrounding scenario as the artist’s children watch whilst carrying on their own everyday conversations.

In an adjacent room Dahlgren presents a readymade series entitled When The Sky Is The Limit. Consisting of framed double page spreads from in-flight magazines collected by Dahlgren, each image is selected, isolated, and framed according to its inherent relationship to abstraction.

Dahlgren's work is concerned with a dialogue between the authoritative singularity of pure formal abstraction and its position within a variable, complex and social shared culture. His repetitious collections of ubiquitous and ordinary objects, often domestic, industrially manufactured (and frequently, knowingly Scandinavian); stand in their gestalt form as proxy for High Modernist Abstract Painting and for all of the ideological territory that Twentieth Century Art Theory has staked out for it. The contributing objects, however, signify a collective and human aspect of society, each representing an individual choice, used in a unique way by its consumer. Together these objects stand for the group or community, and as such they become democratic rather than authored. Through endless ingenious amalgams of pattern, abstraction and mass-produced objects, Dahlgren's recent works purposefully inhabit modes of modernist painting, deliberately playing with the inherent autonomy of the source material.

Jacob Dahlgren was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. Dahlgren represented Sweden in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at, KIASMA Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/MoMA, New York, USA, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, and Tramway, Glasgow, UK. He lives and works in Stockholm.
Jacob Dahlgren’s solo exhibition Third Uncle is currently showing at Workplace London until 9th May 2015, please visit the website for further information.

Exhibition open: 25th April – 23rd May 2015 

www.workplacegallery.co.uk