Overseas exchange

Students from Weissensee Kunsthochschule Berlin accept gifts from Somerset via OSR Projects (including my Two-Dimensional Picnic). It's a development  from Cultivate 2: A Gift for Somerset, which I joined as an Associate Artist earlier this year. You can see the results of the Somerset-Berlin exchange here.

Conversations with Zola #3

More progress on my commission for The Library of Lost Books which will become part of an exhibition for the new Library of Birmingham.

The longer I live with this book, the harder I find it to make a mark on it.  So I thought I'd try a reversible action: a new jacket. This uses the idea of the tri-lingual artefact (French novel, German translation, English reader) and uses the closing line 'Deaths, seed and bread grew of the earth'.  The new dust jacket covers up the book's rather beautiful cloth binding and I don't know if it will be part of the final work, but makes it feel like a new object and therefore one I might possibly alter in more permanent ways.

http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/conversations-with-zola-2.html
http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/conversations-with-zola-1.html 

A nation of shoppers

Volkhardt Mueller 'Any High Street' 2012

"...offers citizens of Exeter – and other cities like it – a mirror in which to examine themselves." Something I wrote about Volkhardt Mueller's show at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum, which runs until 22 September 2012.

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/2478540

The Geometry of Air

Gabrielle Hoad: The Geometry of Air (2012)
Near Broadhembury, Devon 12.20.30 – 12.51.55 UTC 22/10/2011
Laser-sintered nylon

Here's the work I've made as part of the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission 2012 in collaboration with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University. It's a three-dimensional representation of a 30-minute glider flight made in Devon in 2011. GPS readings of altitude, latitude and longitude taken during the flight were transcribed into a digital model, from which a 3D scale-model has been fabricated. Pilot/GPS: Rowan Smith. Technical support: Tim King. Thanks to Ben Gibbard.

An exhibition of the work made by me and a number of other South West artists during this commission will be on show at Exeter Phoenix from Friday 16 November 2012 - Sat 19 January 2013.

http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art/?page=2

Not as smooth as it sounds

"Glissando suggests something smooth, soaring and elegant but this is bumpy and messy, with all its seams and frayed edges showing..." You can read my review of this new site-specific work by Candida Powell-Williams here.

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/single/2427879

25 July - 1 September 2012
Salisbury Arts Centre,  Bedwin Street, Salisbury, Wiltshire SP1 3UT
www.salisburyartscentre.co.uk

www.candidapowell-williams.com

Busy doing close to nothing

Compelling, if a little reverential: Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (2012) is a documentary film that follows the Serbian performance artist as she prepares for a retrospective of her work at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

As the blurb says 'the hardest thing to do is something which is close to nothing'. We see Abramovic's new work for the show, which consists of sitting face to face with audience members one by one. It's partly human interaction at its most basic and moving, part endurance test - as she carries out this activity all day, six days a week, for the entire duration of the show (around ten weeks). Shown at Exeter Picturehouse this week. Here's a trailer. Recommended.

Everywhere and nowhere

I've been a citizen of Nowhereisland (or Nowhereian, as we seem to be called) for almost a year. For anyone not familiar with Alex Hartley's project, its starting point was a piece of land in the High Arctic that was revealed by the melting of a retreating glacier. Material from the island was loaded on to a barge, sailed into international waters and declared a new nation on 20th September 2011. It's since been the focal point for a year-long conversation between all sorts of people about ideas such as utopia, citizenship, territory, nationhood and environment. Now in its last days, it's working its way around the Southwest peninsula, mooring off the coast while its mobile embassy gets to work engaging with the public.

I really I bought into the idea of Nowhereisland - but for most of the year that's all it's been: an idea. I was looking forward to an encounter with some real people and real stuff in Torquay, where the project spent Monday and Tuesday.  It's fun: the island sitting in the sea and a converted horsebox on the shore looking a bit like a jolly icecream kiosk, with happy crowds around it. The kiosk is the Nowhereisland embassy - and it's a real cabinet of curiosities, beautifully made, with lots of drawers and cupboards and racks containing documentation, souvenirs, rock samples, glacial melt water, wellington boots, photos of polar bears, and books and records related to the idea of nowhere and islands.

Nowhereisland has impressive credentials and there's lots to admire about it. But I get no sense of the excitement Alex Hartley must have felt when he first saw the possibility of claiming new land. The vision that set this whole thing in motion seems almost forgotten under an accumulation of details and engagement strategies. It won my mind but it hasn't won my heart.

Nowhereisland by Alex Hartley is a Situations project, one of 12 Artists Taking the Lead projects across the UK, funded by the Arts Council of England, which form part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad in summer 2012.

http://nowhereisland.org/
http://situations.org.uk