Safety in numbers

Preston Street Union - The inertia of the unknown  - Art Week Exeter 2017

As I disappeared inside a giant improvised paper envelope a couple of weeks ago, I felt a real sense of liberation. I was doing it simply because someone had written 'inside the lining of a duvet' on a card I had been dealt and this was the closest me and my fellow artists could manage with the resources available. We were following instructions generated by the Preston Street Union Random Art Machine.

It may sound odd, but the responsibilities of an artist can sometimes feel onerous. For the best of reasons, you get quite locked into particular themes and particular ways of working, and it seems a little irresponsible to deviate. So the idea of submerging yourself in a group identity, then going on to make spontaneous, randomly generated, collaborative work, feels like a real holiday. Sharing responsibility for outcomes means you can take risks and play in a way you probably haven't done since before college - but you really should do all the time.

Preston Street Union is an affiliation of artists from in and around Exeter who were first brought together by Trevor Pitt during his 2015 residency at Spacex gallery. Given the wild diversity of our artistic concerns and our different career stages, it amazes me that we've continued working together, but we have - each in parallel with our own individual practices. Sometimes all we make when we're together is a mess - that's the nature of experimentation. But this time - for Art Week Exeter - I think we (mostly) got it right. We took the risk of creating works live in the gallery and involved the wider public as contributors, spectators and occasional participants.

Responses were largely positive. We were included in Maddy Hearn's survey of Art Week Exeter for a-n.co.uk and reviewed by Terah Walkup, Curator of Fine Art at Plymouth City Museum for the AWE blog. Her words are quoted below.

"Visitors to PS45 in the former Spacex gallery, hosting the Preston Street Union Random Art Machine and the exhibition, Being Human, were in for a treat. Possibly one of the most joyous collaborations during Art Week Exeter, the Random Art Machine was the modern-day inheritor of Dadaism and mid-century performance art.

One year into their association, the affiliation of artists that make up Preston Street Union came together in a project that was both risky and chaotic but whose end product was a successful collaboration that business consultants would pay oodles to replicate. These artists relinquished control of the material, concept, and even title of the works of art they came together to create. Audiences tweeted titles, visitors brought in assorted objects and materials, and participants at the Art Market jotted down concepts on dozens of note cards. After a bout with a dart gun, I witnessed the creation of a work titled Sky Grid – a response to Tolstoy’s War and Peace (one of the prompts) – that unfolded in a conceptual performance whose real value lay not in the final tug-of-war game – which a more astute reviewer could read as metaphor – but in the preparatory conversations and negotiations that make up the interpretive process of art-making."

The Preston Street Union Random Art Machine featured as part of Art Week Exeter 2017 and was supported by Spacex.