ARTISTS TALKING

# 15 [9 April 2007]

Two more polaroids - table and chair - found on the allotment today. The old wooden chair i took up a couple of winters ago, split in two as I turned to put these into my bag.

# 14 [31 March 2007]

Hello to everyone we met at Fabrica on Thursday at the AIR Open Dialogue event. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of new people and to put faces to names of people who we felt we already knew through visits to their web-sites or blogs.

Roz and I, along with Elpida Hadzi Vasileva and Rosemary Shirley had been invited to talk about key issues for our future practice – a subject which has been consistently used at AIR events to open the dialogue between artists.

We took along Roz’s three legged stool which Roz used to explain how she visualises our collaboration. She talked about the “wobbliness” of being an artist and the need to operate at the edge of stability, and how she sees the collaborative relationship as providing a third leg which might provide steadiness at the edge. She went on to expand on this notion, saying that if we two collaborators are then viewed each as three legged stools, between us we have a grand total of not just four legs, but six legs on which we could cover a lot of ground. It all conjures up a slightly comical image, but describes how we hope the relationship will work for us.

My issues, as an artist still in the early “feeling my way” stages of my career, revolve firstly around “support”; how to build a support network through which I can get appropriate advice for all the different aspects of my practice – professional, creative and developmental, and then, secondly, how to maintain a balance between the development of all those separate areas of my practice while still retaining the integrity of my work as well as generating income to support my practice.

Roz focused on the immediate issues concerning our new collaboration. How will the collaborative process work for us? Will there still be time and space for us to maintain our individual work? How will we work together? What if our strengths and weaknesses are the same? Will we become too stable, too steady and lose the excitement of "the edge"? What will we gain from the collaboration, and what will we have to give up? These were some of many questions raised.

Elpida and Rosemary, artists at different stages of their careers, raised other issues, and a foundation was laid for an evening of very interesting and informative discussion where a whole range of subjects were covered.

One thing which came up almost incidentally was that several people expressed slight frustration at not being able to add a comment to the a-n blog, so for the time being, if anyone wants to communicate with us about our blog, we would love to hear from you via the e-mail addresses which can be found on our web-sites at http://judithalder-live.co.uk/contact.html or http://www.roz2.co.uk/contact.html

# 13 [28 March 2007]

We have been awarded a NAN New Collaboration bursary to support the development of Breaking Ground, our project in 2 parts. Judith and I raised a glass to this success on Monday night and are planning our next steps. We have a busy week of art events, AIR Open Dialogue on Thursday night and then my Henweekend 3 day seminar starts on Friday. We finalise our joint presentation tomorrow afternoon and then it is full steam ahead for Part 1 Writing articles about each other's practice. High excitement.
We have chosen this sketchbook image by Judith as appropriate to the unfolding of the collaborative experiment.

# 12 [26 March 2007]

It’s almost exactly a month since we posted our first blog entry and so far we’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about the whole idea of “collaboration” - what we might gain through it, as well as what we might have to give up for it. However, we’ve also been spending a lot of our time working towards commitments within our individual practices.

This week sees a sort of tying up of loose ends, culminating at the end of the week with our talk at the AIR event at Fabrica on Thursday, and Roz’s almost immediate departure after that to take part in the "Hen Weekend" at the De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill from Friday to Sunday this weekend. (http://henweekend.org)

After a short (?) recovery period, Roz and I will be meeting up next week to plan a timetable for the first part of our project. We will be setting aside time to make presentations about our work to each other and will then individually write articles about each other’s practice which we will publish here through our blog. We anticipate that this activity will have all sorts of benefits for us, both through the process of analysing and articulating another artists’ practice, but also gaining an insight into our own work through someone else’s subjective view.

# 11 [24 March 2007]

Here are three of the polaroids I found on the allotment - three different tables.

# 10 [22 March 2007]

Arrived home from the studio to a lovely surprise: a parcel from my friend Val Murrary – a copy of Low Tide – Writings on Artists’ Collaborations written by Jeni Walwin. Last week Val and I met in London to see some exhibitions and each other. I talked to her about this new collaboration with Judith.

