On networks

Last week's Visual Arts South West (VASW) regional meeting at RAMM Exeter was a great opportunity to connect with new people and organisations and to catch up with contacts. It was also a timely reminder of just how much VASW (formerly Turning Point SW) has managed to achieve. In particular, they have offered a range of brilliant opportunities to individual practitioners - such as travel bursaries and mentoring for commercial representation - and are about to launch a critical writing programme.

The keynote speech, by Demos Associate John Holden, was on networks. He made some interesting points about real networks versus clubs (exclusive groups),  pubs (social groups) and hubs (almost-networks built around a central point), and how they need to take care of their most fragile components. Based on his definitions, VASW is still a hub and therefore not as resilient or adaptable as it could be. As a temporary initiative to give a boost to the SW arts ecology, VASW works for now.  Let's hope it continues to evolve into something more sustainable.

http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/turning-point-or-just-more-of-same.html

www.vasw.org.uk

The geometry of shadows

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

'Neoreplicants', the result of the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission 2012, is now open. This project gave 30 artists the opportunity to work with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University.

I used the process to make a three-dimensional scale representation of a 30-minute glider flight. 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. The air above and below the flight path was represented as solids.

I decided to install the top part of my model and hang it from a Perspex shelf set slightly above eye height. This helps it to read as flight and has the unexpected benefit of casting a particularly beautiful shadow.

'Neoreplicants' - Exeter Phoenix, Gandy Street, Exeter EX4 3LS
Friday 16 November 2012 - Sat 19 January 2013
Featuring the work of 30 Southwest Artists including Catherine Cartwright, Mat Chivers, Sam Cook, Katy Connor, Maia Conran, Paul Channing, Susie David, Nick Davies, Robin Duttson, Gabrielle Hoad, Nicola Jaberi, Debbie Locke, Stephen Monger, Helen Snell, Michael Werbicki, Nicci Wonnacot.

Brain food

Ecoid data visualisation from The Confluence Project (2012) - iDAT

Art practice can get a bit solipsistic so it's good to stop and find out what other people (both artists and non artists) are thinking about. This week I've been able to attend Collider: Exploring Hybridity organised by Egenis at the University of Exeter and Data Ecologies organised by iDAT at Plymouth University.

Highlights of  Collider: Exploring Hybridity held at RAMM on 7th November as part of the ERSC Festival were Dr Susan Kelly on 'human chimerism' and Dr Robin Durie on the evolution of culture in robots. Dr Katharine Tyler on 'white ethnicity' was also extremely thought-provoking.  There were also great contributions from SW artists Susan Boafo and Paul Ramsay.

Slightly more related to current developments in my practice, Data Ecologies on 10th November was concerned with methods for 'making the invisible visible'. I especially liked the distinction drawn between dirty data and so-called clean data 'uncorrupted' by human subjectivity. Dirty data relates to qualitative research and 'citizen scientists'; clean data is usually quantitative information gathered via instruments.

There were fascinating contributions from Alice Sharp of Invisible Dust and Simon Blackmore from The Owl Project.  We also had an opportunity to visit the university's Immersive Vision Theatre where we experienced a giant digital model of a 3D fruit fly reassembled from electron-microscoped 'slices', and a visualisation of the constellations viewed from a non-earthcentric perspective (ie with depth).

I learned lots but, if I have one criticism, it's that many of the artists and works featured weren't really engaging with data as their material, they were simply using it as jumping off points for their ideas. Or (and I find this less forgivable) as something to pretty up for aesthetic results.  This is frustrating because data itself can be far more surprising and interesting than anything we can invent.  It just needs a little help to materialise in a form human senses can comprehend.

Conversations with Zola #4

Time to return my 1910 copy of Mutter Erde (La Terre) to The Library of Lost Books, complete with artist additions and amendments. In the end, I decided they should be quite modest.  They're based around the idea of the tri-lingual artefact (French novel, German translation, English reader) and are drawn from the closing line of the novel: 'Deaths, seed and bread grew of the earth'. Here it is, wrapped up and almost ready to go. 

http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/conversations-with-zola-3.html

[in]visible now visible

Bird flights traced onto a window, a walk measured out in a pencil line … Drawings and photographs that track movement and time, and reveal the human presence in apparently objective observations.

Installed my show today at Exeter Phoenix Cafe Bar Gallery.  It's there until 3 November. All work is for sale.

http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art/cafe-bar-gallery/gabrielle-hoad:-invisible.html

Time and motion studies

John Court - Spacex performance (2012)

Drawing, like performance, is durational, but some drawings make it more obvious that others. Being a bit obsessed with time and motion, I enjoy the way John Court reveals how many hundreds of hours he spent working on the drawings he currently has on show at Spacex, Exeter.

I encounter plenty of artists who share my interest in time and motion as conceptual subject matter, but few who are as concerned about the mundane business of productivity. "I like to feel I have done a day's work," he says. Agree. Though I would baulk at lying for eight hours in a pool of paint in the baking Venetian sun, an activity he recalled in conversation with Andre Stitt at Spacex last Saturday.  "I like to have a look over the edge," he says gently and smiles. I'm never quite clear if he's talking about physical endurance or the edge of a sheet of paper. I suspect both exert an equal pull on him. 

