Social practice in isolation

Preston Street Union | Instructions to live by | 2020

I've spent the autumn immersing myself in social art practice, through two excellent projects. The first was a social art study group - (un)Survey - organised by Blind Ditch. Over six weeks Blind Ditch shared an incredibly rich and thought-provoking range of content including online presentations from Paul Hartley of In-Situ Arts, Natasha Davis, Ellie Harrison and Clare Parker. 

Along with the rest of Preston Street Union (PSU), I've also helped to user-test a new social art practice platform - Social ARTery for Axis. An allied Axis project, the Social Art Library is also underway, to which I/we contributed a case study of PSU's Galleries R Us. 

Both projects raise many interesting questions about the role of artist activists in communities. For example...What kinds of change could or should artists try to effect? How do artists look after themselves and their practices when involved in projects with significant social impact? What are the ethics of involving non-art professionals in your work (eg care of participants, aftercare, legacy, authorship etc)?  

A pandemic is an odd time - but perhaps also the right time - to be thinking about social art practice, which has had to dramatically reinvent itself over the past nine months, but which may also have an important role to play in post-Covid rebuilding. 

Open-Up at Hestercombe

Here's a short video about 'Open Up' at Hestercombe Gardens in Somerset, which features Salt-cat (keeps them at home) - a work I made with Megan Calver -  as well as works by Richard Long, Sarah Bennett, Jon England, Jo Lathwood, Philippa Lawrence and Lucy Soni.

The works, distributed across all three of the period gardens at Hestercombe and beyond, range from subtle interventions involving copper plant tags, pigeon rings and galvanised nails, to bold stacked colours, giant bunting and orchard ladders. All artworks were installed and opened at different times during August and the beginning of September 2020 and are on show into 2021. 

See https://www.hestercombe.com for current opening times and booking details. 

https://vimeo.com/488155018

(be)wilder

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | (be)wilder - work in progress | September 2020

Last Saturday Megan Calver and I delivered a workshop for the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton relating to the touring Artist Rooms exhibition: Richard Long’s ‘Being in the Moment’. Commissioned earlier this year, pre-Covid-19, the workshop has been postponed and reshaped several times. Eventually we all agreed we could go ahead with a shortened two-hour session for a small group, accepting we would be constrained by the need to maintain safe distances and keep each participant's tools and materials entirely separate.

Six people joined us in the gallery garden on 19 September to think about landscape, language and movement. Using random processes, we extracted phrases from a range of natural history books. We reordered them both through paper edits and by speaking them out together while moving round the gallery gardens. We wanted to skirt the generalisation and categorisation that necessarily characterises natural history books and instead honour the complexity and specificity of the land and its inhabitants. In short, we hoped to subdue habitual responses and bewilder ourselves into making new connections with the wild.

High winds added to the giddy feeling of being physically reunited with other people in a creative endeavour. Gusts ripped papers from our hands and carried our voices away. At the end we secured everything on the ground with rows of stones: one giant collaborative text for/in/on the wild.

Richard Long ‘Being in the Moment', Thelma Hulbert Gallery - 11 July 2020 to 31 October 2020

(be)wilder workshop 19 September 2020

Open-Up at Hestercombe Gardens

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Salt-cat (keeps them at home) | 2020 | Work in progress for Open-Up, Hestercombe Gardens

Open-Up is a brand new series of outdoor artworks commissioned by Hestercombe Gallery in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

This new exhibition features eight artists with intimate knowledge of Hestercombe, many of whom have responded to the landscapes on the estate in the past. The works, on display across all three of the period gardens at Hestercombe and beyond, range from subtle interventions involving copper plant tags, pigeon rings and galvanised nails, to bold stacked colours, giant bunting and orchard ladders.

All artwork will be installed and opened at different times during August and the beginning of September.

The show centres on a flagship commission by Richard Long Jackdaw Line in Hestercombe’s Georgian Landscape Garden. Other artists include Sarah Bennett, Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad, Jon England, Jo Lathwood, Philippa Lawrence and Lucy Soni.

Open Wednesday to Sunday each week, 10am – 6pm (last entry 3.30pm). Due to current Covid-19 restrictions, all visits must be pre-booked online by 5pm on the day before you wish to travel.

