Jamboree 2018 blog

Image credit: Kat Hall, a Plymouth College of Art observer intern 

A very early start to day three of Jamboree – up and dressed for a 430am walk and talk session led by Bram Arnold: ‘From Civil Twilight To The End of Time [An adventure into the anthropocene]’. Artist-researcher Bram led us on a session that was part way between a Quaker meeting, a reconvening of the Dead Poets Society and a performance poetry ramble. A beautiful way to wake up to the Dartington site – and a small and very friendly herd of cows decided to join us for the last part of the session.

‘Construction site’ by Antigoni Pasidi

Next up for me (after coffee) was a 20:20 session. Two which stood out for me were Stuart Robinson and Antigoni Jasidi’s presentations. Stuart Robinson‘s talk looked at the use of signage and landscape within his practice, exploring the line between natural and cultural imagery of landscapes.
Antigoni Pasidi spoke about her exploration of the intersections of sculpture and performance and the staging that is inherent in both disciplines.

Image credit: Andy Ford 

I then joined a communal making session led by artist and writer Mark Leahy: ‘Telling time: a speech-choir making session’. We participated in some voice games, worked in pairs and as a group to create fragments of narratives. Having built a score exploring temporality, we presented a short speech-choir performance. Mark created some beautiful participant workbooks, with a useful bibliography at the end – workshop ephemera to take away and treasure.

I was then back out into the fresh Dartington air to participate in Rosalie Schwieker’s walk and talk, ‘Terms and Conditions’. During the walk around the estate, we discussed what our individual T&Cs as artists may be, something to add into artist agreements or contracts when negotiating with arts organisations (or other artists). Rosalie gave examples ranging from not travelling by plane, to having work-free weekends. We then partnered up with an accountability buddy who we would check in on and vice versa in a year’s time.

green and owens crossing their impromptu starting line 

Continuing with the walk and talks programme, I then joined green and owens in their first outing of their project ‘Walking Towards Korea’. In their words: ‘For the last year we have been working on an idea with our friend Youngshin who is in South Korea. The intention is that we walk the miles to her (in our own environment) and that she walks the miles to us (in her own environment), ‘meeting’ somehow in the middle, and reflecting on the way about friendship and distance.’ The walk prompted thoughtful discussion around our own friendships in and out of arts ecologies. It ended with a tipple of friendship whiskey – always a fine finish to a walk!

Image credit: Andy Ford 

I then popped into another communal making session led by Francesca Anfossi, ‘The Clay Picnic’. Francesca gave us the opportunity to experiment with food making, and making food containers with clay, resulting in a pop
up picnic giving participants a chance to discuss the process of making, social objects and the social role of food in the outdoors.

Image credit: Kat Hall, a Plymouth College of Art observer intern 

After dinner, I finally took the hi-vis off and let loose in the amazing dance party – enjoying some some spacey tunes from The Valley People followed by some disco bangers and floor fillers courtesy of Hannah and Neil Rose – Jamboree co-founder and Jamboree WAG respectively! Ended the night with this treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bcf5kzBCdy4

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Image credit: Jamboree observer and PCA student Kat Hall

My second day of Jamboree began with an early morning yoga session with artist and yoga teacher Carly Sellers. Great to stretch after the inevitable slow deflation of the camp airbed! Yummy coffee from Dartmoor-based Peace and Coffee also ensured I was ready for a jam-packed programme.

‘Rooms Designed for a Woman’, Emily Speed

I attended the seminar led by curator Lucy Day, which started with the provocation: is separation the best way to tell marginalised stories? Day used her current curatorial project ‘A Woman’s Place’ based at Knole, a National Trust property in Kent, to kickstart group conversations around developing projects outside of the white cube.

A Woman’s Place at Knole shines a light on historical women’s voices, through six contemporary art commissions by Lubaina Himid joins CJ Mahony, Lindsay Seers, Emily Speed, Alice May Williams & Melanie Wilson whose themes encompass love, betrayal, class, gender and inheritance. It was a fantastic and discursive session where we shared ideas around working with and without institutional power structures, the blurry lines of participation, collaboration and co-authorship, and the politics of naming yourself a feminist practitioner. Lots of the conversations continued after the seminar session ended – a lot to talk through!

