Not funded by ACE, and a little foggy why

Howler Chaser - Fog at Durlston | June 2021

With budgets stretched to the limit, I am just one more disappointed artist who didn't get her Arts Council funding, but I still want to talk about it. Because I feel there is something wrong with arts funding when so many people put in so much effort that fails to materialise into money -- and all they get back is a curt one-liner.  

In my case, it was a Project Grant of £12,579 to work with Megan Calver at Durlston Country Park & National Nature Reserve in Dorset on a self-directed residency, working title: Howler Chaser. We were planning to look at the architectural and archival traces of a radar signalling system called OBOE, pioneered at Durlston and used in blind-bombing during World War II. This was to be used as a new lens for audiences to view the rich array of wildlife on the site, particularly those aspects that are ephemeral or concealed. Our outcomes included a four-week on-site exhibition and a participatory public event.

Overall, we worked (mostly unpaid) towards this application for about 12 months, building relationships, doing preparatory research and figuring out how to get the best possible results for us, our partner organisation and our audiences. All while dealing with the difficulties and restrictions of a pandemic. Although not all of that work is wasted, much of it is. Rejection always had to be factored in as a possibility, but its impact on my practice, my career and my livelihood is nonetheless considerable. Here's why:

1) In the final stages of applying, I gave up the equivalent of 15-20 days to research and write the application, time that I could have used to earn money to support myself and my practice. 

2) I had to pass up on other opportunities for 2022 that looked interesting but would have clashed. 

3) I wasted the time of friends, colleagues and potential partners enlisting their support.

4) Most disappointing of all, I put my heart and soul into shaping a really good project that I genuinely believe would have generated new knowledge and awareness, and new opportunities for people to engage with art. And now it can't happen.

Perhaps if you fund-raise for a living, you can decode ACE's feedback effectively but, as an independent artist, their decisions process remains almost opaque to me. I can't even say I've learned from this rejection. Despite immersing ourselves in pages and pages of guidance and several webinars, and utilising detailed cheat sheets, we can only guess what it is about our public engagement and marketing that the Arts Council found so lacking. When reapplying after one knock-back, we did our very best to cram all of our enhanced plans into the 1000-character limit, but apparently ACE still needed more detail. Oh, and second time around they revealed we possibly should have included a marketing partner (even though our project partner Durlston has its own well-established marketing and engagement programme, and a dedicated member of staff to deliver it). I am sure there were rational reasons for our rejection; it's just that I'm genuinely puzzled about what they were.

I refuse to see this as a failure. Our ambitions for this work clearly do not fit the funding criteria of a particular government organisation, and we would be wrong to bend too far to do so. But there are other things about this rejection that evoke a real a sense of loss.  

This project cannot now happen at Durlston with Megan. The timeline we had plotted and the events we had scheduled start rolling in mid-January 2022, so there is no chance to re-apply again in time. Neither do we have the possibility of rescheduling for 2023. Both Megan and I now face pressing personal commitments that will make major collaborations such as this very difficult for at least a few years. 

So that's it. We will make use of the material and research we've generated so far to create some kind of more modest work, maybe even a small exhibition. But the project will lose its deep connection with the site and community that inspired it. 

And I will start the new year trying to fill a giant hole in my income, my plans and my practice. 

Unfunded logo from flaneur.me.org

Limited edition 'Salt-cat' print on sale

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Salt-cat (keeps them at home) | 2021 | Limited edition screen print

This newly released screenprint draws on a site-specific installation I created with Megan Calver for 'Open-Up' at Hestercombe Gardens (2020-21).

Salt-cat was a type of cake made by pigeon breeders to entice their birds to stay or return home. Our installation included 16 fragments of text relating to this historic practice. They were drawn from Hestercombe’s archive, as well as sources such as The Sportsman's Dictionary of 1800. We've combined three of these texts in a new limited-edition print. The colours reference the plumage and feet of Columba livia domestica, the homing pigeon.

This edition of 30 was screen-printed for us by George Barron at Double Elephant Print Workshop in Exeter. They are hand-pulled three-colour prints on Fabriano 300gsm paper and measure 49cm x 36cm (a little smaller than A2). Individually signed and numbered, they are priced at £60.00 each unframed including UK postage & packing.

The print will shortly be available from the Hestercombe Gallery shop and also direct from my Instagram as part of the Artist Support Pledge.  Alternatively, contact me or Megan via our websites.

