Looking back, not forwards

This morning I submitted two videos to be considered for a south-west arts organisation's 15th birthday celebrations. This follows hot on the heels of the AA2A 30th Anniversary Exhibition. Back in 2024 it was 10 years of Hestercombe Gallery and, before that, in 2021, Catalyst, celebrating a decade of collaborations at Exeter University's Environment and Sustainability Institute.

It's good to look back and reflect on past achievements but a little unnerving as organisations fail and there are fewer and fewer future-facing opportunities. The mood seems valedictory - as if the arts are slowly but surely coming to an end.  Or maybe I'm just getting old.

When the lighthouse is dark between flashes

 

Crush | Oil and acrylic on board | 2008

Back in the day, one of my art school lecturers used to say that the first thing students made on the fine art course was a good predictor of the last thing they'd make. At the time, I found this a bit pat. Surely we were there to grow and develop in wild and unexpected ways? But, in my case, he turned out to be right. One of the first things I did at art college was to make a series of drawings in which I used a twig to coax some old and sticky gloss paint to drippily define the contours of crushed plastic cups and tin cans, almost like diagrams of eye movements scanning an image - or a movement tracker following my gestures.

Having spent three years trying all sorts of different things, and being blown off course for months at a time, I got a bit cross one day, went to my studio window and started to track the flight paths of birds across it with a skittering oil bar. That work evolved into What the world becomes, a large-scale drawing installation for my degree show.

It's not that I didn’t change and develop, I did. But I also held true to something that continues to obsess me: how to transcribe fleeting phenomena into stable, tangible objects...revealing the gap between the world and our representations of it. And how to acknowledge the agency of my materials or subjects - as well as my own embodied perception. In addition to being expressed through drawing, it's led me into photography (especially long exposures), film-making (of course), and using data points to make digital drawings and 3-D prints. Étienne-Jules Marey the French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotographer was a major influence, as were the scientific documentations of photographer Berenice Abbott. I also loved this quote from George Kubler in The Shape of Time (1962): “Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes […] It is the void between events.”

Maybe it's a stretch, but I think my recent work about the uneasy relationship between psychics and physics, which addresses the fairly rigid (if useful) ways we construct scientific knowledge, might also relate. There's a lot here to reconsider.

An offshoot of my practice?

 

The Future Present | Work in progress | 2025

There's a branch of my work that doesn't quite fit with all the rest: my interest in growing food and nurturing the surrounding ecosystem. I think of it as my leisure interest rather than my professional practice but, because art always comes out of life, it finds its way in.

Most recently, it appeared when Nick Davies of Loophole Projects asked me to contribute a message to the future for his book The Future Present. I saw the dark side and worried there might not be humans around in the future with the means to interpret printed words or images, so asked if I could include actual seeds.

I selected seeds for their interesting shapes and ability to lie flat between pages: dark little grains of basil, beige flecks of tomato, ornate arcs of hollyhock, cornflowers with their bristles, and the elaborate black and white quills of French marigolds. Using tweezers I placed around 30 assorted seeds in each of 200 glassine packets. Urged by Nick to also make an internationally postable version (without seeds), I added the grid reference of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a marker for where to fix the packets on the page.

Nick summarises the work beautifully in his conclusion to the book: “Hoad's painstakingly packed envelopes not only hold biological messages to the future through the DNA held in the seeds, they also touch on metaphorical subjects such as the flow of life around us (whether ideas or literal seeds) and the meaning of a message to the future (is not every piece of writing but a seed?)”

It builds on a similar work I made called Mutter Erde for The Library of Lost Books back in 2012. Other plant-influenced projects include Interloper in 2014 about the grafting of fruit trees, Foreign Soil in 2015 about the challenges of being a locavore (amongst other things) and most recently RANGE (work in progress 2025- ) focusing on my small allotment, which is perched on the edge of a golf driving range that occupies a former council landfill site. 

Through my allotment I am also growing for the Exeter Broad Bean Flock, an attempt to create a locally adapted food crop through free pollination, and taking part in Dig for Dirt a citizen science project looking at how soil bacteria interact with toxic waste. And just recently I've started talking to a fellow allotmenteer about water harvesting and alternative watering methods such as oyas (buried ceramic pots full of water) and how we might implement them at our site.

I began to feel like a medium hearing, rather imperfectly, the voices of the dead

From Noise | Digital video | Work in progress | 2026

Life is a bit too complicated at the moment for sustained studio practice, but I'm intermittently working on an experimental re-edit of material gathered with Megan Calver during the making of The Signal and the Noise (2025). I'm focusing on extracts from a recording kindly released to us by Chrissie De Rivaz that was made by her late husband John in 1971. He was one of a group from STL Harlow who met with their colleague, the eminent scientist Alec Reeves, to discuss his psychic research - probably just weeks before he died.

