Introduction to Art Licks, currently in residence at The NewBridge Project

Last night's event at The NewBridge Project was a chance to meet Holly Willats, founder and Director of Art Licks, and hear her introduce the new project that she has just begun with The NewBridge Project. 

Holly began by giving a potted history of the life of Art Licks, and introduced us to it's various facets.


After graduating with an English Degree from Newcastle University, Holly returned to London and began working in a commercial Gallery. She wanted to meet artists, talk ideas, and see non-commercial art, but felt frustrated about how difficult it was to find information about artist-led galleries and art networks. Her response was to establish Art Licks. It began, in 2010, as a website listing the exhibitions and events happening in London at artist run spaces, project spaces, galleries, collectives, curatorial groups and non-profit galleries and organisations.

In it's 10-year history, Art Licks has expanded

"to provide an essential platform and voice for the lesser-known and under-represented activities that form the grassroots of visual culture in London. Art Licks exists as a website, tours, printed magazine, learning programme, commissioning programme and annual London-wide festival: the Art Licks Weekend, all supporting the work of artists at a critical early stage in their careers, providing the situation to create new networks & audiences. This has become vital given the financial pressures on UK-based artists with increased costs of living, lack of studio provision & competitive funding streams."

For 2020, Art Licks are carrying out a new project for its printed magazine: producing three issues from different cities across the country, starting with Newcastle.

This trilogy of Art Licks magazine aims to explore the varying practices and artist communities across the country: their entrepreneurial methods of collaboration, structures of support, adventurous programming and tactics for sustainability. Based from Newcastle, Birmingham, and Bristol; with host partners The NewBridge Project, Recent Activity, and east bristol contemporary.

Newcastle is the first of the three cities to host Holly, and conversations sparked during the three-week residency at The NewBridge Project will form the basis of the magazine. Rebecca Huggan, director of The NewBridge Project, will guest co-edit the magazine.

Holly and Rebecca had a few prompts and questions to get the group thinking and talking about what we would like the Newcastle Art Licks to include.

To follow the project blog with updates from Newcastle visit

http://blog.artlicks.com/art-licks-trilogy-newcastle-introduction/

I'm looking forward to talking more with Holly and seeing how the project develops.

FringeArtsBath Festival - 24th May - 9th June 2019

I'm delighted to announce that I will be exhibiting at Fringe Art Bath Festival 2019 in the exhibition 'Telling Spaces' curated by Vicky Vatcher.

For more details take a look at the website, which is constantly being updated

https://www.fringeartsbath.co.uk/

Glasgow Open House

Yesterday I ended my day of exhibitions at 1 Royal Terrace, with the opening of Below The Spillway, a solo exhibition by Augustus Veinoglou as part of Glasgow Open House, the art festival with the aim to "offer an alternative format for public interaction with art outside of the gallery, generating discussion around the way art is exhibited and consumed both in and out of doors." 

The small group of Glasgow School of Art graduates that make up the Glasgow Open House committee began planning the festival in the Summer of 2013. They were "keen to engage with new audiences by opening up their living and working environments to neighbours, fellow artists and the public."

There was an open call for exhibition proposals, and as a result, "the 2014 programme of visual arts, performance and music includes the work of over 80 artists scattered across 32 venues in every corner of Glasgow. It includes exhibitions and events in flats, gardens, sheds and other unexpected locations, reflecting the work of individual artists, collaborative groups and organisations."

For more information about the festival, visit http://glasgowopenhouse.co.uk/#

Today I ventured to Westerton for A Secluded Sketching Ground, an exhibition by Lynn Hynd and Sara Barker.

"Using the visual framework of the garden & wooden shed, Hynd & Barker explore the languages of flatness & space, painting & sculpture, and the thresholds between interior & exterior space, collapsed and re materialized through an active engagement with ‘process’.

The garden is an extension of the artists’ studio, the brink at which the external world is contemplated. The garden’s enclosures, platforms, stages, grounds, surface, colours and roots create an adaptive environment for, and blurr the boundaries of the work itself.

An obsession with surface is everywhere in a garden & the artists’ respective practices are linked in their exploration of the perception & palpability of material , as the blurring of boundaries allow the values of indoor space to escape to the outdoors, evoking a conversation between structure & activity."

I look forward to exploring more Glasgow Open House exhibitions over the next week.

Hidden Door Festival

As Glasgow counts down to the opening of Glasgow International 2014, the world-renowned biennial festival of contemporary art, Edinburgh is host to its very own festival, Hidden Door.

Hidden Door is a not-for-profit arts production company. It was set up in 2010 by David Martin to provide exciting and inspiring opportunities for emerging and breakthrough talent in Scotland that would encourage a D.I.Y attitude to arts production that didn’t depend on government funding to operate.

From 28 March to 5 April 2014 the 24 Rediscovered vaults on Market Street, Edinburgh will be unlocked to showcase some of Scotland’s best breakthrough talent

80 visual artists, 50 live music acts, 40 film makers, 30 poets, 30 performers, 20 animators, 9 unique parties, 2 live music vaults, 2 bars, 1 theatre, 1 cinema, 1 secret music venue, 1 site, 1 chance.