Hestercombe Gardens, Cheddon Fitzpaine, Taunton, Somerset TA2 8LG

https://www.hestercombe.com/event/open-up-outdoor-gallery-exhibition/

Walking Bodies

Looking forward to the publication of Walking Bodies from Triarchy Press next month. It features pigeon steps, a provocation I made in 2019 with Megan Calver, alongside lots of truly exciting new thinking (and doing) in contemporary walking arts practice. Edited by Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind and Phil Smith, who also organised the conference in Plymouth in 2019 from which it derives. 

 https://www.triarchypress.net/walkingbodies.html

Salt-cat (keeps them at home) 2020

Salt-cat (keeps them at home) | 2020 |  Found text and objects, bird rings

I'm delighted to announce the installation of a temporary site-specific work, Salt-cat (keeps them at home), made with Megan Calver in the grounds of Hestercombe House. It shows alongside work by Jo Lathwood, Philippa Lawrence, Luci Soni, Jon England and Sarah Bennett, and accompanies a newly commissioned outdoor work by Richard Long: Jackdaw Line.

Salt-cat was a type of cake made by pigeon breeders to entice their birds to stay or return home. Its ingredients included gravel, lime, saltpetre and stale urine. Drawing on Hestercombe’s archive, as well as sources such as The Sportsman's Dictionary of 1800, we gathered a small flock of text fragments that relate to this practice. These phrases now nestle, together yet separate, in Perspex pigeonholes in a vestibule leading from the terrace garden. Referencing Hestercombe’s 19th century dovecote (now part of the visitor reception office), the work also reflects on people's renewed attachment to home brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

When installing the work we decided not to disturb the current inhabitants of the space (past and present) –  leaving in place their dust, debris, webs, cocoons, moults, droppings and other remains –  incorporating them instead into our work. This ‘dirt’ seemed especially affecting at a time when there’s so much a focus on hygiene and cleanliness.

It's a welcome return to working with pigeons as subject matter; they also feature in Solid Air (2014), Columbarium (2014) and pigeon steps (2019). At the same time, it extends a series of text-based works and proposals made with Megan Calver over the past two years that began with Turn (the) Leaves in 2018. 

The cards with text that form part of Salt-cat were screen-printed for us by George Barron at Double Elephant Print Workshop.

'Open-Up' - a series of outdoor commissions curated by Tim Martin
From 12 August 2020 (new works added on a rolling basis) - Wed-Sun 10am-6pm 
Hestercombe Gardens, Cheddon Fitzpaine, Taunton, Somerset TA2 8LG
https://www.hestercombe.com/gallery/

https://www.hestercombe.com/event/open-up-outdoor-gallery-exhibition/

Looking back: The Buffer Zone (2016)

Gabrielle Hoad, Megan Calver & Susie David: 'Throw only to an alert catcher'  |  2016

Focused on Dawlish Warren National Nature Reserve, The Buffer Zone was a site-responsive collaboration between myself, Megan Calver and Susie David, supported by a bursary from a-n The Artist Information Company. Setting out to create dialogue between the human and nonhuman, often through strategies such as mimicry and hiding, this self-organised residency sowed the seeds of many approaches I still work with and a collaboration that continues to the present day with Megan Calver.

This is the blog entry I wrote for a-n on 4th May 2016 - and it still feels relevant.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve found ourselves almost overwhelmed by the possibilities for work that Dawlish Warren opens up for us. The a-n Professional Development Bursary is something of an anchor. So I’m returning to our starting point – the Buffer Zone – to think about our progress so far.

Dawlish Warren includes a popular beach resort and a nature reserve that extends across a low-lying and constantly shifting spit of sand; in between them is an area known as the Buffer Zone. According to a 2006 Teignbridge Council report, the Buffer Zone exists “to absorb and dissipate the high level visitor usage pressure […] minimising conflicts with the demands of protecting the Nature Reserve”. It’s also an important habitat in its own right, where many species thrive ̶ alongside humans and their dogs.

While the Nature Reserve raises questions about what constitutes ‘nature’ and whether it can or should be ‘reserved’ or ‘preserved’ or ‘conserved’ in relation to human activity, the Buffer Zone is a complex, transitional site that acknowledges the interrelationship between human and other interests. It’s been a powerful trigger for our shared inquiry into human/nonhuman dialogue.

It also stands as a useful metaphor for our own collaboration. The project brings together three independent but related practices with a view to finding out more about where they intersect. The Buffer Zone is a designated ‘soft’ space where our practices can safely bump up against one another and mingle. But it often also results in work no one of us would have devised alone. So in this second sense, a buffer might be a way of moderating the impact of self-censorship and allowing a wider range of ideas to thrive.