Given the circumstances of its making (Reeves' illness and possibly medicated state, a busy hospital ward and a small crowd of close colleagues speaking in their own 'shorthand'), the recording is difficult to understand. It was most likely made with a low-quality portable cassette recorder and basic microphone, then recopied, and includes intrusive ambient sound, tape hiss, distortion and possibly some print-through from degrading tape. 

The fact Reeves' hospital-bed seminar arrives in the 21st century as a glitchy analogue recording is resonant. I am fascinated by Reeves' use of generated noise (eg using radium particles) for paranormal study as it was the very thing his ground-breaking scientific invention of pulse code modulation – or digital signalling – sought to eliminate.

As I set about the difficult process of transcribing the recording back in 2023, I began to feel like a medium hearing, rather imperfectly, the voices of the dead and trying to guess what they wanted to communicate. Indeed, there is a long-standing belief (from the days of Edison and Marconi onwards) that the communications media, through which we experience disembodied voices, might be 'haunted media'1, a place where the human and more-than-human can communicate. 

1Jeffrey Sconce 2020

30 years of art

Many thanks to Chris Millward for making such a beautiful catalogue for AA2A's 30th Anniversary Exhibition, featuring the work of 60 artists and students from participating colleges across the organisation’s history.

AA2A (Artists’ Access to Art Colleges) is an Arts Council England Investment Principle Support Organisation (IPSO) that has been facilitating artists' residencies since an initial pilot in 1996. The programme fosters collaboration between further and higher education institutions and artists while supporting students as they transition from study to employment in the arts. 

The AA2A 30th Anniversary Exhibition runs from 16th July to 13th August, and is open Monday to Saturday 10:00–16:00 at CASC Gallery, University of Chester, Creative Campus Kingsway, Kingsway, Chester, CH2 2LB 

I'm proud to be part of this project: a rare free-to-enter, professionally curated exhibition with a comprehensive catalogue documenting the selected artists. Definitely something to celebrate!

You can view the whole catalogue here. 

Songdelay

Joan Jonas | Songdelay |1973 |  Still from 19 minute video work

How wonderful to be reminded of this work by Joan Jonas, which first resonated with me as I thought about signalling (and performance) in relation to film-making - around 2021-2022 ( I think I saw it at Tate Modern.) 

At the time of writing you can view it here in full. 

I continue to find this film inspiring for its sound (often out of synch or in opposition to normal 'rules' of sound use), its amazing locations (complete with massive passing cargo ships), its playfulness and its down to earth approach to some quite wild ideas. I'll let Princeton University Art Museum explain it further:  

"Songdelay records an improvisational performance Jonas staged with young artists in downtown New York at the Hudson piers, then a derelict area slated for redevelopment. The film is divided into two parts. The first shows a series of vignettes of the artists improvising with props—sticks, a hoop, a metal rod—interspersed with shots of participants clapping their hands above their heads, moving their bodies in angles and arcs along the piers. In the second part, performers tilt mirrors to send flashes of sunlight toward the camera, at times completely saturating the celluloid and overexposing the film. The performers playfully exploit an idiosyncrasy of perception—the delay between the processing of visual and auditory stimuli. Breaks between scenes or vantage points and overexposed celluloid were maintained after the editing process, foregrounding the film’s status not as documentation of the performance but rather as a distinctive work of art that embodies Jonas’s process-based experimental practice."

 

Another archive bites the dust

I heard yesterday, via an Instagram post, that a-n The Artist Information Company has rebranded as Artists Now. In many ways this was great news. A rethink was overdue - the old site had become a bit of a mess and no one seemed to know what a-n stood for any more. Even I, a loyal subscriber since last century (!), had considered resigning my membership.

But I don’t like the way it was done. None of the members were told in advance of the change (apart from a cryptic email about a changeover in payment systems) and many were confused as to whether the new site was genuine. Personally, I was slightly shocked to find that eight years-worth of reviews I had written (some commissioned, others volunteered) had disappeared overnight, leaving me with 21 dead links on my website. I also know that other artists and galleries used those links as evidence of work made and evaluated - much of it in Devon, a region often overlooked by mainstream art publications. It's true, I hadn't written for a-n since 2013, but the reviews were an important archive - of various artists', curators' and programmers' work, and my responses. 

When I queried what had happened to the archive, I was breezily informed that there will be a "live, curated digital archive to tell the story" (whose story?) and that I can request downloaded copies of my reviews. I will reinstate them on my website for my and others' use. But that's not really the point is it?  In a world of made-up CVs, it's the external validation that matters and, honestly, what’s so hard about just dumping the old website on a server so we can still link to it?

I have written before about the casual way digital archives are taken offline and the effect this has on artists' credibility. I really don't think erasing artists from your history is great way to start a new chapter of advocating for them.