For more information, please visit http://hiddendoorblog.org

Glasgow International is nearly here - time to get planning!

Glasgow International 2014: Inflatable art, nail bars & dystopian visions in Scotland’s creative capital


Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow, Scotland, 4 April 2014–21 April 2014


Posted by Susie Stubbs 25 March 2014


http://www.creativetourist.com/articles/art/scotland/glasgow-international-2014-inflatable-art-nail-bars-dystopian-visions-in-scotlands-creative-capital/





Bedwyr Williams, ‘The Starry Messenger' (still), 2013. Courtesy the artist, MOSTYN, Oriel Davies & Arts Council of Wales


As Glasgow gears up for its biennial festival of visual art, we publish aguide to the city, and an overview of a festival considered by some to be the best in Britain.


Glasgow International may be one of the world’s younger visual art festivals, but in the years since this particular biennial baby launched in 2005, it has secured the attentions of critics, artists and the culturally minded from across the globe. The Guardian’s notoriously hard to please Adrian Searle reckons it’s the country’s best such fest; critic Laura Cummings praised it for its “openness, involvement and honest directness”.


One of the reasons Glasgow International has risen through the ranks so quickly is that it hasn’t been conjured out of thin air. Like Liverpool Biennial, it’s based on a homegrown and artist-led arts scene, one that just happens to have international credibility. And while it doesn’t hurt that GI is held in one of the most interesting cities in Europe, another reason it works is thanks to its efforts to push the boundaries of what is commonly considered “visual art”. So, the last event saw a focus on live and immersive artworks – Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege, a bouncy castle version of Stonehenge, for example, or artists at the Mitchell Library masquerading as librarians – and it also saw a spike in the numbers of giddy, bouncing-up-and-down art lovers who attended.


It doesn’t hurt that GI is held in one of the most interesting cities in Europe


The focus this year is no different. Although the 18 day festival is headed up by a new director (Sarah McCrory, formerly of Frieze Projects), and although it takes over all of the city’s mainstream museums and galleries, the trend for immersive, innovative art continues. Bedwyr Williams creates a dark and disturbing installation at Tramway, a life-size vision of a world corrupted by greed and status symbols, Alistair Frost runs a nail bar from a disused shop unit, and a group exhibition atSWG3 Gallery sees artworks tumble from the frames that normally constrict them.


Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne, meanwhile, bring back the inflatable art, this time via a series of pin-shy sculptures that fill a disused, historic swimming baths, and Play Summit, led by artist Nils Norman, relocates an adventure playground to Glasgow Green, with a series of parallel talks and demos lined up to tackle the issue of child’s play (areas) in cities.


With fifty exhibitions, there is much at this year’s Glasgow International to get to grips with, in a city that we have long turned our envious eyes towards – which is why we have published a guide to both the festival and the city it calls home. Written by the Glasgow-based art writer, Chris Sharratt, it provides a handy route around the events that make up Glasgow International, with recommendations of places to eat, drink and shop along the way. And with all artistic eyes about to turn on Glasgow, and with Easter’s Bank Holidays looming large, now is the time to book a trip.

Glasgow International art festival launched - by Brian Ferguson in The Scotsman

Glasgow International art festival launched

by BRIAN FERGUSON

MORE than 40 different sites around Glasgow are to be part of the city’s flagship visual art celebration in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games.

Around 80 artists from around the world will have their work showcased during the biannual Glasgow International, which will be staged for the sixth time in 2014.

Organisers say more than 90 per cent of the work on display during the 18-day spring event will either be brand new or will be on display for the first time in the UK.

Although galleries across the city centre will be hosting the majority of the show solo and group shows, artists will be transforming two sites near the Emirates Arena in the east end - at Dalmarnock and Bridgeton - as well as the old Govanhill Baths, which will be taken over by inflatables.

Shows will be inspired by the historic collections at the city’s Kelvingrove museum, the impact of television and the Empire Exhibitions.

Other exhibitions at the festival include one which will feature a fully-functioning nail bar and another showcasing works of art which jump out of their frames.

Extra funding has been secured for next year’s festival - which will run from 4-21 April - which will see it be part of the programmes for both the 2014 Year of Homecoming and the Glasgow 2014 cultural programme.

Artists bringing major shows to the city include Aleksandra Domanovic, from Serbia, Germany’s Michael Stumpf, and Americans Michael Smith, Jordan Wolfson and Avery Singer.

Festival director Sarah McCrory said: “Glasgow International will continue to show the strength of the renowned and exceptional production from within Glasgow, as well as invite artists into the city to embed into its museums and alternative spaces, encouraging discourse around multifarious topics ranging from new technologies and museum taxonomies to the use of humour.

“Once again the festival will provide a focus on the wealth of its arts organisations and communities, whilst embracing input to these discussions from international practitioners.”

Source: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/arts/visual-arts/glasgow-international-art-festival-launched-1-3131088