In a third sense, found in computing, a buffer is a shared area or holding place where data is screened and processed. So our buffer zone is where we consider together what can be publicly shared – and how; what should be held back and what needs more space to grow. These conversations can be complex.

While at the Dawlish Warren Buffer Zone and Nature Reserve, we’re each gathering research and documentation to feed individual work. But we’re also taking advantage of the opportunity to work together in ways that are new to all of us – specifically, experimenting with live activations of space, body and matter. In challenging and supporting each other to take creative risks, we’ve entered a territory where none of us feels completely comfortable. We also find ourselves creating a new and unruly body of shared work that is disrupting our ideas about how to document, develop, refine and attribute outcomes. It feels like a fitting response to this dynamic, liminal place.

Resulting work was shown in 'Throw only to an alert catcher' in three beach huts on site at Dawlish in October 2016. The work, which included a video reel and artist publication lie lie lie, later transferred to Gallery 333, Exeter Phoenix.

The project was also featured in a paper presented by Mark Leahy ‘after alert catchers: a report on an other (than) worded event’ at Beyond Words: Privileging the Unspoken in Arts and Communities in a Posthuman World, Plymouth University, March 2017 . An edited version of the film Throw only to an alert catcher (2016) was screened at Jamboree 2018, Dartington, Devon.

not really now not any more

The Abode of Love (Unrealised Project) | 2020

Some thoughts on an unrealised project: The Abode of Love (2020)

The wonderfully named ‘Abode of Love’ is a secluded area under the promenade at Exmouth beach. Dating back to the 1930s (or earlier), it's around 100 metres long and consists of nine concrete seating bays. Last year, the Town Council partnered up with the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in nearby Honiton to ask artists to consider its future. I was invited, with Megan Calver, to propose a way of engaging local young people creatively with the space, to encourage a sense of ownership and responsibility for it.

The Abode of Love is an ideal hideaway for all kinds of secretive activity (which is presumably also what earned this space its local nickname - and its bad reputation). One of the most notable features of the site was years-worth of overwritten graffiti. Far from being the usual tagging and spray-painting, the Abode’s graffiti mostly consisted of lightly scratched names and dates, and many references to sex and romance. Occasional high tides also leave their own mark on the site, washing away paint and depositing debris. Making frequent visits, we observed changes to the site over time and talked to some of the people who used it and cared for it.

Rather than erase or ignore the graffiti, Megan Calver and I devised a plan to work with local young people to amplify and transform what we found there, reading it closely and then taking it out of the shelter into the world through formalised speaking and walking actions (and ultimately through soundwork and publications). We were interested in why people wrote on and marked the space and what they hoped to achieve in these acts of private yet public expression. We also wondered about things that still needed to be said and if there might be alternative ways of sharing them. The work was partly informed by an enigmatic piece of graffiti at a train station that inspired Alan Garner’s 1973 novel Red Shift – “not really now not any more”. Written beneath two lovers’ names, the graffiti led Garner to create three intertwined stories of adolescent love, set in different time periods but within the same landscape.

Our proposal was initially accepted, but then circumstances changed and the Covid-19 epidemic hit. The gallery asked us to rethink our commission for a different site and suddenly the Abode was covered in colourful murals.

I feel disappointed that our proposal for this space has now been closed down indefinitely by the comprehensive overpainting of many layers of public writing. I wish we had enacted it, if only with friends. It raises all kinds of questions about what public space is for and who gets to use it: questions we rather hoped to explore with our young collaborators.

Visit the show of a rival...

LEAN | 12-page publication | 2020

Just released: Visit the show of a rival... a tiny 12-page publication (8.5 x 9.5cm) documenting a number of actions I made with Megan Calver at various exhibitions across the South West 2018-19.  Each of these slight and fleeting interventions enacts a score first devised for a project called LEAN, commissioned for the Od Arts Festival in 2018.  As part of an exploration of rivalry and cooperation, we elbowed in on shows by, among others, Philippa Lawrence, Janet Sainsbury, Jacqui Hallum, Susie David, Jon England and Scott McMillan -- and recorded the results. 

Locked-down freedoms

Still from ORBIT (out of play) | 1m 20s digital video | 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic marks a period in which many of the activities that had become the core of my practice - collaboration, participation and working with specific sites - became impossible or severely curtailed. The shock of work being halted and cancelled, literally overnight, was immense. But I am one of the lucky ones, with reasonable living space and just enough resources to tide me over.  I've therefore enjoyed some positive aspects to lockdown. This pause in business as usual has provided me with my first extended time out in about six (frankly exhausting) years. After 12 weeks, I feel I have just about caught up with myself.

