Enter the ecoids

My banana-growing project Foreign Soil entered an exciting new phase last week, with a field trip to the site of my future plantation: West Town Farm at Ide. I was working with Chris Hunt, an MRes Digital Art and Technology student at Plymouth University, to install a number of data loggers loaned by i-DAT.   

Known as ecoids they allow remote sensing of environmental factors such as light levels, temperature, humidity and wind strength. We're running a month-long pilot project, to see how the technology gets on with the farm and the farm gets on with the technology. If things go well, we'll install them across a wider area for a longer period of time in the hopes of finding microclimates where tender plants might thrive. http://britishbanana.blogspot.co.uk/ 

People are strange

Becky Beasley Spring Rain, Spike Island (2013)

I find myself asking if it's possible to see a bad show at Spike Island. There's something about the gallery spaces - so generous, so bright, so peacefully focused on the business of good art - that everything feels right within them. 

Becky Beasley's 'Spring Rain' is a great example. From the cucumber-coloured linoleum in the first part (with the footprint of Duchamp's Etant Donnes inset in black) to a pair of gently rotating black lacquered objects at the end, the show is sparse and yet rich with connections, complex and yet easy to engage with.

At its heart is the theme of pairings - male and female, his and hers, peg and hole, positive and negative, object and cast. There's a bawdy humour at work, but only of the gentlest sort. It's almost as if Beasley has put Duchamp's voyeurism and potential misogyny back in its (surprisingly small) box.  This is England. This is domesticity. This is comical home-grown veg and married sex.

Large-scale hand-coloured photographs of curly cucumbers and spinning casts of tiny brass gherkins sit alongside images of a tablecloth and a handkerchief, both of which have mysterious yet apparently functional holes at their centres. The title of the show is taken from an affecting short story by Bernand Malamud that touches on distance and intimacy - the fragile connections between self and others.

In an interesting move, Beasley has chosen works by Richard Hamilton and Charles Jones to accompany her show. Hamilton's precise and witty photographic montages echo her concerns with interior space, but it's the photographs of everyday vegetables by Jones that best match her emotional timbre. Never exhibited in his lifetime, the images were only discovered by accident in 1981 in a suitcase at a Bermondsey antiques market. They are so intimate and tender they could almost be classed as portraits.

'Spring Rain' shows alongside the fascinating video installation 'Back to Back' by Uriel Orlow, which utilises sound bleed between two video pieces to talk about the past haunting the present in Armenia/Turkey.  Runs 26 January - 31 March 2013 at Spike Island.

I also visited the rather chaotic 'No Borders' at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (until 2 June) featuring Ai Weiwei's Ton of Tea and Yto Barrada's Sleepers.  And 'Version Control' at the Arnolfini (2 February -14 April), a survey of performance, performance documentation and appropriation in contemporary practice.  There was too much to take in during one short, crowded visit,  but I especially liked Eva & Franco Mattes' The Others. This collection of appropriated personal photographs and song recordings found on other people's hard drives was oddly touching.  It seemed to tie up perfectly with Becky Beasley's reflections on the familiarity and strangeness of other people.

Open studios and closed shops

Sissy Lange Not Open Space (2013)

It was good to see a little collaboration, mutual support and sharing this weekend in Exeter between the well-established annual Exeter Open Studios event and the inaugural fringe event, NOSE 2013. This pairing helped to blur the boundaries between commercial, craft-based and ideas-led practices and give audiences an opportunity to encounter and experience a wider spectrum of art than is usually available in a traditional open studios set-up.

Shadow-curated by Stuart Crewes, NOSE stood for Not Exeter Open Studios and set out "to frame the entire City as a spectacular event, albeit at times elusive and surreptitious." While chance discovery of art is always fun, there's also the risk that too much elusiveness and secrecy will defeat the attempts of committed audience members to see the work. Indeed, unable to plan much of schedule in advance, I missed a quite a bit of what was on offer.

Events included 5 minutes dreaming, part of a wider work called This City's Centre by Blind Ditch (cancelled due to the bad weather on the day I went looking for it), Sissy Lange's Not Open Space (see above), Unexpected Collected's Open Museum, and Sam White's portable camera obscura.

I found a copy of Nick Davies' Psychogeog pack but have saved the psychogeography-inspired run around Exeter for a sunnier day. I also made it to the glorious chaos that was the PUNY GODS pop-up film festival in one of the city's empty shops. This cinematic marathon showed work by more than 60 independent Southwest film makers for nine hours a day over three days.

