Publications

Publicly-funded arts organisations are exhorted to extend participation in the arts by getting more people actively engaged in off-site and public realm programmes. Alongside, those in the business world are increasingly aware of the advantages of bringing artists’ ideas into development and regeneration projects. Here we highlight selected projects happening over the summer within the wider public domain.

Sacred sites
Portsmouth Cathedral is the site for Seran Kubisa’s Treasure Island: A Forensic Investigation of a City. Winner of an Arts Council England and SEEDA Arts + Award for Innovation, the artist’s projections and installations presented there during August draw on a forensic investigation and cataloguing of samples taken from the city’s treasured objects, people and places. Analysed in conjunction with a scientist under a powerful microscope, her manipulated images have created prints, light boxes, installations and a web-based archive. The artist has used cutting-edge technology to break down the barriers between science and art, and explore the personal and social history of a city. Each artwork is based on an image created by analysing a sample for fluorescence under the Confocal Laser microscope, with the artist selecting parts of the image and adjusting the microscope to collect ‘natural fluorescence’ data.

Curated by Jane Webb, ‘Illumini’ at St Pancras Church, London will bring fifteen artists together who share a passion for light. Set in the famous St Pancras crypt, their artworks aim to bring life to this desolate and unsettling environment. Work by artists Mercedes Altuna, Madi Boyd, David Chalkley, Vincenzo Di Maria, Lewis Hayward, Caroline Lambard, Jatyne Lloyd, Liz Murfitt, Adrian Navarro, Silviu Pascalin, Suzan Swale, Matthew Swift, Andrea Tyrimos, Jane Webb and Deon Winter will encourage intrepid viewers to travel down abandoned corridors and venture into secret recesses to explore a wide variety of artwork. Pieces range from photographs and paintings depicting light, to sculptural works that literally glow; at once transforming the crypt’s murky and shadowy atmosphere like never before.

Public places
Yvonne Buchheim’s Song archive project, supported by Safle’s Good ideas award scheme will culminate in September with a sound-based exhibition arising from a collaboration with a composer presented at Cardigan swimming pool, the location for the project’s realisation. She created a performance piece in the pool as part of May’s Holy Hiatus public art festival, where an audience formed around the pool-side to watch two professional singers perform a partly improvised song based on the motion and movements of two swimmers. The acoustics of the voices filling the space, atmospheric lighting and chance thunderstorm outside all played a part in transforming the pool into a unique stage.

Visible Virals are at the forefront of a public realm programme commissioned by the Liverpool Culture Company as part of European Capital of Culture 2008 and managed by Liverpool Biennial. They form part of a broad programme of work that reflects Liverpool’s cultural life and varied communities. Artist Nils Norman has spent the past few months working closely with Merseytravel and Liverpool’s Parks & Environment Service and parks experts, exploring and photographing Liverpool’s major green spaces including Greenbank, Everton, Princes, Sefton Parks and Wavertree Botanic Gardens and Birkenhead Park on the Wirral. The result is a light-hearted advertising campaign throughout the city and the Merseytravel system, launched on 3 June, which draws attention to Liverpool’s unique and often little-known parks. Complementing the campaign, he has linked the parks through the city’s public transport system by creating online maps so that everyone can explore the secrets of the city’s parks.

The Tatton Park Biennial near Knutsford, Cheshire is a catalyst for a one-day symposium in July for artists, commissioners and arts organisations to explore the commissioning and contexts for site specific artwork. Presented in partnership with Parabola, ‘Spaces v Site – the commissioning equation’ will explore the range of approaches currently in use, drawing on presentations by artists including Charles Quick, Gayle Chong Kwang and Patricia MacKinnon-Day. Spaces is a new initiative aimed at engaging artists, commissioners and the wider community in debate about site-specific art in Cheshire. This project forms part of the Cheshire Year of Gardens 2008 (CYOG08) programme and development of Cheshire County Council’s Public Art Strategy. For more information and to book a place contact carmel.clapson@cheshire.gov.uk

Life’s a comic
In a project funded by Safle, artist duo Grennan and Sperandio created ten comic strip portraits of Denbighshire life. Focusing on local people who take the Denbighshire Free Press newspaper, they created a snapshot of life across North Wales. Printed weekly on Thursdays in the Denbighshire Free Press until 24 July, the works will also be exhibited, as part of the Llangollen Fringe Festival, during 17 – 28 July at Y Capel, Llangollen.

In residence
The collaborative duo Marek Pisarsky and Anne Peschken who live and work in Berlin and Myslibórz, Poland, have been working collaboratively under the name of Urban Art since 1988. Since 2001 they have also organised site-specific art projects mainly in the Polish-German border region whilst exhibiting nationally and internationally. Recent exhibitions and projects include: ‘Morgenthau for Dialog Loci’, Kostrzyn, Poland 2004; ‘Wanderboje’ for Skulpturenbiennale MÜnsterland, 2005 and ‘Globalpix’ for transRobota, Biennial of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, 2007. Outcomes of their international residency at Berwick Gymnasium are on show there during the summer. This important UK residency scheme celebrating twelve years of operation has played host to over twenty-six artists from across the UK and mainland Europe.

Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire has invited German artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser to temporarily relocate there, to create a giant amphitheatre on the venue’s eleven acre rural site. The duo has a unique approach to creating a building for community usage in that the materials they use and work with are completely recycled, discarded by the building industry or otherwise thrown away as ‘waste’.

The design and build process is being developed with volunteers from the artistic community in the surrounding area. Wysing’s programme focus comes under the umbrella title ‘Communities under Construction’, through which the centre is encouraging the communities around to work and play together, develop stronger connections through artistic activity and contribute to better ‘neighbourliness’ among the surrounding villages.

Wysing has also invited its twenty-four on site studio holders as well as other interested parties to consider developing ‘satellite’ structures of their own to enhance and compliment the amphitheatre structure thus creating a ‘settlement’ at Wysing – one that echoes the ‘settlement’ feel of the centre itself.

Wysing promotes the work of artists that are rooted in the audience and the community – artists that use public participation as a means to develop and change their own artistic practice and ways of working. As an incubator for creative talent, it provides affordable studio space for emerging artists, alongside commissioning and hosting international artist residencies.

Manchester-based Chinese Arts Centre is the subject of an unusual public art installation by Hong Kong artist Tsang Kin-Wah on show until 28 September. In parallel with his first UK solo exhibition ‘What are you looking at?’ in the gallery, he is dressing the building in an elegant floral text pattern adorning the huge panes of glass, creating a public work visible only from the outside of the centre. The work features phrases from the artist’s I Love U pattern, with adoring words and phrases forming the motif window vinyl. The exterior work forms a stark contrast with the artist’s installation within the gallery space that comments on the racial hatred hidden in society. Presenting the two separate works, Tsang forms a dichotomy between inside and outside, love and hate, and creates an experience of his work that leads from catching first glance of the building to the intense text and sound installation inside.

Dada-South, the South-East’s thriving Disability Arts Development Agency dedicated to raising the profile and careers of deaf and disabled artists in the region, has developed the Go Make! Programme. Through commissions for new work, it provides these artists with tangible opportunities to develop their practice. For the most recent commission Dada-South partnered with English Heritage on a site-specific residency at Fort Brockhurst Gosport. An inspiring place, it is contained by a moat and drawbridges and includes intimate corners and hidden spaces contrasting with formal parade areas and old dormitories. Dada-South seeks a deaf or disabled artist or performer to make work in response to the site and deliver a series of workshops engaging the local community – see advert on www.a-n.co.uk/opportunities. The artist’s final installation or performance will be delivered as part of Heritage Open Days 11-14 September.

Festivals and fairs
The 14th annual Camberwell Arts Festival held in June opened with ‘Pub Crawl’, a performance art trail through some of the borough’s best-loved pubs that included everything from Yara El-Sherbini’s Pub quiz by to a storming performance by the Dulwich Ukelele Orchestra, showcasing work that explored the role of the pub in British cultural life. ‘Pub Crawl’ launched a week-long programme of exhibitions, live art, open studios, screenings, talks, walks and family activities. It also took art into Camberwell’s many hidden green spaces, with Camberwell Green forming the starting point for an exhibition that spilled out onto local parks, pavements, shops and galleries to form a green art trail throughout SE5. Brave shopkeepers handed over their shop windows to local artists for the festival’s duration. Chila Burman exhibited vibrant lollipop inspired prints in a local newsagent while Jade Cole curated a screening of video art in a TV repair shop. Local kids seemed transfixed by Alex Hulme and Rebecca Lucraft’s Smackpuffin installation in Rodney’s Opticians.

Some intrepid local residents explored the window theme further, showing work in their own front windows. Their contribution – along with the Open Studios weekend and the Summer Show at Camberwell College of Arts – highlighted how the high volume of artists are living, studying and practicing in the area are to Camberwell’s life and vigor.

The fifth Brighton Art Fair returns to the Corn Exchange with over 120 printmakers, sculptors, photographers and painters showcasing work. This annual event is a chance to view and buy a wide range of high-quality, original art at prices ranging from £30 to £1,500. The fair is one of the few in the country where individual artists sell direct to the public, a welcome opportunity perhaps for those seeking to avoid the commissions and other rake-offs that put a strain on scant levels of profit. Running 19-21 September, entry is £5.