It took me a couple of weeks to get my bearings. While many arts organisations immediately went into overdrive, recruiting artists to generate digital content and participate in online activities, I was still trying to process the immensity of what we were facing and work out the basic elements of survival for myself and those close to me.

Initially I was glad of the time to wrap up Anyone may come and go Preston Street Union's commission for RAMM. As a group, we then went on the contribute to Adam Garratt's online 'lightboxcolab' project.  I  also worked with Megan Calver to put our future work for the Thelma Hulbert Gallery on ice with a short promo video. She and I later set to work on a long-postponed publication to wrap up LEAN, our project for Od Festival in 2018.

Although the empty weeks that stretched ahead encouraged me to think big, I settled instead for working in short bursts on small projects to allow for the other inevitable tensions, intrusions, worries and responsibilities of  living through a pandemic. I made a couple of unsuccessful applications(what's new?) but have also had a few generous invitations to make new work.

I set about teaching myself editing with Vegas Movie Studio, trying to work with video as a medium in its own right, rather than just a means of documentation. It's early days but I contributed a video work the predecessor to your prayer to Forced Collaboration and made ORBIT (out of play), based on my daily circular lockdown walks, for an informal Zoom project 'Stilled Lives'. This film grew from an image I made for a lockdown show 'together / apart' at That Art Gallery, Bristol.

I've been incredibly appreciative of the opportunity to view online and for free, gallery, film and performance works that would otherwise have required a trip to London (or even further afield). Highlights have been Tacita Dean's Event for a Stage (a rare opportunity to see her work in digital format), Mark Wallinger's Threshold to the Kingdom, Helen Cammock's They Call It Idlewild, John Smith's The Black Tower, Ed Atkins' Old Food, Hofesh Schecter's Clowns, Fabrizio Terranova's Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, Complicite's The Encounter and Simon Stephens' The Sea Wall.

No doubt we will emerge from lockdown to a changed world, but I feel more ready to face it after this chance to pause and reflect. I hope we can 'build back better' - politically, socially and environmentally. There are interesting times ahead, in which activism may be one of the most important uses of artists' time and effort.

Looking back: LEAN (2018)

This score, devised by myself and Megan Calver was part of LEAN. Made for the Od Arts Festival 2018, LEAN was a series of objects and actions designed to prompt thought and conversation around ideas of rivalry and cooperation. Visit the show of a rival was inspired by a conversation we'd had about objects that get parked or left in gallery spaces. Two of our favourites were an electric organ and a sandwich trolley, but things such as brooms, dustbins, clipboards, clothes, toys and scrawled notes have also appeared in our shows over the years.

Lean (Tools for Rivals) for Od 2018, was a series of everyday leaning objects such as a clothes prop, door wedges, branches and walking sticks that were inserted into displays across the festival. They were identifiable only by subtle markings in fluorescent paint or tape and were used to distract from and disrupt our artistic rivals’ work. Over the following 18 months, we continued to place objects in various south-west galleries and to document them. A forthcoming 12-page publication showcases a few of those actions and invites new ones.

LEAN was originally commissioned by Simon Lee Dicker & Bob Gelsthorpe for The Art of Rivalry, Od Arts Festival 2018. 

Looking back: River Bovey Walk (2008)

The distance travelled by foot, travelled by hand (River Bovey Walk) - detail with pedometer | 2008 - | Pencil on paper

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work.

Although this is an old work, it relates to my ongoing interest in tracking movement and measuring. It came to mind again when I visited the (currently suspended) Richard Long show at Thelma Hulbert Gallery Here I was reunited with Long’s Silbury Hill (1970-1), which acted as a major inspiration.

I was attempting to tie together, as closely as possible, the experience of a riverside walk and the process of remembering it later in the studio. Rather than re-walking it, I chose a slower method more akin to writing: I am drew a fine, condensed pencil line on paper.

I recreated the walk in sections, drawing a continuous line between two markers 50cm apart. Each section covers approximately 220 metres of the 6.643km walk and took about eight hours to complete. The walk itself, in total, lasted about 90 minutes. Yet the enormous difference in pace and duration belies the similarities between the two events. As I drew, I was constantly reminded of the process of walking. The drawing was repetitive, rhythmic, meditative. It slowed my mind and allowed it to wander. Both events were about my body moving through space. The paper, like the landscape, has a terrain which the pencil has to accommodate – sometimes it slows it progress, sometimes it throws it off the intended path. Small wobbles of the hand disturbed the precise measure and begin to form ripples that recall the flow of water and the strata of rocks.