Image from Rosalie Schweiker’s 20:20 talk

I started the afternoon with a 20:20 session. The 20:20 programme strand are a series of quick fire artist talks in a pecha kucha format; where artists share twenty slides for twenty seconds each. I loved hearing about Rosalie Schweiker’s notion of being a sausage artist vs a mince artist – the former being an artist whose practice follows a traditional trajectory of commissions, awards, solo shows, and gallery representation, while the latter embraces a methodology of making that may not translate well to documentation, that is often immaterial, and often collaborative. Long live the mince artists! Green & Owens shared their collaborative practice and ideas around friendship, domesticity and precarity via wonderful performance scores. Jamboree founders LOW PROFILE shared recent works and their plans post-Jamboree, which include a civic planting project working with Plymouth-based arts organisation Take A Part.

I then soaked up some sun with Simon Bayliss’ Walk and Talk session, Landscape Painters Anonymous. It was lovely to have a part of the day to focus on creating after discussion and absorbing a lot of information, as well as taking a closer look at the amazing context of the Dartington Estate.

I continued participating in the walk and talk sessions with Plymouth Art Centre Assistant Curator and Dartington alumnus Lucy Rollins’ session playfully titled ‘Wassup Dartington’. Lucy shared personal and historic narratives and anecdotes of the site. Big thanks to Lucy for soldiering on despite her knee injury, thankfully the only tent –induced minor wound sustained!

I then attended AJ Stockwell’s incredible Communal Making session ‘Sonorous Stones’. AJ led us in a human-geologic choir, as we activated her ceramic stone-formed instruments to create an otherworldly sound and atmosphere. AJ was an awardee of a bursary place sponsored by WARP (Wales Artist Resource Programme); there are 36 artists attending on such bursary schemes via artist associate schemes over the UK and its brilliant to have the practitioners with us this weekend.

A real highlight of the day was Simon Lee Dicker’s ‘Silent Swim School’. The group silent swim in the river Dart provided a moment to reflect on the day’s discussions and workshops and a chance to cool off.

Still from Bryony Gillard’s ‘A cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body’

After some delicious Punjabi food by Plymouth-based Desi Junction, I finished the day by watching Jamboree’s Moving Image programme. Films that struck a chord with me included Bryony Gillard’s ‘A cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body’, Megan Broadmeadow’s ‘Let The Stars Be Set Upon The Board’, and  Jenny Cashmore’s ‘In and Out (Building Circuits)’.

All image credits Andy Ford unless otherwise noted.

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Image credit: Andy Ford

Over a year in planning and development, Jamboree is finally here – and we are so excited to welcome 150 artists and curators to sunny Dartington! I’ll be reporting on site each day, and full reports from our team of observers – Fine Art students from our partners Plymouth College of Art – will be sharing follow up reports from their perspectives. Please do follow us on Instagram @artistsjamboree where we’ll be sharing a lot more documentation and behind the scenes shots too.

Image credit: Andy Ford

Yesterday (Thursday 28th June) began with artists and curators arriving from all over the country, from Newcastle to Newlyn, and pitching their tents on the beautiful Dartington campsite. Early arrivals explored the Dartington grounds, viewed artists moving image curated by Video Social Club, and dropped off multiples and editions to sell in the camp shop, and small works to display in the miniatures exhibition.

Image: ‘Westward Ho! (Maquette)’ by Stuart Robinson

Artists LOW PROFILE welcomed the participants by sharing some ideas around Jamboree 2018, and the history of Jamboree 2015. You can read some of the Jamboree 2015 participants’ reports via a-n blogs at: https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/jamboree

We then heard from Hannah Pierce who explained why a-n decided to partner with LOW PROFILE on Jamboree, and how it is an example of how artists can come up with exciting solutions to their own creative and professional development needs. Keep it #artistledtilimartistdead!

The final presentations were from Friday’s seminar speakers, who gave a brief introduction to their artistic and curatorial practices and raised some of the provocations they would be exploring on the following day. We are lucky enough to have a diverse and fascinating group of practitioners to lead the seminar sessions: curator Alistair Hudson of Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth, who asked,  ‘If we truly want to democratise art, should we abandon exhibitions for good?’ Curator Simon Morrissey of Foreground introduced the idea of dichotomies of centres versus peripheries in the art world. Artist Sonya Dyer used the philosophy of Franko Beradi as a position to ask: ‘how are we going to live with each other in the future?’. Curator Lucy Day of A Woman’s Place (and Jamboree project supporter and critical friend) questioned: ‘Is separation the best way to tell marginalised stories?’. And finally curator Ingrid Swenson of PEER interrogated what is meant by socially engaged practice.

For further information about the seminar leaders visit our seminar webpage at https://artistsjamboree.uk/programme/seminars-by-invited-curators

Image credit: Andy Ford

The evening finished with delicious food from The Real Junk Food Project, a brilliant organisation that saves food waste, screenings from BEEF (Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film), a bar, and chats at the campsite under a full moon.