It was a privilege to hear the two of them talking together. We learned that UK-born John lives and works in Finland but doesn't speak the language. In fact, he struggles to read and write his native language. He's profoundly dyslexic and many of the works shown here grow from the impenetrability of the written word. Instead, they make language physical through movement, noise and tactility.  In his hands, language is no longer a transparent container of concepts, it's the stuff of the world. Brilliant.

John Court: The work between the lines
29 September - 24 November 2012  (with a day-long performance on 24 November)
www.spacex.org.uk

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

Feeling over function

Michael Samuels Tragedy of the Commons (2012)

I can't help feeling that Spacex's current show - This Was Tomorrow -  actually belongs 45 miles west in Plymouth. That city's status as the greatest built example of post-war planning and architecture seems a more fitting backdrop for these works by Michael Samuels, which look back playfully to the ideals of Modernism.

Housed in Spacex's converted 19th century warehouse at the more boho end of Exeter, the work seems instead to reference the local vintage and junk stores. Precisely constructed from fragments of modern furniture (lots of G-plan), along with speaker cabinets, anglepoise lamps, G-clamps and ratchet straps, the materials for this work could easily have been sourced from nearby shops.

While I try to keep my focus on the work's formal qualities, I'm actually feeling nostalgia. I'm seeing bits of my grandma's Formica-topped table and the dark-wood wall cabinets favoured by my ageing parents-in-law. Not to beat about the bush: these are sculptures made from dead people's furniture. It gives them a poignancy that is compelling, but possibly unhelpful in relation to the artist's clever investigation of formal, material and spatial qualities. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful show.

The largest gallery space, windows closed off to create a claustrophobic cave, is home to Tragedy of the Commons, a monster construction of modular furniture, which - exceeding domestic scale - becomes architectural in its impact. Its title refers to an ecological/economic theory which suggests individuals will inevitably destroy a shared resource. The UK's post-war legacy of run-down tower blocks, echoed here, seems to underline its truth.

Michael Samuels: This Was Tomorrow  28 July - 15 September 2012
Spacex, 45 Preston Street, Exeter EX1 1DF
www.spacex.org.uk

Digital dates

Just announced. The results of the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission, which gave 30 artists the opportunity to work with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University, will be on show between 16th November 2012 and 19th January 2013. Now all I have to do is get my object made...
http://www.exeterphoenixdigital.org.uk/2012DAC.php

Culture crash

Oliver Flexman's Operations in the Contact Zone, which opened last week at Exeter Phoenix, offers a knowing take on the often absurd mismatch that can occur when translating from culture to culture. As human beings, we have more in common than we often think, but the subtleties of branding and labelling also highlight the differences.

The whole show is as slick, glossy and assured as the branding it reflects. My favourite piece is two huge, faded shop fascias from the Gulf. Though they once sat on two sides of a corner site advertising the same restaurant, the images are now placed back to back over a light box. On one side it reads Prince’s Restaurant the other Princesses Restaurant. The installation is brilliant: the object looks as if it's crashed onto the gallery floor from on high and propped itself on a piece of municipal street furniture.

Operations in the Contact Zone, 20 July - 30 August 2012
Exeter Phoenix Galleries, Gandy Street, Exeter

http://www.oliverflexman.com

www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art

Putting the open in open studios

Proof that South West open studios are finally acknowledging the importance of non-saleable work:  Somerset Art Weeks (15th-30th September 2012) supports a number of recognisably contemporary entries. There's a gallery in a phone box curated by Peter Messa, a pop-up museum by Hacker Farm and curated detritus from OSR Projects. I'm hoping these artists didn't have to pay the same entry fee as artists who stand to generate income from the event.
www.somersetartworks.org.uk

Trying to stay out of the picture

I'm delighted to have been offered a small show at Exeter Phoenix in October.  [in]visible will feature a selection of my drawings and photographs that track movement and time, and which reveal the subjective nature of apparently objective observations.  All work will be for sale.

Gabrielle Hoad: [in]visible - 9 October - 5 November 2012, Exeter Phoenix Cafe Bar, Gandy Street, Exeter EX4 3LS

www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art

Conversations with Zola #2

More progress on my commission for The Library of Lost Books which will become part of an exhibition for the new Library of Birmingham. I'm working with a German translation of a French novel La Terre by Emile Zola (Mutter Erde in German). I want to address the idea of earth referred to in the book's title and themes: the soil from which everything grows and into which everything decays.

So, I'm thinking I'd like to plant some seeds in that earth. These are dill seeds (Anethum graveolens), known as Gurkenkraut in German (translates as cucumber herb, thanks to its frequent use with cucumber in German cookery) and Fenouil Bâtard in French (bastard fennel).

