Facilitating Text and Art Strand for Newcastle University 2nd year Fine Art Students

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I am excited about facilitating my first Fine Art session of the new academic year (2019-2020). I am leading one of the strand electives for the Newcastle University second year Fine Art students. I have written the programme documentation and will be delivering all the sessions. Here's is a brief introduction to what's in store for the students!

This strand is about exploring the use of text within artworks.

I will begin by giving a brief history of the word in art from 20th Century. We will look at examples of artists working with text, and consider the different forms that text can take in an artwork such as through writing, performance and sound. We will discuss how the form of text changes the meaning of an artwork and alters the way that an audience engages with the artwork. We will think about how text can be an individual artwork, or act as a component for a larger artwork.

It is not about writing about art, writing text to accompany exhibitions or writing about your practice e.g. artist statements.

Teaching will take a number of forms, including individual 1-1 tutorials, seminars and group sessions presenting and discussing ideas and artworks. The strand will culminate in a group exhibition. Students are expected to work together to plan their contribution to the exhibition, and think about the most appropriate way to realise their artwork.

Sounds Like Her - Gender, Sound Art and Sonic Cultures at York Art Gallery

'Curated by Christine Eyene, known for her enquiry into feminist art and her research on sound art from an African perspective – Sounds Like Her sets out to broaden existing approaches to sound art and challenge the Eurocentric and patriarchal frameworks that have informed the discourse on sound art practice and continue to dominate the mainstream today.

The project brings together six women artists, each exploring sound as a medium or subject matter: Ain Bailey, Sonia Boyce OBE RA, Linda O’Keeffe, Christine Sun Kim, Madeleine Mbida and Magda Stawarska-Beavan.

Collectively the selected works represent sound in the broadest sense, exploring voice, noise, organic and synthetic sounds, rhythmic patterns, sonic structures and visual materialisation of sound. The result is a varied exhibition of mixed media bringing together audio, immersive installation, painting, print, drawing and video.'

Having read about Ain Bailey's The Pitch Sisters, I was disappointed not to experience the work within the exhibition. The work, in part, 'responds to the line: "The preferred pitch of a woman's voice is A flat below middle C" from the 1985 film, Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue. The work seeks to present what a female sonic universe would sound like if women's voices indeed vocally hung around an A flat below middle C. The installation is a circular layout of speakers playing the voices of 46 women performing the note.' I managed to find a link to a stereo recording of the work on the British Music Collection website. 

https://britishmusiccollection.org.uk/composer/ain-bailey

I must admit that the element of the exhibition that I was most attracted to was the way in which the walls had been painted and the design of the catalogue. The colour choice could be said to be rather feminine, and given the title of the exhibition, GENDER, Sound Art & Sonic Cultures, I was reminded of one aspect of my Undergraduate dissertation which commented on how the context affects the reading of the work. In this context, the work is displayed in a gallery with delicate pastel shades - is this trying to emphasise the femininity of the work? 

The Occasion Collective - SLOW at Durham Castle

Last Saturday evening I had the pleasure of experiencing SLOW, an immersive live sound performance and promenade held in the majestic grandeur of Durham Castle, hosted by The Occasion Collective (TOC).

"TOC is a curatorial and practice-based artist-led collective which provides artists with the opportunity to exhibit, develop and collaborate.with a focus on engaging new audiences with spectacular and speculative creative practice. TOC champions transdisciplinary collaboration, and creates a much-needed platform for artists of varied disciplines for mutual benefit."

SLOW by Jamie Cook, looks to explore the possibilities of acoustic/electronic collaboration through large-scale, immersive, meditative, promenade performance and installation. Cook’s work often utilises mixed media collaboration, exploring the relationships between art/music/dance/film and how the lines between these practises can be blurred to create new and interesting possibilities.

In response to Cook's work, the history and heritage of Durham Castle and it's surrounding research, TOC artists Bex Harvey, James Pickering and Adam Goodwin displayed a number of audio-visual installations. 

As the musicians played in the Castle's Great Hall, the complex, poly-rhythmic, surround-sound textures created were channelled throughout the winding stairs and underground chapel and a number of other hidden locations within the Castle grounds. The Castle came alive and there was a really special vibe as people bustled round trying to find all that was to be seen. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and was not expecting for it to be as extensive as it was. The only slight downsides were that it was very difficult to hear the audio from the videos as the audio from the Great Hall was so well circulated throughout the entire Castle. 

My other mildly critical comment would be that it would have been useful to know how many video works or other artworks there were to find. A map would have guided us round, but I appreciate that the artists may have wanted for things to be less obvious and add to the sense of discovery as one wanders around.

SLOW - Composed by Jamie Cook

Performed by

Jamie Cook (electronics)

Will Hammond (vibraphone)

Merle Harbron (fiddle)

Ceitidh Macleod (cello)

Adam Sams (bass clarinet)










https://youtu.be/YSlu5WpGZJQ

Emma Hart: BANGER at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Fruitmarket Gallery is one of my favourite galleries. I rarely leave disappointed, whether that be due to the reliably top class exhibitions or the excellent range of art and culture publications available in the shop. Located right next to Edinburgh Waverley train station, it is often my first point of call on any trip up to the Scottish capital. My recent visit was no exception. 

I had no prior knowledge of the work of Emma Hart, and this made for an excellent treat. I was immediately attracted visually to the sculptural installation that greeted me in the downstairs gallery. 