The perfect start to the long weekend of Jamboree!

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Image credit: Model For The Disney Matterhorn Model Experience, Jamboree participant Bridgette Ashton

Artist duo LOW PROFILE are pleased to announce the participant-led programme for Jamboree 2018. Jamboree 2018 will take place from the 28th June – 1st July at the Dartington Estate in Devon. It is an artist-led project focused on offering a space for artists and curators to make new productive relationships and share practice in a critically engaged, supportive environment. The 4 day event will draw together 150+ artists, curators and programmers from across the UK for an intensive weekend of talks, workshops, walks, exhibitions, seminars, screenings and an artist shop.

Jamboree aims to support the development of a geographically dispersed, national network of artists and curators. It’s programme is participant-built; with attending artists and curators leading seminars, 20:20 talks, walk & talks, communal making sessions and contributing to a moving image screening programme, an exhibition of miniatures, and the camp shop which sells artists multiples. This practice-focussed approach to Jamboree means that artist’s and curator’s current concerns are platformed; sharing experiences, exchanging skills, testing out ideas, and broadening the reach of their work.

The Communal Making sessions explore an element of an artist’s practice that benefits from group making or participation. Participation may entail attendees physically supporting the making or production of a work, or can be through participating as performers, bodies etc. This programme includes ‘Sonorous Stones’ led by AJ Stockwell, where a human-geologic choir will work with ceramic instruments cast from stones.

The Video and Moving Image Screenings give artists & curators an opportunity to share moving image work or project documentation with other participants. The programme includes ‘Kangaroo Beach’ by Simon Bayliss, a video work featuring a disconcerting collection of appropriated footage of muscular, buck kangaroos set to the artist’s own dance music composition.

20:20 talks offer a quickfire intro to visual artists, curators, programmers & arts organisers and their arts practice and projects. Talks include Rosalie Schweiker on ‘mince art vs. sausage art’, Sophie Bullock on ‘the artist as mediator between the public and the institution’, and Claire Tindale on ‘the use of the ‘miniature’, or ‘model’, as the mechanism for exploring physical and psychological spaces’.

Walk and Talks are artist or curator-led, mobile (walking, moving, pausing) outdoor discussion groups, focused on specialist subject areas, topics or obsessions that surround, come from, or informs their practice. Alice White’s ‘Word Up’ will ask if it’s possible to use a song’s lyrics as a curatorial framework within contemporary art (paying particular attention to 80s and 90s guilty pleasures).

Attendees will be invited to bring scaled-down or more portable aspects of their practices to participate in an informal table-top exhibition, with drop in sessions for attendees to meet and get to know each other’s work. Participants are also be invited to sell small scale affordable artworks, limited editions and ephemera in the Jamboree Camp Shop.

Alongside this, Jamboree founders LOW PROFILE have invited a range of artists & curators to lead structured seminars, focused on workshopping specific areas of interest, themes or creative processes. This series will include Céline Condorelli discussing her work as an artist, as an educator at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan, and as one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK and Alistair Hudson (Director Manchester Art gallery and the Whitworth, formerly Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art), discussing the concept of the Useful Museum, as an institution dedicated to the promotion of art as a tool for education and social change.

For more details of the full programme, visit: https://artistsjamboree.uk/programme

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http://bridgetteashton.co.uk/

http://www.aj-stockwell.com/WORK

http://www.simon-bayliss.com/

http://rosalieschweiker.info/

http://www.sophiebullock.net/

https://www.axisweb.org/p/clairetindale/

https://www.atfwhite.com/

http://www.celinecondorelli.eu/

Thanks to Plymouth College of Art, PAC Home at Plymouth Arts Centre, Extra Special People at Eastside Projects, CG Associates at Castlefield Gallery, WARP at g39, Spike Associates at Spike Island, Visual Art South West, Somerset Art Works, and CVAN North West; the Jamboree team have been able to offer 32 artists and curators bursaries, covering the cost of tickets (including camping).

The artists and curators who have been awarded bursaries and those who have already purchased tickets are listed on the newly launched Jamboree participants directory, available at: https://artistsjamboree.uk/jamboree-directory.
The directory will continue to be updated and aims to become a useful resource for attendees to stay in touch & for others to find artists & curators based around the UK.

We’re sharing these fantastic practitioners’ work on our social media channels, follow us at:

Twitter: @artistsjamboree

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artistsjamboree/

Instagram: @artistsjamboree

Image: ROKK ER MODIR by Jamboree 2018 bursary awardee Isobel Adderley