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

A little piece of Exeter

Here is my little piece of Volkhardt Muller's supersize woodcut Any High Street, commissioned while he was cutting the plate in an empty shop in Exeter back in November 2011.  It depicts a piece of litter on the pavement.

Development of the woodcut continues this summer at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum, where you can buy your own section from as little as £2.50. The project seems to be as much about public interaction as printmaking, and you can talk to the artist while he works. His print installations Cell and Pastoral, originally created in decommissioned prison cells at Rougemont Castle, are also on show.

RAMM, Queen Street, Exeter EX4 3RX
30 June - 22 September 2012
http://www.rammuseum.org.uk/

Gone but not forgotten

Paul Thek - The Tomb

Loving The Gallery of Lost Art at Tate, an online gallery that tells the stories of works of art that have been destroyed, stolen, mislaid - or were otherwise ephemeral. With textual and visual documentation and archival materials offered as evidence of the existence of the missing works, it has a spooky, improvised atmosphere that we strove for with HEIST, but never quite achieved. A real 'aha' moment for me.  http://galleryoflostart.com

Gardens unwrapped

I spent Saturday in Oxford touring the city's Botanic Garden. I was there to meet metron curators Diane Jones-Parry and Annabel Ralphs about the latest in their series of artist-led projects centred on books.

I'm one of a group of artists working with them on the Oxford Botanic Garden's archive of annual Gardening Chronicles. Senior Curator at the Garden, Alison Foster, drew articles from the Chronicles, which date back to 1851, and randomly allocated them to the participating artists as source material.

My articles are on the crocus and on budding and my task is to make work that can be sited in the gardens, glasshouses or other areas of the site. The exhibition is due to take place in 2014 so there's plenty of time to dig deep into the research and to ponder the very horticultural direction my new work seems to be taking.

http://unwrappingbooks.info/#/oxford-botanic-gardens/4560059824

Mystery upon mystery

I was intrigued by artist Louise K Wilson’s additions to the 1975 movie Picnic at Hanging Rock. Her new work Missing Scenes: An Evening at Hanging Rock was commissioned by Spacex as part of Topophobia and presented at Exeter Phoenix as a one-off event on 5th July. 

Louise K Wilson showed Peter Weir’s (shorter) director’s cut in its entirety, along with various audio and visual interventions, the most prominent of which were snippets of recorded interviews with Devon locals Val Bogan, Joe Loxton and Michael Calver. They talked informally about their impressions of the book by Joan Lindsay, on which the film is based. Wilson also gave a tantalising hint of the contents of the final (missing) chapter, which offers a solution to the mystery at the heart of the story.

I enjoyed seeing this excellent film again, and hearing different views of the novel as we went along (though, as my companion pointed out, it was bit like watching TV when someone else has control of the remote and keeps hitting pause). However, I confess to feeling slightly puzzled about what Louise K Wilson intended by taking on this iconic film for a rework. The event felt like an exploration of mystery and uncertainty, the activities of speculation and explanation, the inevitable blurring of fact and fiction and the multi-layered meanings of texts...

Perhaps it's only right that I really can't be sure.

Topophobia is at Spacex  for one more day only. It closes 7th July.  

Nothing Ever Happens

"Nothing much ever happened at West Coker" in Somerset, according to the village annals. "No relic of saint nor monument of art nor scene of natural beauty ever attracted visitors to it."  So it's hardly the sort of place you'd expect to find a contemporary art gallery.  But the Old School Room, run by Simon Lee Dicker and Chantelle Henocq looks set to challenge that. 

Curated by Nia Metcalfe, their latest show Nothing Ever Happens looks at our attraction to and dislocation from the natural world. This tension is typified by Michael Day's contemplative video pieces, in which picturesque landscapes are interrupted or overlaid with the technological and the mundane.

Dafydd Fortt has constructed a compelling two-dimensional work at one end of the space. Mind the Shake Holes, Tyle Haidd to Cwar Yr Ystrad is derived from photographs taken during several walks between two quarries in the artist's Welsh homeland. Cut-out images - divorced from context - are systematically repeated to create a kind of psychedelic wallpaper.

The dream-like atmosphere is completed by Ellie Doney's sculptural forms which seem poised between  liquid and solid, beautiful and grotesque. Consisting of poured glass matched with clouds of foam filler, they seem at home in their own materiality and yet convey an uncanny sense of instability.

Nothing Ever Happens, featuring the work of Michael Day, Dafydd Fortt and Ellie Doney, runs Thursdays to Sundays, 15 June 2012 - 8 July 2012 at OSR Projects, Old School Room, Church Street, West Coker, Somerset BA22 9BD

More live than I meant to be

Attended my first Live Art Meet at Exeter Phoenix on Tuesday.  I was curious to know more about these new events, but didn't really expect to be part of the entertainment. However, interaction was required - even by unwitting drinkers in the Cafe Bar as, under the guidance of our host Claire Burke, we meandered our way through parts of the Fluxus Workbook.

