Interview on BBC Radio Scotland

Find a link here to an interview with me about the exhibition on Radio Cafe, a BBC Radio Scotland programme. It’s up for 7 days and you will find the article 30 mins into the broadcast, it lasts for about 10 mins. We talk about Elizabeth Turrell’s and Shane Waltener’s work.

26/01/2010

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Exhibition opens at IC at the Dovecot..

I have been up in Edinburgh watching the final touches of installation taking place before the exhibition’s opening on Friday 15th January. The team at Innovative Craft have done a fantastic job and the show looks excellent. 

I caught up with Shane Waltener and unravelled the large Garland 21 which had come from Birmingham and had so many hands of making brought with it in the piece. Shane installed it into the space before I talked  about the exhibition with a BBC Radio Scotland  journalist. I will link to the article here when it is published online – it was fascinating talking through the work and trying to visualise it for a listening audience.

Many thanks to Amanda Game and her staff for their great work in installing the show and all their hospitality. Four of the makers in the show (David, Shane, Sue and Dawn) had come for the opening and it was a great privilege once again to talk through the work with them and think about the work as if for the first time..looking at some of the relationships between the work in this new location was really interesting and incredibly stimulating and there seemed to be some lovely serendipity going on.

Here are some images from the past few days…

Garland 21 is unravelled while David’s, Heidrun’s and Matthew’s pieces watch on along with the step ladder…

Shane installs Garland 21 in the gallery…

peeking into the space through Shane’s work..

and through Matthew’s work..

A visitor looks at Elizabeth Turrell’s work.

There were some lovely visual relationships going on between the works. Here you can see the work of Matthew Harris, David Gates, Gary Breeze and Sue Lawty.

And now with the addition of Paul Scott’s and Ann Linnemann’s work.

Images David Gates and Helen Carnac

The following images are from Sue Lawty

Happy New Year…

I visited the exhibition at the Waterhall in Birmingham for the last time on Saturday and was happy to see that Shane and Cheryl’s Garland had grown substantially again. For me it has been such an important object to think around and about during the show. The fact that you can engage with it in different ways… being involved in its growth and perhaps remembering something through doing has marked an important aspect of  it. Some visitors have left thoughts on Amy Houghton’s typewriter installation, which was sited next to Garland, talking of memories of making and how through contributing to the piece these have surfaced . I think I will miss visiting the Waterhall space, it has become a bit of a special space to me and I am sure will now always conjure up images and thoughts of this project when I visit it in the future. 

The exhibition is now on the move…having ended in Birmingham on Monday and now with packing in progress…it will open at IC at the Dovecot, Edinburgh on 15th January. Hope to see you there.

In the meantime we have had a review in Crafts Magazine by Emma Crichton-Miller which you can read online here.

The following is an extract from it.

‘In accord with its title, this exhibition has been two years in the making, accruing a great deal of explanatory writing, a veritable river of thought, behind it. By claiming shared values with the Slow Movement, it has become an ideological show; and the dramatically altered economic and political landscape even make it topical. Curated jointly by Helen Carnac and Andy Horn, a maker and academic and the former director of the publicly-funded educational charity Craftspace respectively, it’s vibrant with a shared excitement about what craft can be today, what it signifies and how 
it can be displayed to suggest new and unexpected meanings, evident in all the writing and the interviews with the makers involved. The danger has been that the exhibition would somehow fall short of all these beautiful ideas – or, worse, would illustrate them with mind-numbing exactitude. Instead, what has been assembled somewhat chaotically, in this huge but rather unforgiving room, is by turns moving, impressive, gorgeous, curious, elusive and enchanting – and never less than thought-provoking. It complicates and enlivens the debate; indeed, at times it simply silences it, with beauty’

Last few weeks at Birmingham…

The exhibition is ending at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery on 4th January and will open at Innovative Craft at The Dovecot, Edinburgh on 15th January. If you can get to Birmingham before it closes it will be the only chance to see it at  such a large venue and in its entirety as we are scaling down now slightly for the rest of the tour.