August’s highlight north of the border is the Edinburgh Art Festival, opening 31 July. Now in its 5th year, EAF has quickly established itself as a vital contributor to city’s summer festivals programme. This year sees over fifty exhibitions including Tracey Emin’s twenty-year retrospective at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller at the Fruitmarket Gallery; Alexander Heim at Doggerfisher; Andrew Grassie at Talbot Rice Gallery; Richard Hamilton’s ‘Protest Pictures’ at Inverleith House; ‘The Golden Record’, Sounds of the Earth at Collective and Richard Wilson at The Grey Gallery. Kay Rosen and Susan Collis will be featured in the new Ingleby Gallery, the largest private gallery outside London, with Mark Wallinger the first featured artist in Ingleby’s Billboard for Edinburgh project. Meanwhile in Portobello the Garden Gallery will see local, national and international artists installing works in residents’ gardens.

Complementing the exhibitions is a wide-ranging programme of tours, talks and special events including Festival Scavengers. Scavenger events have already hit the headlines in New York (PS1) San Francisco (Museum of Modern Art) and London (Tate Modern) – teams begged borrowed, bartered, and bluffed their way around the cities, scavenging items relating to artworks in the hope of winning a cash prize. Forty ‘scavenger teams’ will be out and about in Edinburgh from 18 August.

A creative force of theatre makers, visual artists, pyrotechnicians, inventors and technicians who mix light and fire, music and fireworks, performers and processions, Walk the Plank creates create bold and enchanting outdoor performance for audiences of thousands as well as small gatherings. “We work to commission, creating events that bring together artists and audiences in a moment of shared celebration, as well as realising work that is driven by a sense of playful interaction between artists and spectator in acknowledgement of a specific context” said Liz Pugh, co-founder and producer. Last year, the group staged the UK’s first ‘Art Car Parade’ in Manchester, working with Michael Trainor as curator, to commission twenty-one artists to transform vehicles into mobile artworks. Many were illuminated and paraded along Blackpool’s Golden Mile before going to NewcastleGateshead for the 2007 New Year’s Eve Glowmobiles. For news of the 2008 commissions, see the advert in this issue within the Opportunities pages. On 20 September the company will stage East Meets West for the Essex Jiangsu Festival where 3,500 people will gather for a Moon Picnic before a promenade performance takes them on an imaginative journey through Weald Country Park, in Brentwood.

Widening participation
The seaside town of Felixstowe with its three-mile long coastline running from Bawdsey Ferry to Felixstowe Port, the largest in Britain, is the site for an artists’ commission that aims to “excite the imagination and draw people to explore the coastline on foot and cycle”. Artists applying need to be experienced in working as a lead artist and/or collaborating with others who work in diverse styles and media. “They should feel comfortable carrying out an exploratory programme of research and design and presenting this in a manner that is appealing to a non-arts audience and in a form that can work as a reference document for future development.” The £10,000 fee is inclusive, covering research, design, community consultation and engagement and all associated expenses.

Application deadline is 31 July; for the full brief contact: nicky.corbett@suffolkcoastal.gov.uk

A consultancy of fifteen years standing, initiated by curator and public art pioneer Isabel Vasseur, ArtOffice is acknowledged as a major resource for the development of opportunities for artists to produce work for the public realm. Through a formidable association of professional curators, architects and art historians, the organisation undertakes consultancy and research with and for public and private sector clients. ArtOffice locates artists in residence in schools, colleges and the workplace as part of generating wider audience for the arts. Artists currently involved include Christian Marclay, Giles Round, juneau/projects and Marielle Neudecker and the launch of a vertical garden in central London by Mark Dion and GROSS. MAX. Publications that are available to purchase through the website address significant issues around placing art in contemporary urban and rural settings and explore notions such as the interface between visual arts, the environment and landscape and with science and technology.

A relative newcomer to the art commissions process, Pauley Landscapes aims to be an innovative and diverse landscaping company offering quality horticultural, artwork and 3D modeling services to a range of landscape architects, public and private bodies and art organisations nationally. Affiliated to Pauley Construction, a well-established construction and electrical contracting business that recently won the Environmental Award at the British Construction Industry Awards, it is now looking to extend its database of artists who have some experience of producing larger scale pieces on commission. To get more information on forthcoming projects and opportunities, artists need to send a CV, a small selection of related images and website address to info@pauleylandscapes.co.uk

In addition, Pauley Landscapes has the facilities to transform an artist’s two or three dimensional work by superimposing it into a digital landscape, providing an unlimited view of scale, tone or setting before presentation or installation phase.

Links:

www.cityforensics.com
www.kubisa.co.uk
www.wysingartscentre.org
www.chinese-arts-centre.org
www.dada-south.org.uk
www.safle.com
www.camberwellarts.org.uk
www.brightonartfair.co.uk
www.spacescheshire.com
www.liverpoolparks.org
www.walktheplank.co.uk
www.artcarparade.co.uk
www.artoffice.co.uk
www.pauleylandscapes.co.uk

Susan Jones

Feature compiled by Susan Jones, Director of Programmes, a-n The Artists Information Company.

First published: a-n Magazine July 2008