I'm interested in performance but not performing. Nevertheless I will be brave and go back as it was friendly and fun. Events happen the last Tuesday of every month and are announced here:
http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/art/galleries-opportunities/art-meets.html

Blow up art

Jeremy Deller's Sacrilege (aka bouncy Stonehenge) visited Belmont Park, Exeter today and, after it had had a quick mop down, we all got on and leaped about. It is truly is the year of inflatable public art, though I think Sacrilege rather outshines Kurt Perschke's RedBall, which was here a few days ago.

Turning thoughts digital

Test piece in Meshlab

Working on my Digital Art Commission and getting a headache. The biggest problem is not coming up with ideas, but getting those ideas into a form that a 3D printer can work with. Anything you want to make has to be digitised and it has to have dimensions in three axes.

If you can imagine it, you can probably print it, but first you have to master a 3D design program. There are many sophisticated tools such as AutoCAD (used by architects and engineers) but, as beginners, we were introduced to Google Sketchup.  It's free and it's clever, but ultimately it's clunky.  If we had six months to do this, I'd work my way through it, but I have to produce a design by 10th August.

Can you re-model objects from the real world? Yes. There's a fantastic piece of free software that goes with cheap kit for home 3D scanning http://www.david-laserscanner.com/, but those scans still have to be stitched and cleaned using a clever but rather daunting piece of free software - MeshLab.

Can you import raw data and visualise it? Yes. That's what I'm trying to do, again using MeshLab. But turning numbers into objects can't be done at the touch of a button. I've needed a lot of help from a programmer friend, and we're not there yet. It's alien territory for artists as there are no test prints, no maquettes - nothing to touch. You work on a digital file and the next thing you see is your finished object. I guess that's why it's known as rapid prototyping.

I'm one of 30 artists participating in the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission 2012, in partnership with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University.

Making the virtual real

Gyroid by Bathsheba (made using additive layer manufacturing)

Amazing insights yesterday into a technology that looks set to revolutionise our relationship with manufactured objects. It all happened as part of my participation in the Exeter Phoenix Digital Art Commission, in partnership with the Centre for Additive Layer Manufacturing (CALM) at Exeter University.

Additive layer manufacturing allows you to take highly complex digital designs (for example, filigree/lace, chains, gears, hinges, bone implants, origami, mathematical models) and construct them in a single process, layer by layer, as if you were printing them from your computer. No need for tool-making, machining, moulds or assembly. No need to worry about undercuts or hollows. You can make models in plastic, metal, plaster, resin, paper, wax...and soon (we're promised) in chocolate or ice. Artists and designers are already doing amazing things as you can see here. 

I'm still digesting the possibilities for my practice, but also the huge learning curve required to master the technology that will allow me to submit a design for printing later this summer.  I know that I'll be revisiting my work with flight, but I have a lot of technical issues to iron out.

In the meantime, I'm inspired by Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter Project. Venturing into the Sahara with portable technology, he replaced the lasers used in the high-tech sintering process with the energy of the sun to fuse ordinary sand into glass sculptures.

The write stuff

Interesting online discussion initiated by Plymouth-based arts and culture publication Nom de Strip and Plymouth-based performer Hannah Silva. It's about the lack of serious writing about theatre in the South West - but much of what's said applies to the visual arts too. http://hannahsilva.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/where-are-the-south-west-theatre-critics/

Flat Food: A Gift for Berlin

This is my latest contribution to A Gift for Somerset, an ongoing exchange between artists around the world, which is being led by OSR Projects.  I'm asking artists at Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin to organise a picnic of flat food in honour of Somerset.

This gift is inspired by Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs in which Michael, a programmer at Microsoft, is fed food that will fit under his locked office door while he obsessively writes code. It is also inspired by the landscape of the Somerset Levels, which is very flat.

More on my participation in A Gift for Somerset can be found here:
http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/cultivating-collaboration.html

Virtually Manchester

Blast Theory I'd Hide You

Having written about Blast Theory's 2011 retrospective at Spacex, I was keen to actually experience one of their edgier, hi-tech games. I'd tried the contemplative phone-based work Ghostwriter at Exeter's RAM Museum and found it a little tame, but the high-energy I'd Hide You didn't disappoint.

Blast Theory are a multidisciplinary group of practitioners who present interactive art and immersive theatre, often in the form of games which explore ethical and technological boundaries. I'd Hide You ran over three nights in Manchester's Northern Quarter. Runners roamed the city, interacting with its citizens and trying to snap each other, all the time streaming video to a watching online audience, who were also armed with snap buttons. As an audience member you could also type messages (such as the whereabouts of rival runners) to your chosen runner.  Snap a runner onscreen and you scored a point. Get snapped by someone else and you lost a life.

I dipped in briefly early on Thursday and Friday nights and found the game a little frustrating. Time delays meant successful snapping was virtually impossible and the video stream was often broken up.  Plus my runner seemed to be running around a bit aimlessly. I was fascinated by the process and the general feel of the thing, but as a game it seemed a poor substitute for the purely digital.