Correspondence 01 extra

 
While Savinder Bual and I were working on our individual submissions for Correspondence 01, we made a shared piece of work: Time Travellers. 

As artists, we have common interests in art and science, and the measurement of time and space. As a starting point, Savinder shared the animations of Al Jarnow with me. We started thinking together about shadows and sundials, and looking for ways to physically experience the movement of the Earth in relation to the Sun. We also wanted to make simultaneous work together that would span time and distance. 

At an agreed time, we started walking towards each other from our separate locations, she in Hitchin near Letchworth, me in Exeter. We kept going for the duration of the time difference between us by the Sun (as opposed to our shared official time of GMT+1 / British Summertime).

We later documented our action as a more formal score that can be performed by people anywhere in the world.

Correspondence 01

Photos by Corey Bartle Sanderson from the Correspondence 01 install at Broadway Gallery, Letchworth

 

Savinder Bual | Sundial, True Time, Letchworth | 2021 

Savinder Bual | Sundial, True Time, Letchworth | 2021
Gabrielle Hoad | Two-handed timekeeper | 2021

Correspondence01, curated by Kristian Day and Matt Burrows

17th August - 5th September 2021

Broadway Gallery,  2 The Arcade, Letchworth Garden City SG6 3EW

Exeter Phoenix, Gandy Street EX4 3LS

Alexis Soul-Gray Oliver Kirkham Gabrielle Hoad Andy Cluer Adam Garratt Molly Rooke Janet Sainsbury Tobias Francis Jackson Sprague Will Luz Abi Freckleton Anna Fairchild Maria Meyer Jessica Wetherly Magdalena Gluszak-Holeksa Liz Harrington Jack Anthony Taylor Helena McGrath Freya Pocklington Savinder Bual

Two-handed timekeeper

Two-handed timekeeper (left & right) | 2021 | Three minutes of digital video x 2

“The railway time is shown by a silvered minute hand, 

the minute hand denoting the true time being gilt.”* 

During the mid-19th century, with the coming of the railways, many of Exeter’s public clocks had two minute-hands, one showing Railway Time (or GMT), the other Local Time, which was approximately 14 minutes behind by the sun.

Two-handed timekeeper is derived from a recording of shadows moving across a playing field in Exeter on 14 July 2021. The footage has been split, superimposed and speeded up to make visible the solar time difference between Letchworth and Exeter. 

This work arose from shared research and experiments made with Savinder Bual during the Correspondence01 project. It reflects on human-made rules and scales of measurement versus the independent movement of celestial objects.

Two versions of the video will be shown simultaneously: one at Exeter Phoenix, the other at Broadway Gallery Letchworth.  The video still above combines both versions into one image.

Left: Two-handed timekeeper  ̶  Exeter and Letchworth (Longitude -3.542433 and -0.22703)

Right: Two-handed timekeeper  ̶  Letchworth and Exeter (Longitude -0.22703 and -3.542433)

Correspondence01, curated by Kristian Day and Matt Burrows

17th August - 5th September 2021

Broadway Gallery,  2 The Arcade, Letchworth Garden City SG6 3EW

Exeter Phoenix, Gandy Street EX4 3LS

*The clock at St John’s Church, Fore Street, Exeter, as described by the Exeter Flying Post in 1845. Source: Clive N Ponsford Time In Exeter (1978)

Ghost Moth and other manifestations

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Ghost Moth | Exeter Phoenix Platform | 2021

Between 2nd and 8th August, I was lucky enough (along with Megan Calver) to be part of Exeter Phoenix’s Platform series, which offers artists based in the South West region opportunities to test out ideas, new work and recent developments in their practice.

Our opportunity took the form of a short, experimental residency, during which we reconsidered our predominantly site-specific practice for a gallery environment. Working quickly with a limited range of low-cost and recycled materials, we created a number of test pieces and prototypes, with particular focus on scale, impact and use of space.

Although there was no pressure from Exeter Phoenix to be visible to the public, an audience felt important in the context of what we were trying to do, and so we challenged ourselves to have work in progress on view through a ‘porthole’ we created in the whited-out gallery doors. We also invited a few colleagues and contacts to come into the space by appointment. Curator Matt Burrows provided additional mentoring and support throughout.

