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