By Saturday night some of the problems seemed to have been ironed out (or maybe I was just lucky). I joined in after dark and a couple of drinks, onboard with the wily and chatty Matt. The game seemed to be getting into its stride, though its faster pace revealed some of its flaws (both logistical and technological). 

There were moments (only moments mind) where the adrenalin pumped, where I laughed out loud and where I felt genuinely transported to another place, watching the the world through my runner's eyes. Most interesting of all was the emergence of strategic playing: audience and runners colluding in subterfuge, trickery, distraction and deceit. 

Even though I'd Hide You was slickly styled and presented, I feel I've witnessed a bold experiment rather than a finished game. But that's what makes it interactive art and not just entertainment. Where Blast Theory lead, mainstream culture will follow.

I'd Hide You was presented at Future Everything and as part of the new Arts Council online project The Space.

http://www.idhideyou.com/
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/index.php

Conversations with Zola #1

Mutter Erde (with soil) from 'The Library of Lost Books'

I'm working with a book issued to me by The Library of Lost Books, which will be returned in September to become part of an exhibition for the new Library of Birmingham.

It’s a German translation of a novel by Emile Zola - Mutter Erde (translates as Mother Earth, original French title La Terre). Apart from being fascinated by the text's transitions through translation, I'm interested in pursuing the idea of soil, earth, dirt (both as source of life and as waste) - particularly in relation to the final sentence of the novel which apparently translates as "Deaths, seed and bread grew out of the earth."...And so I was intrigued to find, on closer inspection of the book, that it already contains some soil, squashed between pages 444 and 445.

London - Bideford - Exeter

Emily Speed Star Fort (previous installation of work currently showing at Spacex)

I've mostly had to focus on things other than art over the past week or so, but I've still managed to squeeze in a few exhibition visits. While in London near Chancery Lane I managed to make time for the Hunterian Museum to look at the way they organise and present their anatomical specimens (I'm still mulling over work around collections and archives) and Sir John Soane's Museum, just for the joy of it.

Back in Devon, the Jerwood Drawing Prize is at the Burton Gallery Bideford until 11th June. Some stunning draughtsmanship on show,  but the exhibition doesn't feel as ground-breaking as it used to. A personal favourite was Jessica Killeen & Samuel Taylor's Interventional Drawing - not so much because of the process it depicts, but because of the film that resulted, which was funny, sexy and full of heart.  I also liked Nicky Rolls' Sketch 2011, a projection onto (and beyond) a notebook where people and vehicles escape the artist's framing to wander across the gallery wall. http://www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/page/3158/Jerwood+Drawing+Prize

Finally, Topophobia, which has just opened at Spacex. Curated by Polly Gould and Anne Eggebert, it revolves around the idea of fear of place and continues until 7th July.  I was particularly taken with Emily Speed's Star Fort - a surreal and emotionally resonant remaking of furniture as protection/incarceration ... and Louise K Wilson's video piece which sites the singing of a haunting madrigal in a former Cold War weapons testing facility.  The latter makes use of a subtle yet disorientating disconnect between what's seen and what's heard. http://www.spacex.org.uk/pl109.html

Lost book finds home

My book has arrived from 'The Library Of Lost Books'.  It's a German translation of a novel by Emile Zola.  I'll be working with/on it for the next few months, ready for return to the library and an exhibition in 2013.  thelibraryoflostbooks.blogspot.co.uk

Looking east

Meekyoung Shin - Ghost series

Plymouth is bouncing back after British Art Show 7 with another ambitious multi-site exhibtion Sinopticon. The exhibition is based on the 17th century notion of chinoiserie, a western construction of a fictitious orient, often expressed through decorative arts and household goods. (Willow pattern plates are the best-known example.)  The exhibition is billed as chance to explore issues such as value and taste, replication, stereotyping, racism, trade, authorship and the exotic.

I particularly liked the work at Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery which, apart from looking absolutely luscious in the recently refurbished galleries, throws new light on the museum's own collections. A highlight was Meekyoung Shin's Ghost series 2009-2011, a collection of exquisite glass-like vases fashioned entirely from soap. The work filled the whole gallery space with a scrubbed-clean, institutional aroma and drew interesting contrasts between the work of craft with the work of cleaning, holding the permanence of glass and ceramics against material that can just be washed away.

Sinopticon 28 April - 7 July 2012, various Plymouth venues www.sinopticon.org

Cultivating collaboration

'A Gift for Somerset' - wall of gifts

Cultivate 2: A Gift For Somerset raised interesting issues about collaborative working practices and how to relate them to institutions and audiences. Essentially a process of gift receipt, response and exchange between artists, it was centred on the gallery space at Taunton Brewhouse, culminating in a public exhibition 28th April - 7 June 2012.

The project was led by Simon Lee Dicker (of OSR Projects) and Karen Macdonald (an independent curator) with support from Tim Martin (Taunton Brewhouse). I was involved for two days, working as part of a group of associate artists in the gallery to respond to gifts sent in by other artists from around the world.