It was a great opportunity to ‘think big’ and scale up our work. We were able to experience how different objects, materials or presentation styles read in the formal gallery setting, and how they ‘talk’ to one another and shift in meaning.

Some of the work was made quickly and spontaneously, some developed over the week, some was abandoned after only brief display, some was intentionally ephemeral, and some made purely for ourselves.

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Exeter Phoenix Platform | 2021

The above image is from Monday 9th August when we dismantled the temporary weekend exhibition and, in doing so, made a whole new iteration of a sculpture we nicknamed 'the lighthouse' – possibly my favourite version of all.

https://exeterphoenix.org.uk/events/calver-and-hoad/

Platform residency

The Buffer Zone | 2016 | Photo: Susie David

I will be working with Megan Calver as part of Exeter Phoenix’s Platform series from 2nd to 6th August 2021 (Covid restrictions permitting). Platform offers artists opportunities to test out ideas, new work and recent developments in their practice.

During this short experimental residency, we will reconsider our site-specific practice for a gallery environment.  Expanding on our shared preoccupation with language and communication, we plan to improvise activations of space, body and matter, and explore new ways of presenting our outcomes. The residency provides us with an invaluable joint workspace to develop a new project.

We'll be working in the gallery Monday 2nd - Friday 6th August, with additional work on show through the gallery door in the evenings and during 7th and 8th August.

Exeter Phoenix Galleries, Gandy Street EX4 3LS

Immersed in Durlston

I’ve just returned from an intense but rewarding few days working with Megan Calver at Durlston Country Park in Dorset. Continuing a project we began at the start of this year, where we worked remotely with the Rangers’ Daily Diary, we've now been able to immerse ourselves completely and experience the site at all hours of the day and night. Two striking features were the spectacular wildflower meadows, ringing with skylark song, but also the dense and dripping fog that rolled in and out throughout our stay. This was only a recce to get to know the site, its inhabitants and its custodians, but we were inspired to make a few experimental photos and videos that will inform future work.

CORRESPONDENCE-01

I've been selected for Correspondence, a new project curated by Kris Day and Matt Burrows that pairs 10 artists from the Letchworth arts community in Hertfordshire with 10 artists from the Exeter area in Devon. Simultaneous exhibitions, hosted by Letchworth’s Broadway Gallery and Exeter Phoenix will take place in August. 

It's a really interesting group of artists and I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges from the different conversations and interactions. I'm particularly excited to be paired with Savinder Bual who has made some amazing work relating to early cinema and with whom I share an interest in scientific discovery.

The selected artists are:

Alexis Soul-Gray Oliver Kirkham Gabrielle Hoad Andy Cluer Adam Garratt Molly Rooke Janet Sainsbury Tobias Francis Jackson Sprague Will Luz Abi Freckleton Anna Fairchild Maria Meyer Jessica Wetherly Magdalena Gluszak-Holeksa Liz Harrington Jack Anthony Taylor Helena McGrath Freya Pocklington Savinder Bual

Crosstalk at the Pint of Science festival 2021

Gabrielle Hoad | Crosstalk (still from digital animation) | 2021

Creative Reactions, a project encouraging collaboration between artists and scientists, launches today as part of the national Pint of Science festival. I've contributed a short digital animation Crosstalk, made with the support of Dr Rebecca M Hock, a researcher in behavioural neuroscience at the University of Nottingham. My entry in the online catalogue and a link to to the video is here.

Catalyst virtual exhibition live

I'm delighted to be part of  'Catalyst', a new virtual exhibition showcasing nearly a decade of art-science collaborations from the Environment & Sustainability Institute's Creative Exchange Programme. It's curated by Claire English in partnership with Arts & Culture Exeter, and features new work by Bram Thomas Arnold, The Art and Energy Collective, Sarah Bowler & Elizabeth Masterton, Tim Cockerill, Rosie Fierek, Hugo Glasier, Harper & Chave, Gabrielle Hoad, Josie Purcell, Rame Peninsula Beach Care, Roseberry & Slack, and Chris Thorn.

I'm showing two digital images from a photographic series called The Luminous Envelope. They were made in 2015 shortly after my collaboration with Dr Jonathan Bennie of the ESI and reflect my ongoing interest in scientific/mathematical models (ie simplified representations which are used to facilitate prediction or understanding). Jon and I used both digital climate modelling and practical fieldwork to study microclimates in southwest England to assess the feasibility of growing a banana crop. Our results highlighted the inevitable disconnect between speculative microclimate models and specific day-to-day weather data. The Luminous Envelope responds to a similar disconnect, this time between the ‘purity’ of mathematical equations describing the behaviour of light, and historic attempts to make them tangible through physical model-making.