The new header for the blog is from Elizabeth Turrell’s Badge Box installation..the ‘I’m slow but sure’ badge is circa 1940’s American.

Garland…

The Garland has been growing…it is interesting to see how audiences have got so involved in Shane Waltener’s installation and during my most recent visit I was fascinated by the way the piece had unfolded. As a maker my practice is driven by process and so seeing Garland or Amy Houghton’s typewriter piece being engaged with keeps the process and exhibition alive in exhilarating and at times completely unexpected  and exciting ways. 

New one to one from Russell Martin…

Caroline Juby and Russell Martin, Friday 13 November 2009

“Life’s too short”

Considering time in an expanded sense, and looking at alternative practices as a way to reconsider contemporary craft, this dialogue is with and Caroline Juby, a PhD researcher in the geography department of Royal Holloway, University of London, who I contacted after reading an article she had written for the London Archaeologist.  I had assumed her practice – specialising in the Paleolithic past of London – is experienced in a very different way to most crafts makers, but there were subtle similarities, such as the way touch can provide access to different cultures and modes of thought, and an extension of the object’s existence past the lifetime of the practitioner.

Her dialogue, one of the longest one to one dialogues in the project, covers a huge range of topics, including:

• Climate change as an ongoing phenomenon spanning thousands of years
• Where modern peoples fit in the ‘narrative’ of history
• Haptic methodologies of experience and community
• The human species as one amongst many, simply trying to survive
• How even very ancient objects continue to accrue meaning and significance through the biographies and provenance of their owners
• The need for opportunism by the archaeological community in London

The dialogue took place in the Museum of London, which hosts the exhibitionLondon before London on London’s Paleolithic past.  We also reference the October 2009 In Our Time Radio 4 programme on the Geological Formation of Britain.

Visit this page to listen to their conversation…

Workshop at the weekend…

Sue Lawty will be running a free, drop in Family Art Workshop this weekend.

In the Waterhall Seminar Room, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

14 November from 11am

15 November from 1pm

Natural Order

Every living thing has specific individual qualities of form, colour and texture.

We will explore rhythmic design and pattern using natural materials like leaves, twigs and seed heads…

Each pattern will be photographed before being dismantled and a gallery of ideas gradually built up over the week end.

Repeatedly using the same marks allows refreshing freedom and non-precious attitude to drawing and design work.

Exhibition commissions…

A number of the artists and makers in the exhibition have been commissioned to make new works. I will focus on each of the artists and their new works in a series over the next month…beginning with Sue Lawty.

These works can also be found in the exhibitor pages…

Calculus

2009

2 x 3 m

natural stone on gesso

(photo credit: John Coombes)

 

Calculus Sue Lawty

“…To see a World in a Grain of Sand…”

William Blake

I wanted to take something tiny & insignificant; very small stones unnoticed underfoot on beach, out of context… and through repetition and scale of work,

subject the viewer to be made small in their presence.

Each tiny insignificant speck of stone bears witness to the vastness of geological time. Time so immense it renders us, humankind, as the real speck;

ourselves an insignificant blip in the earth’s history.

The original rock would have been formed and then subsequently broken down and eroded over millions of years. Each resultant gravelly mark of stone

has been rumbled and rolled, tossed and turned, pounded and shoved relentlessly in and out on tides twice a day, every day for years…  until now…

halted on the verge of becoming sand.

Calculus:

- the study of change in the same way that geometry is the study of shape and algebra is the study of equations

- a branch of mathematics originally based on the summation of infinitesimal differences.

- a particular method / system / logic of calculation or reasoning

- Latin for small stone

You can read more from Sue on her blog

 

Thanks also to

the exhibition designers hyperkit who have done a fantastic job designing the identity for all the graphic elements of the project, the catalogue and the exhibition design.

Visit their website to find out more about the identity that they created for us.

from the hyperkit website

from the hyperkit website

Thank you…

To Russell Martin for the Analogue project. It has added enormous content to the blog and thinking around the subject. Russell has just uploaded some recordings from the past weekend when we visited Birmingham…read the latest conversation here