This collection of gifts (some physical, some conceptual, some virtual) was the starting point for a group collaboration. With just four days to produce and install a public exhibition speed, spontaneity, improvisation and collaboration were key. Flexibility and openness were vital too as the artists involved in production were a constantly shifting group.

'A Gift for Somerset' - responses to gift from Open Place

'A Gift for Somerset' - response to In the fluid tense from Jethro Brice

I focused with several others on a set of instructions, In the fluid tense, gifted by Jethro Brice. He asked us to consider, from the standpoint of the future, objects that were "once ubiquitous and mundane...now obscure" and to design prototype technology for the post-industrial world. These were then placed in a 'future museum'.

Although the content of this glass cabinet evolved constantly, at the time of the opening it contained mysterious miscellaneous metal parts (from a deconstructed and remodelled icing set found in a local charity shop), along with a model of a windmill made from old drinks cans, and drawings and a prototype of a sunlight-powered 'bulb' used by poor families in the Philippines to illuminate their homes. It was finished off with two plastic buckets (one mounted with a wheel) and a pair of found miniature metal objects whose form defied any useful function (a bucket with no bottom and a watering can with no spout).

Other parts of the icing set found their way into a response to a gift from Open Place in Ukraine. Part of this Kiev-based group's submission involved a 'Louis Vuitton'  plastic carrier. Inserts from the icing set echoed symbols on the bag and were therefore repurposed as 'future logos', divorced from brand connotations. One was projected on the wall and others hung to make shifting shadows.

The need for a public outcome was a useful point of focus, but also a source of anxiety. Putting incomplete or unresolved work on public display can make artists feel very vulnerable. This was solved by taking collective responsibility for the responsive works, which gave individuals scope to be more adventurous. Collectively, however, we faced an even greater challenge: inviting a general audience into the gallery to view what was, in some ways, a project in progress.

Gallery layout was used to give clues to the gifts' connections: received gifts were arranged in one corner around a makeshift map of locations, and responses emanated from it across the space. Thorough annotation ensured the origin and meaning of each gift and its responses could be understood. And in one work, the audience was encouraged to continue the process of gift exchange by swapping small personal items for hand-made badges. Nonetheless, for an outsider, the exhibition may have appeared as a rather random, if  rich, selection of objects and ideas. 

I still have a lot of questions about the best way to invite the public into such a process, but I take away from the project a renewed sense of optimism about the possibilities for artist collaboration. The loose, transitional production group (built around three or four core practitioners) created an informal yet purposeful atmosphere. Not reaching a wholly clear resolution means there's impetus to come back together (in some form) and move things on.

For me, the project embodies the gift economy that sustains much grassroots artistic activity - and may in the future sustain wider communites too. 

Cultivate 2: A Gift For Somerset was led by Simon Lee Dicker and Karen Macdonald . Associate artists that I worked with during my two days at Taunton Brewhouse included Tim Martin, Simon Ledson, Megan Calver, Jon England, Felicity Shillingford, Georgina Conroy,  Anna Newland Iacono, Gordon Field, Chantelle Henocq and Tasha Elena Stevens-Vallecillo.

More information at: http://osrprojects.wordpress.com/

Going back to my old school

Volkhardt Müller – Memory Lane (2012) Work in progress

In 2007, a year after I graduated, my old art college relocated from Exeter to become part of the University of Plymouth. Its former site at Earl Richards Road North (ERRN) was left to decay. Five years later, with demolition imminent, Revisions & Propositions (Sarah Bennett, Andy Klunder and Volkhardt Müller) were allowed to open the building to the public for just one weekend (31st March - 1st April 2012). They used the opportunity to show site-specific work to an invited audience, many of them former staff and students.

Derelict buildings - particularly those that are steeped in history or memory - often seem perfectly capable of speaking for themselves. When artists attempt to interpret or engage with such sites, there's always a risk they will be upstaged. The work at ERRN also had to compete with a whole array of personal memories triggered by the visit: most of us had taught or studied here and knew we were probably seeing inside the building for the last time.

The three artists wisely allowed the building to be part of the experience of the work rather than merely the setting for it. If they resented the attention given to former workspaces and other people's anecdotes, they didn't show it. Andy Klunder's work Opera Lignum was particularly generous in this respect. It allowed us time in the old wood workshop to pick our way across the damp-rippled floor, to inspect redundant safety signage and to ponder disconnected ducting and cables accompanied by his found and reclaimed recordings of active saws and lathes.

Meanwhile, Sarah Bennett’s Institutional Traits (Series 1) stepped beyond the inherent nostalgia of the event to ask some deeper questions about the organisation that was being celebrated. It featured 'mugshot' images enlarged from workplace swipe cards. These scratched and partly obliterated portraits, marked by repeated interaction with the workplace security system, become striking metaphors for the way we are changed by our complicity with institutions, sometimes to the point of self-erasure. I was left thinking of the mark the institution had left not only on myself, but also on the many people unknown to me who inhabited this building over the years

All of the work focused in one way or another on the notion of traces and residues and allowed the audience to imagine themselves as a cohort of ghosts moving through the building.