Sections of this work were shown in 'Torre Abbey Contemporary Open' (2009), 'Drawn In' (2009) and 'River Bovey Walk' (2008).

Looking back: Working with mathematical surfaces (2012- )

The Luminous Envelope #3 (Unravelled octahedron) | 2015 | Digital photograph 59.4 x 84.1 cm

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Although I find advanced mathematics utterly bewildering, I notice there is a common thread in a lot of my digital work that relates to surfaces. I don’t mean surfaces in the usual artistic sense of touch and texture but abstract entities of infinite scale (but no volume) described by points and lines. Mathematicians talk about them using symbols and numbers and, more recently, model and view them using 3D visualisation software.

My first encounter with mathematical surfaces was when I tried to use 3-D printing (laser sintering) to create objects from GPS flight data generated by gliders and birds. It’s relatively easy to plot successive points in space in a computer program and to link them into a screen-based ‘surface’ that you can manipulate in virtual space, but turning those points into a scaled, real-world object with physical volume is a whole other matter.

I encountered a similar issue when in 2015 I was invited to work with a range of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. These rendered mathematical formulae as plaster models (ie represented abstract entities as tangible objects you could sit on a shelf). I was particularly fascinated by the claim that such objects were locked away in the 1940s "to protect students from the dangers of intuition". In fact, the constant refrain from Professor Sam Howison, who patiently guided a group of artists through engagement with the collection, was that we were dealing with “surfaces not solids”, even as we held the heavy plaster objects in our hands.

The image above shows one of the photographs I made in response to a model of Fresnel's Wave Surface. The original model represents light waves emanating from a crystal as a solid object. The photographs make use of polarisation to dissolve sculptural objects into zones of colour. (Polarisation, incidentally, is a technique frequently used in the study of crystals.)  It was commissioned by Metron in collaboration with Oxford University Mathematical Institute and shown as part of ‘Illegitimate Objects’ at Oxford University Mathematical Institute (2015).

In this context of things that (imperfectly) co-exist in the infinite abstract and bounded physical realms, I was fascinated to be introduced last year to the myth of Skidbladnir by Anna Heinrich and Leon Palmer. Skidbladnir was the ship of the Norse gods, which was so large that it could hold on board all the gods with all their weapons, arms, and horses, yet could be folded up and put in a pocket like a handkerchief (or possibly, I considered, a memory stick).

More details

Looking back: Interloper (2014)

Interloper | 2014 | 12-page publication + large-scale print on vinyl banner (175 x 84cm)

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Interloper, made for Oxford Botanic Garden in 2014, was a particular turning point for me. For this project, Senior Curator Alison Foster drew articles from Oxford University’s archive of the Gardeners’ Chronicle, which were then randomly matched with participating artists.

My article, from 1841, was on bud grafting, a process often used by fruit growers to propagate different varieties and species on others. Although the processes by which the mixed plant materials co-exist are now largely understood, the phenomenon used to provoke both curiosity and anxiety. The way grafting challenges the boundaries of living things led me to Timothy Morton’s The Ecological Thought (2010).

In seeking antique images of grafting, I stumbled across a beautiful 1660 tome called The History of the Propagation & Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature by Robert Sharrock. Sharrock carried out many practical trials into grafting and, in a neat twist, it turned out many of them had taken place in Oxford Physick Garden, the site on which I was now working.

Interloper examines the perceived divide between natural and cultural, traditional and technological through images of strange conjunctions. (The title itself is a hybrid word, bringing together Latin and Middle Dutch.)

My work, which was placed in the garden’s orangery alongside grafted fruit trees, consisted of an image on a large vinyl banner (a material chosen to withstand the garden’s watering regime), and was accompanied by an artist publication. In making the publication, the usual process of imposition, which rearranges spreads for printing and binding, was bypassed. Instead the reader has to disassemble the pages (mentally or literally) in order to obtain complete images.

Commissioned by Metron for 'the breaking of tulips' at Oxford Botanic Garden, the publication also appeared at 'Counter 2014', Plymouth Arts Centre with MCMXCII Projects, and as part of 'The Floating Library 2015', Silver Lake, St Anthony, Minnesota.