Puny Gods: Exeter Open Studios Edition - 52 Fore Street, Exeter

I finished the weekend with Felicity Shillingford's Trip Hazards and Sharp Edges, a tour of some of Exeter's public sculptures which were draped in hazard tape under the watchful gaze of city centre CCTV, and concluded with the inevitable arrival of private security personnel.

Felicity Shillingford Trip Hazards and Sharp Edges (2013)

During the weekend I also visited some very interesting open studios shows by Richard Rochester, Jilly Edwards, Jenny Southam, Stella Tripp, Karen Ringrose and James Romain, as well as the event's taster show at Gloss.

NOSE 2013 ran in conjunction with Exeter Open Studios from Friday 22 - Sunday 24 March 2013 at sites across Exeter.

Alternative cinema

Thanks to David Salas, I've made it into this weekend's NOSE, a companion event to the city's annual Exeter Open Studios.  David's running one of his regular pop-up cinema events and my video pieces, She produces the text (2006-12) and Bound (Gravity Drawing) (2008), are among more than 60 short films being shown in this marathon clubby filmfest.

Puny Gods

Friday 22nd, Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th March
12.00 noon - 9.00pm

52 Fore Street (empty shop opposite BHS) 

Exeter

www.punygods.com

Birds and bananas

Have been trying to work out how my banana project Foreign Soil and my larger body of work on bird flight fit together. Maybe they don't. Maybe the increasing focus on botanical themes in my work is a completely new direction and I'm in an awkward transition phase. But I tend to believe that your work may take you on some interesting and worthwhile journeys, but it usually brings you back to the same place.

The banana project began at a point where I didn't have a lot of exhibiting commitments and so I gave myself permission to do anything. And I realised I'd been thinking about growing bananas in Devon every since a casual conversation with Christine Duff of Organic Arts in 2009. I then found myself involved in The Library of Lost Books and made a work about seed banks, so there's a preoccupation with ecological change.

But I also think it's interesting that my bird flight work is concerned with testing the limits of objectivity, that is, trying to be really precise about what's out there in the world. With the banana project and its nod to scientific research, I'm doing almost precisely the opposite - trying to will something into existence through sheer force of documentation.

Seeing the difference - Exeter and visual art

It's 10 years since I gave up my 'proper' job in London and headed off to Exeter to start a new one as a freelance artist and writer.  If I'd known then what I know now about artists' careers (not to mention rising fuel and travel prices) I might have stayed put.  But, at the time, it seemed important to put myself in a completely new place physically if I was going to be in a new place mentally. And, looking back, I'm pleased to see just how much Exeter has developed as a centre for visual arts.

When I graduated from Exeter School of Art & Design in 2006, the college was about to relocate to join its parent organisation, Plymouth University, and the prospects of any thriving visual arts scene in the city looked bleak. We had a smattering of galleries in the city and an annual open studios event, but the ground for new artists was sterile.  It was clear anything I did, from exhibiting to finding studio space, was going to have to be self generated.

However, it's hard to describe the level of inertia I encountered. At the very first meeting about setting up studio space, an artist who'd lived and worked in the city for several years came along solely to tell us that it 'couldn't be done'.

These days Exeter feels like a different place. A centre of excellence even back then, Spacex now engages more actively with local artists providing freelance and  professional development opportunities, small commissions and occasional residencies.

Its near neighbour Exeter Phoenix has been showing good quality contemporary art in its galleries for a few years now and offers a number of exhibiting and professional development opportunities for SW visual artists. It's become home to Double Elephant print workshop, which has recently started to offer residencies and bursaries to contemporary artists. And to start-up PrtSctPress, which produces risograph artist editions.

OrganicArts, the farm-based arts and education charity has gone from strength to strength since 2006, and the Centre for Contemporary Art & the Natural World (CCANW) found a home at nearby Haldon (though it's soon to relocate to Exeter University and work on a project basis).  The university itself has recently launched courses and research programmes in Art History and Visual Culture and is working hard through its Arts & Culture team to engage with the wider community in Exeter.

Last but not least, the newly refurbished Royal Albert Memorial Museum has just appointed a panel to advise on contemporary arts programming. And the city council in general is much more arts friendly, perhaps looking to its competitor Plymouth and seeing the surge in energy and profile that hosting BAS2011 brought.

As a result, more artists with energy and ideas seem to be basing themselves here. There are now two group studios offering access to workspace: EVA (offspring of the project that 'couldn't be done') and the new Arts Hub.  These complement the private studios that have sat above Spacex for many years. Best of all, we've seen a number of artist-led projects such as No Guts No Glory, DIY, This City's Centre, NOSE2013 and Stowage.  Exciting times for Exeter.  At last I can allow myself to feel at home.