More than just an exhibition, it was an immensely social experience. Groups of people who had a connection to the institution met for the first time or were reunited after a long break. The exchange of memories - both spoken and unspoken - was incredibly powerful. 

Unfortunately, safety and security requirements meant that our tour was closely supervised, with artists talking about their work as we viewed it. With so little room for discovery and reflection, it became a rather closed experience. It was only when I broke ranks at the end of the tour and went to view the wreckage of my studio space that I began to feel a true sense of loss.

Revisions & Propositions: ERRN took place on 31st March and 1st April 2012 at the former Exeter College of Art & Design, Earl Richards Road North, Exeter.

Revisions & Propositions: http://revisionsandpropositions.newsandmediarepublic.org/artist-2/

Sarah Bennett: http://sarahbennett.org.uk/home.html

Andy Klunder: http://www.klundera.com/index.html

Volkhardt Muller: http://vm.newsandmediarepublic.org/

Lost and found

I'm delighted to have been selected to join The Library of Lost Books, a project that will culminate in an exhibition in the brand new Library of Birmingham when it opens in September 2013.

The project asks artists to engage imaginatively and technically with discarded books, catalogues, music scores and wooden archive boxes from the old library. Our task is to give them a new lease of life as art objects. 

http://thelibraryoflostbooks.blogspot.co.uk/

The Imperfect Nude

If you walked into the current exhibition at Exeter Phoenix without reading the blurb, you might think that you'd stumbled upon yet another show by a Devon art society.  The walls are stacked, floor to ceiling, with over 100 paintings centred on naked figures: some technically good but rather dull, some intriguing, some funny, some a bit tasteless, some downright bad.

However, a closer look tells you something's not quite right. There's a palpable sense of awkwardness, only half covered by a smirking sense of irony. Curators Dan Coombs and Phillip Allen assembled this collection by asking contemporary artists who more usually work in abstract or non-representational ways to respond to the subject of 'The Perfect Nude'.

The curators describe the 'the nude' as being neglected in contemporary art - and perhaps it is, in the sense of the study of a posed model (the late Lucian Freud aside). But, in fact, the naked body is ever-present in contemporary painting: in images appropriated from advertising, newspapers, art history, pornography and other reference sources. And that's largely what's on offer here.

For many contemporary UK artists the thought of standing in a studio, paint brush in hand, scrutinising another living, breathing person is beyond the pale; even though  20 or 30 years ago it was what many artists did, and the life class was still the foundation of any art training. The gallery blurb touches on the argument about the terms naked and nude, pitting art historian Kenneth Clark against art critic John Berger. In fact, many now see the study of the naked human form as an unfit subject for art - both because it implies objectification of the person and because it's been done to death.

Though there are some interesting paintings here, I'm most intrigued by the artists who seem to have cast back to old art school days and produced classically posed 'realistic' nudes, some of which have wobbly unconnected heads, tube-like limbs and poorly delineated hands and feet. Are these deliberately bad paintings? Are these artists presenting themselves to us naked and vulnerable? "I've done my best but see, it's true, many successful modern artists can't represent the human form in paint".

So, is it time to stop being so prudish, face up to our inadequacies and get back to the life room - or was it a lucky escape from an irrelevant, even suspect, genre?
 
The Perfect Nude runs 29 March - 12 May 2012 at Exeter Phoenix Galleries, Bradninch Place, Gandy Street, Exeter, EX4 3LS.http://theperfectnude.wordpress.com 

See also my blog entry about life class http://gabriellehoad.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/naked-truth.html 

Bookwork - Divide (The Territorial Imperative)

Divide (The Territorial Imperative) |  2008
Guillotined book, bricks and digital print

This work was made for a group show in Exeter Central Library centred on an artists’ walk around Exeter Quay and a nearby trading estate. “A walk – like a narrative – unfolds though time. Yet its flow may be interrupted: a wall blocks the view, a high fence bars the route…”

The book was The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey and it was cut in half for me by a local printer. We both had a telling moment of doubt before committing the act.

Bookwork - A Guidebook of Supposed Lies

A Guidebook of Supposed Lies | 2004 | Found book with additions

A Guidebook of Supposed Lies is part of an ongoing investigation into marginalia and readers’ interventions in library books (from coffee stains to scholarly arguments). A found copy of Francis Chichester's Gipsy Moth Circles the World was given a new dust jacket, library date stamp sticker, catalogue number, bar code and other additions. In an attempt at collaborative authorship, it was then liberated into the Plymouth University Library with the instruction that  “This book is to be improved on or before the date stamped below…”

The book's new title is drawn from The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje and the dust jacket contains a quote from the same book: “When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts and faded unknown animals alongside them.” 

Bookwork - Threads (Crusoe Revisited)

Threads (Crusoe Revisited) | 2007 | Found book, thread

I'm reviewing some of my old bookworks in preparation for making a proposal or two. This piece was based on a found copy of Robinson Crusoe and was shown as part of 'Bibliomania', Holden Gallery, Manchester in 2007.