Visit the exhibition here

Walking Bodies on sale

Walking Bodies published by Triarchy Press contains many fascinating reflections on - and provocations for - contemporary walking arts practice. It includes pigeon steps, a provocation I made in 2019 with Megan Calver, as well as essays by Emma Bush, Hamish Fulton, Sarah Scaife, Cathy Turner and many more. The book was edited by Helen Billinghurst, Claire Hind and Phil Smith, who organised the conference in Plymouth in 2019 from which it derives (and who are also contributors). Buy direct from the publisher: ebook £16.00, paperback £20.00.

Open-up re-opened

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Salt-cat (keeps them at home) - detail | 2020

Hestercombe Gardens reopen fully from 5th April and so there's another opportunity to see Salt-cat (keeps them at home), a work I made last year with Megan Calver in response to the pandemic. It's part of Open-Up, a series of outdoor artworks commissioned by Hestercombe Gallery, which features eight artists, many with intimate knowledge of Hestercombe. The show centres on a flagship commission by Richard Long Jackdaw Line. Other artists include Sarah Bennett, Jon England, Jo Lathwood, Philippa Lawrence and Lucy Soni.

Open daily, 10am – 6pm (last entry 4.30pm) until 27th June. Due to current Covid-19 restrictions, all visits must be pre-booked online.

Open-Up: 19th August 2020 - 27th June 2021

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

Catalyst

Gabrielle Hoad | The Luminous Envelope | Digital photograph | 2015

I have some work featured in a new online exhibition Catalyst, due to launch on Earth Day (Thursday 22nd April). It's been organised by Exeter University's Arts & Culture team working with the Environment & Sustainability Institute (ESI) and Cornwall-based curator Claire English. The exhibition reflects on 12 past collaborations between academics from the ESI and artists, and will feature artworks which have been developed by those artists since.

Given that the exhibition is wholly digital, I chose to feature images from The Luminous Envelope, which have been printed in physical form but exist equally happily as pixels on a screen. These photographs were made in response to a collection of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. They relate to my ongoing interest in the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that assists prediction or understanding. This theme was originally explored during my collaboration Foreign Soil with Dr Jonathan Bennie at the ESI in 2014. 

For Foreign Soil, we undertook a study of microclimates in southwest England to assess the feasibility of growing bananas – now or in a future climate scenario. Our inquiry, which focused on a particular south-facing pasture, included both digital climate modelling and practical fieldwork, and highlighted the inevitable disconnect between speculative microclimate models and specific day-to-day weather data.

The Luminous Envelope responds to a similar disconnect, this time between the ‘purity’ of mathematical equations and an attempt to make them tangible through physical model-making in plaster of Paris. In both cases, models (whether made of pixels or plaster) emerge as useful, but imperfect, representations.

Foreign Soil was developed with support from Exeter University’s Creative Exchange programme. The Luminous Envelope was commissioned by Metron in collaboration with Oxford University Mathematical Institute.

Crosstalk

Gabrielle Hoad  | Crosstalk (still from work in progress) | 2021

Made for Creative Reactions Nottingham with Dr Rebecca M Hock, Research Fellow, School of Psychology, University of Nottingham, Crosstalk is a digital animation that responds to research into associative learning at Nottingham University. 

Testing assumptions about the human brain using laboratory rats is common practice in medical research; most of us probably owe at least some aspects of our health and wellbeing to lab rats.  It's part of a wider interdependency between our two species.  

My short animation mingles images of human and rodent heads so that they are difficult to tell apart. A sense of malleability in the imagery points to the research team’s interest in inhibitory learning: how healthy brains are able to adapt and ‘apply the brakes’ to unhelpful reactions.

In neuroscience, ‘crosstalk’ refers to the way that electrochemical signals in the brain may affect others. But there is also a sense in which crosstalk (ie incidental communication) between rats and their handlers is part of everyday life in the lab and an acknowledgement of their agency outside the mechanics of experimentation. 

