Here are some images of the works that Caroline thought I should develop in the context of proposals for future exhibitions built around my ideas concerned with issues if trading histories, geopolitics, migration and cultural mapping.
Soon after our first meeting I took part in a group exhibition called Boîte-en-Valise: Generator which toured to Venice during the Biennale, May 2017. Then in October 2017 the exhibition went to Point of Contact Gallery in Syracuse, USA. Boîte-en-Valise: Generator encouraged transportability of practice and the nurturing of collaboration and cross-fertilisation of artistic practice. Each artist transported the means to generate their work in Venice and Syracuse in a normal sized suitcase, which went as luggage on a flight, train and bus journey and was taken from the suitcase for presentation and development in the two venues. Including sculpture, performance, video, photography and sound as well as collaborations, interventions and conversations. I made a version of Sail Away in Venice and a piece called Dream Boat in Syracuse, which was a collaboration with the Syracuse based Cuban artist Abisay Puentes. This was a totally new piece, based on an idea I’d been nurturing for a while about boats as metaphors acting as carriers for our dreams, vessels for our adventures and often symbolic of the transition from the material to the spiritual world. Abisay drew text in charcoal on the wall behind the boat telling the moving story of his journey from Cuba to North America. The old clinker boat was borrowed for the show. People were encouraged to sit in it and tell or write their dream, leaving them behind in the boat on a piece of paper. Dream Boat was a popular and successful piece and collaboration. It was great to work in this unexpected way and make a totally new work that was very much the result of a collaboration between two artists from different continents and yet at the same time contained ideas and elements that were very individual to us both.
I felt that this second stage of the exhibition opened up new ways of working for me that the mentoring was helping with.