Photo: Kevin Burrell

Looking back: The archivists walk... (2018)

breaking the fall | 2018 | Cropped still from 3-minute digital video

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. breaking the fall and The archivists walk over the beautiful debris of our broken flowers are two related works with a tangled collaborative history.

The three-minute video, breaking the fall was made with Megan Calver as a postscript to her wider research project with Sarah Bennett and Philippa Lawrence: Disclosures & Dialogues. This considered possible futures for Hestercombe House in Somerset in discussion with artists, writers, curators, historians, architects, archivists and horticulturists.  In relation to ideas of conservation, Megan invited participants (including me) to experience what it felt like to let things go by dropping flowers down an 8.5-metre stairwell at the property. 

She and I later recreated this action to document it for the Hestercombe archive, adding an extra action Megan wanted to explore of trying to catch the blooms. We also filmed ourselves measuring the drop, which we included in the finished film as it added a further thought about how we might best attend to and care for our heritage.

The text work is my personal contribution to the Hestercombe archive and a coda to our actions. The stairwell we used was by the entrance to the archive office. In coming and going during the day of filming, one of the archivists had to pick his way across the flowers we’d left lying. I liked the idea that archivists might try to step carefully around, but might also inadvertently trample on, what history leaves behind.

The archivists walk… | 2018 | Digitally printed text, Epson ink on Tetenal paper 

Looking back: Fatal exchanges (2017)

Fatal exchanges (detail) | 2017 | Site-responsive installation, plus 12-page publication

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Fatal exchanges, made with Megan Calver in 2017, seems especially appropriate as it focuses on the effects of a virus.

Drawing on a text, Murder in the Kitchen by Alice B Toklas, the work examines a network of deaths resulting from instinct, accident, pleasure and necessity. Created during a group residency on the Cotley Estate in Somerset, it was inspired by an event in 1832 when the hounds of the Cotley Hunt were struck by the rabies virus and the Master of the Hunt had to shoot all but one of them.

A lot of people approached the work assuming it was vehemently pro- or anti-hunting but our stance was one of curiosity. We set aside our own abhorrence of blood-sports to try to understand the relationship that the Cotley estate owners and their staff had with fox-hunting. Ultimately, we were able to place hunting in the wider context of land management; not apologising for it but trying to think dispassionately about what humans and non-humans do, not only to survive, but in the pursuit of pleasure. It should be noted the estate now imports fox urine from the US for drag hunting, but memories of the original ‘sport’ live on.

We built our installation out of found objects from the site. At its heart was a  magpie trap, acting as a plinth for a sad old taxidermy fox with bare-boned feet and a stick-like brush. We were told he was about 100 years old; he was also alive with carpet beetles. The cycle of life and death continued.

Looking back: Lark, stone (2016)

Lark, stone still | 2016 | Action to camera 

One of the ways I’ve been using the time in lockdown for Covid-19 is to reflect on past work. Lark, stone was a short action to camera made at Dawlish Warren, Devon, with Megan Calver and Susie David.

The simple gesture of turning a flint in the hand conjured up the song of a skylark, which appeared to coordinate its actions with mine: the weight and inertness of the stone contrasting with the bird’s energetic movements and song. On reviewing the video footage, we discovered that the stone also sings, squeaking gently as it is turned in the hand.

Part of a collaborative inquiry into the possibilities of live experimentation, supported by a bursary from a-n The Artist Information Company. Shown as part of ‘Throw only to an alert catcher’ (2016).

More details.

Lichening

Hide #5 (Lichening) | Digital photograph | 2020

“To be one at all you must be a many – and that’s not a metaphor.” Donna Haraway*

This is the latest in a series of experimental photographs concerned with the idea of the hide – a camouflaged structure that seeks to efface the presence of the observer and encourage 'natural' behaviour in those observed. I am interested in the hide as a means of surreptitiously entering the territory of another, but also in the hide as skin, a notional boundary between self and the world.  

When Haraway says you must be a many, she is referring to the way we are intimately connected with other things, that our bodies are not singular things but whole ecosystems. I am particularly interested in the lichens in this image, which are a symbiosis (a mutually beneficial relationship) between fungi and algae or cyanobacteria. As amalgams of multiple organisms working together, they make with. We are all created by multiple relationships. 

Hide #5 was made following an invitation from Gail Flockhart to respond to the theme 'Selfies together in isolation' as part of her PhD research at the University of Plymouth.