While anthropomorphism (ascribing human characteristics such as intention to nonhumans) is often discouraged in science, its usefulness in reframing our relationships with animals has been highlighted by a number of contemporary thinkers including Vinciane Despret and Eileen Crist. In dealing with this difficult subject matter, I have also been immensely grateful for Donna Haraway's wisdom in her chapter 'Sharing Suffering' from When Species Meet (2008).  

Image of white rat adapted from original by Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier under a Creative Commons licence CC BY-SA 2.0

Image of rat brain MRI adapted from 'The SIGMA rat brain templates and atlases for multimodal MRI data analysis and visualization' by D.A Barrière, R. Magalhães et al. Nature Communications Vol. 10, Article 5699 (2019) under a Creative Commons licence CC BY 4.0

Crosstalk is a Sci-Art collaboration exhibited online as part of  'Creative Reactions' for the national Pint of Science Festival 17-20th May 2021

together / apart - the book

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

When That Art Gallery in Bristol closed on 23rd March, 2020 for the first COVID-19 lockdown, gallery owner Andy Phipps issued an open call for images inspired by COVID. These were printed as Polaroids and displayed in the gallery window opposite the Bristol Royal Infirmary. A new book now features 204 pictures by 182 contributors whose work was exhibited in the windows of the closed gallery. I'm pleased to be among them.

Published 12th March 2021 by Tangent Books. Price £15.00 including UK postage and packing. 50 per cent of profit from sales will be donated to Creative Youth Network.

https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/shop/togetherapart

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

branch from reaches

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | branch from reaches (work in progress) | 2021

'branch from reaches'

15 February to 19 February 2021

Here is a second set of scores quarried from the Durlston Country Park online Daily Diary between Monday 15 February and  Friday 19 February 2021, with an additional compilation from Monday 22 February.

Every day (apart from Christmas Day) the Durlston rangers record their early-morning observations from the site and post them online. Text from these posts has been systematically excavated and reassembled by myself and Megan Calver to create a series of scores for action. 

Durlston is a 320-acre park and nature reserve on the outskirts of Swanage, Dorset. It includes the remains of two quarries: one for Purbeck Stone and the other Portland Limestone.

Every day for five days we created an instruction from the Daily Diary entry and then each enacted it in our own homes, working under the restrictions of lockdown and improvising with what was to hand.

A selection of the outcomes were documented on Instagram: rapid ‘sketches’ made with a view to creating more ambitious future works with and for the site. 

https://www.durlston.co.uk

Art is essential

 

These are uncertain times. No one yet fully knows the long-term effects of the pandemic or the impact of Brexit on how we live and work. But it is already becoming clear that the current government does not consider contemporary visual arts to have a significant role to play in their recovery plans.

Hence a new campaign #ArtIsEssential from CVAN, the Contemporary Visual Art Network, which states: "The arts and culture sector contributes £2.8 billion a year to the Treasury via taxation to the UK economy, and provides 363,700 jobs, but recent events have exposed the delicate ecology of our sector leaving it vulnerable. We need to ensure that policy and decision makers are considering the real needs of our sector and see the far-reaching impact the visual arts has in our communities and the contribution it makes to our economy."

At a time of massive economic, ecological and social crisis, it's hard to justify continued public spending on what, to many, appears an elite and obscure branch of the arts. A luxury even. Art can be all of those things but it is also the fuel for the kind of thinking that will get us out of this mess. As artist Helen Cammock said in her eloquent presentation at the campaign launch, we need lateral and nimble thinking more than ever. Doing art, learning about art, experiencing art, being peripherally influenced by art, helps us develop that kind of thinking. Artists draw threads together: they help us think critically about the past and present and, perhaps more importantly, to imagine the future. That means we need to look after artists and their livelihoods and enable them to play their part alongside scientists, engineers, educators, social workers, carers, food producers civil servants, politicians, economists, business people...

Art is essential from a personal point of view too. I've had some kind of art practice all my adult life but didn't call myself an artist until after I’d completed my degree. In the 15 years since I graduated, I’ve patched together a living from funding, commissions, very occasional sales and lots of freelance work. I sometimes think life would be easier if I went back to having a salaried job but #artisessential to me. And I know the experiences I offer through my work are sometimes essential to other people too. It's very hard to quantify... but just occasionally I know that my work has prompted someone to think or act or feel or see a different way. It may be a big shift or only the tiniest temporary flicker of thing but, for all the reasons above, it matters.

https://www.artisessential.art

Art is work

Preston Street Union | Random Art Machine | 2017

I'm an artist - and I'm also a freelance writer for business. It's the glue that holds together my rather more patchy income from art commissions. It means I'm exposed to a lot of current thinking in business and administration and I have often toyed with the idea of using its processes, and especially its jargon and imagery, in my work.

