I spoke about working with Sophie in an earlier post before a-n’s website went offline for it’s update, so I’ll recap here and talk a bit more about other things that she does too.
I’d worked with Sophie on a pot-luck artist collaboration day in St Helens late last year and it was interesting to share our practice and see how we could work together. So I invited her to develop the performance aspect of ‘Displaced Persons’. We tried out a few dance exercises, linking movement to verbs and the ideas behind the work. Seeing the different vocabulary of movement that Sophie used to me was eye opening and helped me to push the movements I was creating to some extent. Having someone to bounce ideas around with in a practical setting was also useful and we ended up with just using hands and arms in the performance part and using those as a projected element in the production of a stop motion drawing.
Sophie works as both a dancer and in the production/direction of performance pieces, so her experience as both practitioner and producer of others really helped. She’s currently working on ‘The Hacienda Tales’, a play on which she is co-writer/director which will be running at The Edinburgh Festival from 11 August. It’s a take on Chaucer’s canterbury tales, with Manchester’s Hacienda club becoming the cathedral the characters head to.
For more information about Hacienda Tales go here: http://www.liacconcepts.co.uk/the-hacienda-tales/#tabgarb=tab1
In the second of my collaborator profiles I’ll talk about working with Gareth Houghton, who is a motion graphics professional. Gareth and I studied fine art together 11 years ago and have been friends ever since, although our practices have diverged as I’ve followed a fine art route and he has developed his work in the commercial world.
I’ve called on Gareth’s skills a number of times over the years to help me with editing video/animation work, starting with editing together my commission for Liverpool Biennial’s Art for Places project in 2010. That experience of working with him led to me picking up some skills in video editing that have proved useful so that I can try things out and create simple works by myself. I also had Gareth’s help to edit the footage for ‘a remarkable architecture of stairs’ which was shown at the Bluecoat last year. With each new project I work on, the process gets more complicated as I understand more about what can be done, so for this exhibition I wanted Gareth on hand as all three new works had a video element to them.
As he works with the software (after effects) on a daily basis, it means that Gareth knows all the shortcuts and processes which I don’t and would lead to me spending HOURS making the work by myself and to a much lower standard. For this show he edited, masked and tweaked the timelapse footage from the New Mills pavement installation and we worked together to work out how to create the animations that form Residential mosaic. As time was tight he also showed me how to edit the footage together for the projected hands bit of ‘Displaced persons’, giving me a test version that I could base the final work on. It’s this process of learning, watching and developing solutions to my ideas that helps my work to progress.
Here’s the showreel for Gareth’s company Clinic Motion Media (the new work gets on there too – keep an eye out for ‘Labyrinth’ and ‘Merthyr Tidfil’)
I had a lot of help from a number of collaborators to realise the work in the current exhibition, which was made possible by the Arts Council funding that I received. It means I can pay other artists and professionals to help me out, something that I value greatly. I’m going to post a number of profiles about those collaborators this week as the exhibition draws to a close on Saturday 9th August.So, for the first one:
Karen EdwardsLetterpress collaboration
Whilst I was in Southend on my residency with Metal I came up with the idea to create Monopoly-style ‘chance’ cards to share some of the research that I’d been doing into the forces that cause people to need to move home (or not). The combination of an economic situation (e.g. limited availability of affordable housing) along with an action (miss a turn) seemed to be a way of communicating some of the ideas I’d been looking into. I mocked some up on the computer, but as a digital print they were lacking some of the handmade quality of the original Monopoly cards. I’d used a letterpress machine to print some single letters whilst I was on AA2A at Salford in 2011, and had seen letterpress used in various situations to good effect, so thought it would be a good method to use in this context.
I’d met Karen, who’s based at Bridewell studios, during the planning of Liverpool Art Month a few years back, and had seen her letterpress works at an artist fair recently, so approached her to ask for her advice and assistance. Karen was interested in the project and we met to see how the work could be produced. I brought the digital examples and had sourced some suitably coloured card whilst Karen had done some research into the font that was used by Monopoly.
Karen has a lovely collection of type, and the closest font she had was a sans serif font, but when she tried setting the text that I wanted she found that she didn’t have enough. This is where I would have floundered, but Karen knew that it was possible to get dies cut with each individual phrase on it. This cut down the amount of time that it was going to take for her to set the type and meant that she could press on with pressing the cards. I’ve ended up with 10 different cards in an edition of 20 that Karen printed on her Adana press (which is a magical little press with a rotating ink pad, levers and a lovely mechanical feel). Apart from the content and the overall look of the cards I didn’t have a hand in the actual printing, which still feels a bit odd, but is something I’ve learnt to live with since my ‘Asking for help’ review bursary.
You can have a look at Karen’s work on her website where you’ll see some of her prints, books and pictures of her press.
http://www.karenedwardscreations.com/page4.htm
I’m going to be giving an artist talk at my exhibition tomorrow, Saturday 26 July at the Brindley in Runcorn, Cheshire at 1pm. There’ll be refreshments, nibbles and if the comments board is anything to go by, some healthy discussion on contemporary art too.
The Brindley has a comment card wall for each of it’s exhibitions and it’s always interesting to see how varied the responses to an exhibition, something that I think is a great thing. I’d hate it if everybody loved everything, and the same goes for my work. There’s been a few comments on there about how my work is different to what is usually on show, and a few about the link between the (limited) text that accompanies the work and the work itself. All of the comments, positive and negative are useful to help me see how the work comes across to an audience and help me to consider how I create work in future. I’m looking forward to meeting some of that audience in person tomorrow and sharing our different interpretations of the work.
If you’re in the area, I’d love it if you could come and say hello.
The Brindley, High Street, Runcorn, WA7 1BGArtist Talk, 1pm Saturday 26 July 2014
My last post, before a-n went offline for it’s shiny new update, had me in the midst of things coming together for the exhibition, juggling jobs that needed doing and feeling like there wasn’t enough time to work on content. Well, that continued until about two days before the opening of the show. Anyone who offered to help was roped in, although there were big parts of making the work that no one could help me with – namely an 8 foot diameter 1500 frame stop motion animation and the creation of nine different layouts for animations to sit in the top of the plinths.
But, as always happens, it all got done in time. With a generous helping of stress and a sprinkling of tears. I’m pleased with how it’s all come together and how it looks in the gallery. There’s things i’d have done differently with more time, but maybe the outcome wouldn’t be much different. And there’s definitely more works to follow on from the pieces in the show too, so that’s exciting.
I’m going to write some blogs over the coming weeks of the show that look at the works and the process of getting them to realisation in a bit more depth, part of that will be to profile the other professionals who have worked with me as I feel they deserve some more recognition.
In the meantime, if you’re in the North West come and see the show, especially if you’re enroute to Liverpool Biennial. Get off the train a stop early at Runcorn, take a 5 minute walk along the Bridgewater Canal and visit the show at The Brindley – I highly recommend their HUGE scones (with jam and cream obviously).