Robinson Crusoe was a story remembered from my childhood, which I revisited after a chance encounter with a copy of the novel in a charity shop;  the reunion was rather less cosy than I'd hoped.

The stitching I inserted throughout this book both embodies the narrative thread and destroys it. It was made with thoughts of Roland Barthes’ ‘writerly’ texts where the thread is a kind of ‘deliberate static’ that interferes with the possibility of losing oneself in the book.

Why all the bananas?

Banana Island aka Cranana | Cress grown on canvas | 2012

My sudden obsession with making images of bananas stems from a project I'm researching called Foreign Soil. Carried out in partnership with OrganicArts and West Town Farm, and in consultation with banana cultivation and climate-change experts, it's a proposal to grow edible dessert bananas outdoors in the UK. 

By suggesting that we impose this tropical alien on the traditional Devon countryside, I'm hoping to throw all sorts of issues into sharp relief, such as what it means to eat locally produced food and the implications of peak oil and other disruptions to global trade.

Twenty-eight drawings later

I've been nominated for the Aye-Aye Books/28 Drawings Later Innovation Prize.

Twenty-six drawings later

Foreign soil West Town Farm clay on paper

One drawing a day as part of the 28 Drawings Later project  http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

Twenty drawings later

One drawing a day as part of the 28 Drawings Later project  http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

Nineteen drawings later

Fourteen drawings later

Sugar banana

One drawing a day as part of the 28 Drawings Later project  http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

Eleven drawings later

Ten drawings later

Flour banana

 One drawing a day as part of the 28 Drawings Later project  http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

Nine drawings later

Still going (not always so strong). Still banana flavoured. One drawing a day as part of the 28 Drawings Later project http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

24-hour arty people

Haroon Mirza Untitled, featuring untitled works by James Clarkson (2012) - Spike Island installation view

Cramming in the art before I have to go back to earning money. Thursday night: Rushed from a talk on Blast Theory by Gabriella Giannachi, Director of the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter at Spacex to David Blandy's opening of Passage of the Soul at Exeter Phoenix.

Friday, off to Bristol to see the astonishing and charmingly geeky  /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| by Haroon Mirza at Spike Island. (May have more to say on this.) Also in the galleries, Suzanne Mooney's intriguing photographs The Edge of Collapse. 

Then up to the Arnolfini to see The Museum Show Part II - an interesting survey of artists' collecting strategies, and a chance encounter with a screening of Monica Ross' Acts of Memory 2009-2010, a timely commemoration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights through individual acts of memorisation.

Blast Theory Bless Practice runs until 18th February 2012 at Spacex
David Blandy Passage of the Soul runs until 17th March 2012 at Exeter Phoenix
Haroon Mirza and Suzanne Mooney run until 25th March 2012 at Spike Island, Bristol
The Museum Show Part II runs until 19th February 2012 at Arnolfini, Bristol
Acts of Memory - http://www.actsofmemory.net/

Two drawings later

Banana leaf on a banana skin (bruise drawing) for 28 Drawings Later project http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

One drawing later

Have accepted the challenge to do one drawing a day for the 28 days of February as part of the online celebration of drawing: 28 Drawings Later. I'm going to use it mostly to think around a possible project proposal, but I'm also enjoying the incredible diversity of other people's responses to the challenge. Drawing rules! http://www.facebook.com/28DrawingsLater

Telling stories in the dark

Spent a couple of hours on Sunday at the National Trust's A la Ronde property in Exmouth. The house is currently 'put to bed' for winter, but you can go on a guided torchlight tour, peeking under dustsheets and into dark cabinets. As an added treat, there's contemporary work by artist Hayley Lock on show.

A la Ronde is a unique 16-sided house, created in the 18th century by the Parminter cousins, two ladies who loved to travel, to collect and to make things, especially out of shells, feathers, sand, and cut-out paper. Hayley Lock's (Now that would be) Telling is the perfect match - a collection of miniature, sparkly and eccentric items placed around the house.

Apart from its slicker digital elements and its cheeky knowingness, Lock's work could almost have been made by the Parminters themselves. It's accompanied by a text by Liz Williams that re-imagines the daily life of the cousins, moving around the house, following the sun.

(Now that would be) Telling is at A la Ronde, Summer Lane,  Exmouth, Devon EX8 5BD until 5th February 2012

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/alaronde/

Busy bees

Mario Merz Lingotto 1968 (brush-wood, beeswax and steel)

I didn't have much time at Tate Modern yesterday, but I did manage a quick whizz round the Energy and Process section. It's good just to be an art tourist sometimes: to switch off the intellect, enjoy what's presented and see what stays with you. This piece by Mario Merz - which seems part fairytale, part celebration of the virtues of honest labour - is the one that's stuck. A block of beeswax sits on a welded steel frame, backed by neat bundles of twigs used for sweeping. Lingotto is Italian for  'ingot' (as in gold) but is also a district of the artist's home city of Turin, famous for its Fiat factory.

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?venueid=2&showid=2338