*Donna Haraway Anthropocence, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble (University of California, Santa Cruz, 9 May 2014) 

together / apart

Gabrielle Hoad | Orbit #2 | April 2020 | Polaroid processing by That Art Gallery, Bristol

After the forced closure of their physical space, That Art Gallery, Bristol launched an open call for photos taken during the Covid-19 pandemic. Selected photos were printed using their Polaroid Lab and displayed in the windows of the premises for the duration of lockdown. They were also shared on the gallery's Instagram feed. This is mine: one of a series of abandoned balls, snapped while I was out on a daily circular walk in my immediate neighbourhood.

together / apart, That Art Gallery, 2 Upper Maudlin Street, Bristol BS2 8DJ

Be cloudy

During UK lockdown, I’ve contributed to Forced Collaboration, which brokers cross-disciplinary interactions between artists around the world and shares the results online. It's run by artist Georgia Gendall.

For this quickfire 'Self Isolation Special', I set the instruction 'be cloudy'. The instruction is considered a piece of work as much as the collaborative outcome, and the identities of the paired artists are not revealed (even to each other) until the work is made public. My instructions were realised by Alice Mahoney.

I also made a new piece of work in response to instructions by Haddas Eshel. 

forcedcollaboration.org

about body unknown with something alien

about body unknown

with something alien

the human talk

body unknown about

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Work in progress - THG Nature Shorts | 2020

I'm working with Megan Calver on a new participatory live artwork for the Thelma Hubert Gallery in response to their current (but temporarily closed) Richard Long exhibition. This show is touring as part of ARTIST ROOMS.

All being well, we'll be working with young people in Honiton to realise the work later this year but, for now, the gallery is sharing our work in progress as part of their online Nature Shorts series.

Drawing on Richard Long’s use of words in relation to landscape, we will invite the other-than-human to collaborate in the making of new texts. For now, we are experimenting with buckets, basins and baths in our homes, using items such as wax paper discs to stand in for floating leaves and logs.

Richard Long Being in the Moment at Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton (run extended to cover gallery closure).

the predecessor to your prayer

the predecessor to your prayer | still from 1m 27s of digital video | 2020

During UK lockdown, I’ve made a contribution to Forced Collaboration, which brokers cross-disciplinary interactions between artists around the world and shares the results online.

I was asked to “Think about the idea of chaos” and given a long set of instructions. In response, I made a short video piece that draws heavily on Conway’s Game of Life. This is a game played with a 2D grid of square cells, each of which can be alive or dead. The player plots an initial configuration, after which every cell interacts with its neighbours according to a simple set of rules. Applied repeatedly over time, these interactions give rise to complexity.

Such cellular automata were integral to the development of chaos theory, and are used today in simulating the spread of infectious diseases. In a sad coincidence, the game’s inventor, John Horton Conway died this month aged 82 from complications related to Covid-19.

Bounded within a 1:1 (square) aspect ratio, my video contrasts regular grids and binary systems with natural forms and random video 'noise'. The film’s soundtrack draws on the quirks of modern dictation and text-to-voice software to deliver a torrent of increasingly panicked language in a steady electronic voice.

the predecessor to your prayer can be viewed on Vimeo and via the Forced Collaboration site.  My collaborator (who set the instructions) is Haddas Eshel.

A message on the move

Preston Street Union | Anyone may come and go | Live installation at RAMM Exeter | Photo: Jonathan Price

On Saturday 15 February, in the courtyard of at Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Preston Street Union took a 15-metre length of red wool and folded it into a wrapper for display in the museum's Making History gallery. It was the culmination of eight months of collective research and making for our commission Anyone may come and go.

The brief live action, of parading then folding the wool, made the link between this new work and our previous outdoor work for the museum SERGE/SURGE, in which the same length of fabric breached Exeter's city wall at various points during the course of one day. This red carpet of welcome was carefully cleaned and re-rolled after each action, with many hands tending to the work. Now those same hands prepared it for a more traditional static display.

Having brought the fabric back inside the museum, we are now continuing the idea of trade and movement by distributing an edition of digital posters far and wide, all bearing the message 'anyone may come and go'.

#anyonemaycomeandgo

More details 

Enacting historic processes of labour

Preston Street Union | Anyone may come and go - launch event 15/02/20 | Photo: Tim King 

On Saturday 15th February 2020, Preston Street Union presented the second of two commissions on the theme of migration for Exeter's Royal Albert Memorial Museum: Anyone may come and go.