"The exhibition presents two bodies of work that represent the most recent developments in her artistic practice: Mamma Mia! (2017), a major installation made following a residency in Italy awarded as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women that Hart won in 2016; and a group of new sculptures collectively titled BANGER (2018) made since Mamma Mia! and in response both to it and to the space of The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Mamma Mia! (2017), consists of ten large ceramic objects which hang from the ceiling, while an eleventh lies sidelong on the floor. The objects simultaneously resemble heads, upturned measuring jugs and lamps. They are glossy and monochrome, and project large speech bubbles onto the floor, some of them periodically sliced through by the shadows of ceiling fans made of oversized cutlery. As you move around and under the forms you become aware that the interior of each is a riot of intensely coloured, highly inventive pattern. The patterns used, ranging from the violent to the humorous, suggest the cyclical nature of anxieties and addictions, as well as the habitual repetitions of everyday life.

  

Upstairs in BANGER, viewers are faced with Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t After You. Headlights in a rear-view mirror, the work has you projecting forward and looking back, thinking about what’s behind you before you turn left into the rest of the space. And when you do turn, you find yourself face to face with the first in a series of four double-sided sculptures, car windscreens that stand, like road signs, around the gallery. On one side – the outside – you see into the inside of a car. On the other – the inside – you look out to the outside. The sculptures are made from handmade ceramic tiles, closely tessellated in such a way that the same shapes make different images on each side.



The four major sculptures, Green Light, Give Way, Wipe Out and X, are joined by others that direct and affect how you navigate the space – peering at and under the car bonnet of Fix Up; standing square onto the steering wheels of Race You to the Bottom; moving past Gatecrasher, both a safety barrier and a drawing of a car that seems to have crashed into the gallery wall; and tracking the movement of the woman of Wind Down as she winds herself face first down into the gutter and receives a splash in the face.

Throughout the gallery, visual and verbal puns bring things together and apart, both simplifying and complicating your looking as you ’get’ – or maybe struggle to get – the idea. Multiple ways of looking at each sculpture emerge the more you look. This shift in viewpoints plays out in the dual meaning of words like viewpoint and perspective, which are both about actual processes of looking and also about one’s worldview."

I was fascinated to discover that Mamma Mia! is the result of a residency in Italy in which she had "access to lessons about the Milan Systems Approach, a systemic and constructivist method of family therapy at the Scuola Mara Selvini Palazzoli which involves physical re-enactments and the study of repeated actions. The body of work is the culmination of an investigation into pattern, from visual patterns to patterns of psychological behaviour. The work also looks at the design and rupture of pattern and the ruminations in between."

http://www.emmahart.info/HartBanger2018.html

http://www.emmahart.info/

https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/max-mara-art-prize-women-emma-hart/

BBC Radio 4 Front investigates acoustics in architecture

The look of a building has always been an essential element in architectural design, but less conspicuous are its acoustic properties. Specialists in acoustic design are frequently engaged to enhance the aural experience of people in a room or a building. Their work ranges from blocking out unwanted noise, such as from passing trains, to providing the optimal sound for the audience and musicians in a concert hall. 

In Wednesday's episode of Front Row, Stig Abell visits Arup,
an independent firm of designers, planners, engineers, consultants and technical specialists, working across every aspect of today’s built environment.

Arup has a virtual sound laboratory which they use to inform the design of some of the world’s best arts and culture venues. A look at Arups website, in particular the projects section, reveals the wealth of incredible buildings that they have worked on. 

https://www.arup.com/projects/arts-and-culture 

I am lucky enough to have worked in a variety of their buildings in the UK including Glasgow City Halls, RSNO Centre at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and The Reid Building at Glasgow School of Art. I have also visited a number of their other projects such as Angel of the North, Gateshead, Tate Modern, London and The Tetley in Leeds. 

They demonstrate how the same piece of music can change according to where it is played, and explain that they use SoundLab’s sound simulations (auralisations) to demonstrate to clients the impact that major infrastructure projects such as HS2 will have on communities. These sounds can then be taken into consideration when designing the building.

Stig also talks to Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering, about the history and importance of sound in building design.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001ygw

Introducing a new instrument to the Drone Enseble

Following a workshop that Joe participated in during TUSK Festival, he was inspired to create a new instrument. The new addition to the Drone Ensemble was given its debut yesterday when Drone Ensemble lead an instrument making workshop. 

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A post shared by Ben Applegarth (@ben_applegarth) on Oct 22, 2018 at 4:16pm PDT

Drone Ensemble Performance at Workplace -3:15pm, Saturday 27th October

Hear Drone Ensemble perform within their installation Lyres of Lemniscate for the last time at Workplace Foundation, Gateshead.

The performance will feature a range of new instruments made during the preceding workshop (see separate event - booking necessary)

https://www.facebook.com/events/255006225202343/

Lyres of Lemniscate was commissioned by Workplace Foundation and Tusk Festival supported by the Digital Cultures Research Group in CultureLab at Newcastle University.

FREE ADMISSION, ALL WELCOME

image: 
Drone Ensemble Performance for TUSK FESTIVAL 2018 at Workplace Foundation. Photo: Rob Blazey

Sign up now to participate in an instrument making workshop with Drone Ensemble at Workplace Foundation on Saturday 27th October

Sat 27 October 2018

13:00 – 16:00

LOCATION:

Workplace Foundation

The Old Post Office

19-21 West Street

Gateshead

NE8 1AD

Join the Drone Ensemble in an instrument making workshop at Workplace Foundation.

Participants will have access to materials and tools and the expertise of Drone Ensemble members and will make new instruments that make use of both acoustic and amplified sounds.

Participants will then perform alongside Drone Ensemble in a public performance to close their installation Lyres of Lemniscate.

The workshop is suitable for participants 14 years and above and is limited to 12 spaces.

Lyres of Lemniscate was commissioned by Workplace Foundation and Tusk Festival supported by the Digital Cultures Research Group in CultureLab at Newcastle University.

Please reserve your ticket via the EventBrite link below

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/drone-ensemble-workshop-and-performance-tickets-51633572405?aff=efbeventtix

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.

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