Playing with bricks

I do not regard the singular brick forms as finished, and have a number of ways that I want to change them and work with them. Although they are still too wet to carve into, saw or polish, they are ok to be moved around and so I can play with how they are placed.

Hovering above the floor

More casts revealed

Art Lending Library on tour

Today I took part in the launch of the Art Lending Library in Peterlee, East Durham.

The Art Lending Library is a project by 
Market Gallery and Walker & Bromwich.

The ambitious commission by Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich takes the form of an experimental library and public procession. Originally conceived and curated by Market Gallery for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2012, it provides the unique opportunity for the people of the town or city in which it is exhibited to borrow works of art and enjoy them within their homes, work places and community centres.

The Art Lending Library brings together over 50 works by a diverse range of artists working across the broad spectrum of formats available within contemporary visual arts practice. The project has been made possible through the generosity of participating artists in gifting their works into the care of the library, to be made available to loan for the duration of the exhibition.

The library structure is made up of multi-functional wooden crates. Each crate houses an artwork and is detachable and ready for transport to people's homes. On returning to the library the crate is re-attached to the body of the library and again operates as a display case. This modular design creates a constantly changing sculptural form that maps the user's borrowing. As people borrow or return an artwork they will also physically shape the library, becoming a part of an on going social sculpture.

The project stands in resistance to the tide of narrowing access to the arts and education by creating an egalitarian space where art can be borrowed and enjoyed by all sectors of society. Art Lending Library follows the model of a public lending library which members of the public can join free of charge.

Following its success in Glasgow, the Art Lending Library is going on tour, and today it was launched in as part of the inaugural East Durham Creates Festival. Here are the details:

Peterlee
Peterlee Memorial Methodist Church 29 Oct – 1 Nov 2014

Thornley
Thornley Village Centre 7 – 10 Nov 2014

South Hetton
Robin Todd Centre, South Hetton 13 – 16 Nov 2014

Artworks from artists based in Durham have been chosen for the Art Lending Library in this venue.

Artists that have been exhibited in Art Lending Library include Penkiln Burn, Graham Fagen, Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, Mark Vernon, Ellie Harrison, Katie Cuddon, Henna Rikka Halonen, Oliver Braid, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva, Mark McGowan, Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope, James McLardy, Stephen Hurrel, Alec Finlay, Laura Eldret, Calum Stirling, Andrew Burton, Laura Aldridge, David Sherry, Chris Biddlecombe, Stuart Murray, David Faithfull, Yu-Chen Wang, Jonathan Owen, Nick Fox, Andros Semieko, Kate V Robertson, Peter Evans, Beagles and Ramsay, Jemima Brown, Ally Wallace, Dean Hughes, Fernando Arias, Salome Oggenfuss, Roos Dijkhuizen, Kevin Hunt, Clara Ursitti, Tessa Lynch, Helen De Main, Sandy Grant, Jasmina Cibic, Pilvi Takala, Razan Akermay, Rachel Maclean, Pester & Rossi, James Stephen Wright, Romany Dear, Jacqueline Donachie and Roddy Buchanan, Tim Savage, Ciara Phillips, Catrin Jeans, Chris Mackenzie, Ross Frew, Ewan Manson, Rachel Barron, Sarah Laing, John Vella, Tom Nolan, Kate Murphy, Deborah Kelly, Michael Needham, Ashley McCormick, Annie O'Donnell, Dryden Goodwin, Gayle Chong Kwan, Iacopo Seri, Juan Pablo Echeverri, Margaret Harrison, Nick Kennedy, Nicky Peacock, Kraig Wilson

Designers Sophie Dyer & Sebastian Gorton Kalvik continue to deliver the design work for Art Lending Library.

The project is accompanied by a programme of free participatory events that are open to everyone.

 

Being involved in the parade was a really positive, fun and moving experience. A group of students from the Fine Art department at Newcastle University volunteered, and we were kitted out with librarian and art-handler outfits. The procession took us from the Methodist Church where the library is based, along the High Street and through the local shopping centre, leading back to the church.

 

Some of us were carrying flags, there was an art handler carrying an artwork which was then handed over to a librarian, other librarians were using the crates as drums, and we were handing out the Art Lending Library cards. An excellent brass band brought up the rear of the parade and added a crucial tuneful element to the memorable event.

Having seen the Art Lending Library in Glasgow, back in 2012, I was very keen to be involved in it here, and the experience truly enhanced my appreciation of this wonderful participatory artwork.