For the past year, we have been investigating the flow of people, artefacts and ideas that have enabled Exeter to prosper. Our new work centres on the construction of tillet wrappers used in the city’s historic wool trade.

It consists of a pearwood and redwood printing block, carved by master woodcarver Saena Ku from an original, collective drawing by Preston Street Union; 15 metres of red woollen serge; and a painted, printed and stiffened tillet wrapper. The show is accompanied by a digital print on paper, distributed free around Exeter and beyond.

Yet, for me, the most significant aspect of this project isn't the finished objects we've produced, but the processes that led to their creation. This exploration of trade, industry and labour has been enacted -- through a collective approach to thinking and making. 

A significant chunk of our time was devoted to using our practical skills to interrogate research by local historian Michael A Patrick. His new findings challenge the accepted narrative about how tillet wrappers were produced and used.

This interrogation meant creating our own version of a printed tillet wrapper, and included the testing of a range of materials from fabrics to glues, primers and paints. It's important to note that, when working together, Preston Street Union don't make objects (beyond a few simple props) -  until now. So we had to invent a collective making process. As individuals we might have adopted tried-and-tested methods - for example to mix colours or manage registration in printing. But as a group, we evolved a much more organic way of working.

As we started to make, we became itinerant, relying on borrowed studio space and carrying our materials, tools and work from place to place. Different hands and minds tackled tasks during different working sessions, and communication wasn't always faultless. Therefore each new working session began by looking at what had already happened and improvising from there. Those who turned up had to solve the problems that had arisen, not try to unpick what had already happened just because it hadn't been done 'the right way'. It was messy and time-consuming and often exhausting, but it had its own kind of logic. And ultimately, it produced results.

So we have not done any of this perfectly, but we have done it. The process and the tensions within the making touched on themes such as improvisation versus technique, imagination versus research, resistance versus consensus...there's still so much to unpack. Ultimately it's been about the difficulties and rewards of collaboration and connection -- of doing work together. And, as I said in a previous blog entry, it all feels very appropriate to our subject matter -- and the times we find ourselves in.

Anyone may come and go, Making History galleries,  RAMM, Queen Street, Exeter EX4 3RX
Saturday 15th February - Sunday 29th March 2020

Preston Street Union would like to thank: Saena Ku (master woodcarver), Michael A Patrick (historian), Simon Ripley & Double Elephant Print Workshop, Lara Goodband and Tom Cadbury (RAMM curators), Kathy Norris (Exeter Phoenix), Topos Exeter, Exeter Custom House, Topsham Museum, Ebdon's Refreshments.

RAMM's contemporary art programme is supported by Arts Council England

Inhabiting the pigeon

pigeon Steps | Intervention at Walking's New Movements conference, University of Plymouth 2019 | Photo: Claire Hind

pigeon steps

walk heel to toe, alert to the peripheral
gravitate with others to potential gifters

continue to inhabit a state of expectancy

pigeon steps was devised by myself and Megan Calver to investigate the walking movements of feral pigeons. It was first presented as a participatory provocation at the 'Walking's New Movements' conference, University of Plymouth, 1-3 November 2019.  

We kitted out a group of around 20 willing delegates (plus ourselves) with elastic knee straps (to constrict gait) and masks made of modified sandwich boxes (to emphasise peripheral vision). The group then set off in search of food, indicated by the rustling of paper bags.

Wearing the sandwich-box masks was sweaty, claustrophobic and disorientating. Walking in tiny steps was challenging. We weren't really like pigeons at all - and yet... There was something about disruption to gait and perception that took you out of the human body. We began to follow cues from each other as much as the sound of rustling bags - and became a very convincing little flock of expectant foragers. 

The kit was made with a nod to pigeons. For example, the sandwich boxes were chosen as masks because of the signals they give pigeons about food sources. We had hoped to attract some avian role models - or at least spectators - but bad weather meant the activity had to take place indoors. We were also riffing off some half-remembered ideas from Bruno Latour about the need for prostheses to facilitate interspecies communication. (Risky to riff around so many academics, but no one seemed to mind.)

It was an ephemeral, light-touch work, but our thoughts about expectancy and gifting were serious ones. Feral pigeons and humans live closely interconnected lives, but they usually watch us far more closely than we watch them: perhaps because we are potential predators as much as providers.

With thanks to Phil Smith, Claire Hind and Helen Billinghurst, who organised the Walking's New Movements conference, and Exeter Real Food Cafe, who donated the compostable sandwich boxes.