Val is part of TEA, a collaborative group of artists who have worked together since 1987. She was full of praise for the benefits and pleasures of collaborative practice. Low Tide includes a chapter on TEA. Although published in 1997, this book offers much of interest to a pair of new collaborators.

In the Foreword, Paula Brown speaks of the collaborative art documented: “This is cunningly mercurial work where art forms merge or collide or metamorphose into something else altogether; where artists experiment with new partners, practices and identities. This is work which offers spectators new ways not just of seeing but of participating.”

www.teaweb.org

# 9 [16 March 2007]

I went to London today to visit The Princes Drawing School during it's Open Day. Also went to the Jerwood Space where I saw the work of
Williams-Suggitt, another collaborative duo who are new to me. In their video piece, "Perched", currently showing in the Jerwood Cafe, Williams and Suggitt, dressed in colourful bird costumes, spend time "perched" on stools in the cafe, exploring ideas around identity as they experiment with how it is to be "other". Made me think of Roz's exploration of similar issues. http://www.myspace.com/williamssuggitt

Roz and I have also talked briefly this week about spending a one-off pilot day at the allotment, just to see what we might want to do together over a longer period of a residency. I'm very keen to visit the allotment anyway, and Roz wants me to film her burying her typewriter there. The weather has been glorious and Roz was busy at the allotment last weekend actually cultivating it.

# 8 [11 March 2007]

As part of our research into the collaborative process, we’ve begun to build up quite a list of collaborative partnerships whose work we’d like to look at, some of whom, if possible, we’d like to meet and talk to.

Recently we came across Jen Hamilton and Jen Southern during their exhibition “Running Stitch” at Fabrica (http://www.theportable.tv/runningstitch/index.html) and Roz went to see “Lone Twin” (see 4th March post) at The Gardner Centre. We’ve both encountered the work of Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie and, now that we’re looking, we’re beginning to come across more and more partnerships whose work we want to find out more about.

We’ll definitely be researching Anne Eggebert & Polly Gould’s work, including their projects “Transplantation” and “Nature and Nation”. Today Roz has discovered a project called “Kitchen Antics and Appliances” by three-way partnership Barbara Dean, Ann Rapstoff and Hilary Kneale and we’re hoping to make contact with these artists soon. (http://www.kitchenanticsandappliances.com/)

Roz already has experience of collaboration with Isabel Albiol which resulted in a piece of work entitled “Rabbit Hole”, shown at the Hockney Gallery, RCA in 2005. (http://www.roz2.co.uk/rab01.html) I have less experience of collaboration, having only dipped my toe into collaborative working on a casual and experimental basis.

As I’m beginning to research these and other projects, questions about the nature and variety of collaboration are raised. Some collaborations are specific – partners come together because they have something they can offer each other – specific skills or attributes. Others are speculative – an opportunity to pool resources and see what happens.

FAMOUS COLLABORATIONS

Gilbert and George

Warhol and Basquiat

Elton John and Kiki Dee

Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin

# 7 [9 March 2007]

We have been invited to give a short presentation at the next a-n AIR Open Dialogue at Fabrica in Brighton on Thursday 29 March. Judith and I will speak about our new collaboration and key issues for our practice now and in the future. Two other artists will present, followed by discussion and a glass of wine. AIR stands for Artists' Interaction and Representation. This event is for AIR members only.

# 6 [7 March 2007]

We went to Alice Maher's exhibition, "Natural Artifice", at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery on Saturday. Alice gave a talk there in January which sadly we missed, but this weekend we went to a gallery talk by Gill Perry, Head of Art History at the Open University, about the exhibition and about Alice's work in general.

The exhibition includes work in a variety of media. A series of photographs explore Alice's relationship with nature as she wears a hood of moss, a helmet of snail shells and a collar of hearts; large scale charcoal drawings are inspired by Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delight"; a human sized "ice bed" and a miniature house of thorns play with ideas of comfort and discomfort and subvert the familiar.

The talk brought up issues which we've been thinking about within our own practices; questions about working broadly with an assortment of materials and processes on a range of themes which sometimes appear to be unrelated. It was reassuring to see the links in Alice's work which have appeared over a considerable length of time. Something for us to think about more when we write about each other's work.