Walking down the grim, grey High Street lined by shops to let, value shops and bookies could have been a rather depressing experience, but the Art Lending Library brought a cheer to the streets and it was amazing to witness the light that people had in their eyes when we passed.

I gave a couple of lads some library cards, and a moment later they were helping hand out a bundle of these cards to others as they walked with us to the church.

Already there have been 4 items loaned out of the library, hopefully a sign of things to come.

At the briefing we were given some rather startling figures about the lack of arts and culture provision in this area, and I really hope that having such high quality artwork in Peterlee gives the community a sense of what contemporary art is and can be, and helps create a curiosity and desire for more.

For more information please visit
http://www.artlendinglibrary.org.uk/about/east-durham/

http://eastdurhamcreates.co.ukhttp://

www.walkerandbromwich.org.uk/home.html

Visiting Artist Lecture - Stephen Hurrell

This week's Visiting Artists Lecture was given by Glasgow-based artist, Stephen Hurrel.

http://www.hurrelvisualarts.com

Recent casting experiments

Lithography workshop

Today I had an introduction to aluminium lithography, a new process for me.

"Lithography, 

planographic printing process that makes use of the immiscibility of grease and water.

In the lithographic process, ink is applied to a grease-treated image on the flat printing surface; nonimage (blank) areas, which hold moisture, repel the lithographic ink. This inked surface is then printed—either directly on paper, by means of a special press (as in most fine-art printmaking), or onto a rubber cylinder (as in commercial printing)."

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/343748/lithography

I applied pencil crayons, marker pens, cut up pieces of card and cut up pieces of tracing paper onto a shape that I had torn from tracing paper.


Lithography plate prior to inking or printing

I then exposed this imagery onto the aluminium plate, and printed the plate using the offset press.


Lithography plate after inking


My first lithographs

New casts revealed

I set out to make a number of new rectangular casts that I will then experiment with in terms of how to display them.

A Bad Hand, Folding: A Live Rehearsal

A Bad Hand, Folding: A Live Rehearsal

Featuring versions by:
Faye Green & Beth Ramsay
Giles Bailey
Paul Becker & Francesco Pedraglio

Music by Dawn Bothwell.

Last night I went to the Culture Lab for A Bad Hand, Folding: A Live Rehearsal. I did not know what to expect, and the event was like nothing else I have ever experienced.

It was like sitting in on a practice session as the group tested out different ideas, sometimes stopping in the middle of some spoken word, other times waiting until the end of a section in order to have a chat about what was working/not working.

It made me question the role of the audience. We were not acknowledged, except at the start when they explained that this was not something that they had finished, and therefore that we should be patient with them. Were we there to give them an idea of what it would be like to have an audience? At times I wondered whether some of the performers were off-put by having an audience there, and them having to critique their own performance.

It was really interesting to spectate, what seemed to me to be a kind of critique session for a spoken word performance. As this is not my area of practice, I learned a lot about what they thought was not working within the performance, and different ways they could change and approach their work.

It would be fascinating to see the final outcome, and see how far it has moved on since the rehearsal.

Torsten Lauschmann Artist Talk

This week's visiting artist was Torsten Lauschmann, and I was one of the students who was chairing the seminar that took place after the talk.

Here are some of my thoughts in relation to / as a result of looking at Torsten's work

- Lauschmann often exhibits a work that he thinks is unfinished, and will reshow the work in different exhibitions, sometimes it getting closer to being finished. An exhibition is an opportunity to develop the work and each exhibition marks a different stage in its development.

- His work has been described as "too fast to be photography, too slow to be film"

- Lauschmann thinks that interactive art seems too much like a game

- Interested in failure

"I didn't fail, I just found out how it doesn't work"

Having heard Lauschmann explain the setup of certain works within his artist talk, I began to question how well his website represents his work. For example, on his website, 'Dead man's switch' is a video of a candle. However, when discussed in the artist talk, Lauschmann explained that every time the candle in the video was blown out, the lights in the gallery would come on, thus illuminating the audience and surroundings. In this way, the physical space plays its part in the artwork, yet online, one would not understand how it is actually exhibited. It brought into question the nature of how to document certain works.

Likewise, some artworks work well on the computer screen, but other works may not suit this - how does an artist frame the artwork and the documentation?

For more information about Torsten Lauschmann, visit

http://www.torstenlauschmann.com

Casting time!

I've spent the past couple of days in the casting workshop, making some more layered-coloured plaster blocks which I then want to experiment installing so as the audience can walk around rather than looking at from a single side.

I've already used over 35kg of plaster in this 2 day period! Oh, it is good to be casting again.

This is the kind of colour scheme I have been adopting.

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