In fact, business thinking has found its way into my work, but in a rather more mundane sense. It turns out that, because of my (largely self-taught) project management skills, I have often been the one doing the heavy admin lifting in artist-led projects. From setting up shared studio space to organising exhibitions and running groups, I'm usually toiling away on scheduling, fundraising, logistics and budgeting while others are doing what we all like to think of as the 'creative' parts. At one point, having slogged away for 18 months doing so much admin for a large shared studio space that I had no time to get my hands dirty, I was forced to admit that the project (and not my neglected paintings) was The Work.  It felt OK to me, but no one else really saw it that way. I had demoted myself from fellow artist to 'boring admin person who's always banging on about health & safety and filing accounts'. 

More recently, through my involvement with Preston Street Union, I have been thinking about labour, including the organisation of labour and the value of different types of labour. It's partly in honour of our name, which was gifted to us back in 2015 by Trevor Pitt. We have frequently adopted the costumes of manual labour (hard hats, hi-vis, butchers' aprons) and made a start on creating a union banner, but rarely got to grips with labour (small 'l') in any activist sense.   

During 2019 - 2020, we made a couple of pieces of work about Exeter's historic wool trade as part of a commission for the Royal Albert Memorial Museum. While the final works had some merit, the real interest for me lay in the way we created and developed them. The work that went on show at the museum felt rather inadequate as a representation of a huge and rich archive that included a group development workshop run by an artist-plumber, fascinating conversations with expert craftspeople, group debates about organisation and work processes, in-depth practical research and, yes, heaps and heaps of admin. 

It's why I take issue with artists I've met over the years who want to describe art as 'play'. To me it seems like a way of diminishing what we do - making it sound indulgent, relaxing, value-less. It can be all those things - and certainly a quality of playfulness is something most artists strive to protect within their practice. But the wider business of art? Well that's work, no doubt about it, and people need to get paid for it. 

So I'm delighted over recent years to have noticed an increasing number of art projects that take work as a theme. Initiatives such as RADMIN ("admin as a site for meaningful work") and the FeralMBA have placed business practice (and the failure of the 'business as usual' model) at the heart of art practice. I'll add more as I remember or come across them, in a spirit of keeping up with the admin.

Excavating scores

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Durlston scores (work in progress) | 2021  

Here is a set of scores quarried from the Durlston Country Park online Daily Diary between Monday 4 January and  Friday 8 January 2021, with an additional compilation from Monday 11 January 

Every day (apart from Christmas Day) the Durlston rangers record their early-morning observations from the site and post them online. Text from these posts has been systematically excavated and reassembled by myself and Megan Calver to create a series of scores for action. 

Durlston is a 320-acre park and nature reserve on the outskirts of Swanage, Dorset. It includes the remains of two quarries: one for Purbeck Stone and the other Portland Limestone.

Every day for five days we created an instruction from the Daily Diary entry and then each enacted it in our own homes, working under the restrictions of lockdown and improvising with what was to hand. 

A selection of the outcomes were documented on Instagram: rapid ‘sketches’ made with a view to creating more ambitious future works with and for the site. 

https://www.durlston.co.uk

blue visible

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | blue visible (work in progress) | 2021

'blue visible'

Monday 4 January - Friday 8 January 2021

A series of actions and small works created with Megan Calver in response to the Daily Diary for Durlston Country Park.

Durlston is a 320-acre park and nature reserve on the outskirts of Swanage, Dorset.

Every day (apart from Christmas Day) the Durlston rangers record their early-morning observations from the site and post them online. Text from these posts has been systematically excavated and reassembled by us to create a series of scores (instructions) for action.

Every day for five days we created an instruction from the Daily Diary entry and then each enacted it in our own homes, working under the restrictions of lockdown and improvising with what was to hand.

A selection of the outcomes were documented on Instagram: rapid ‘sketches’ made with a view to creating more ambitious future works with and for the site.

Quarrying at Durlston

skitter Peregrine a shelter | Monday 4 January 2021 

Work in progress with Megan Calver. One of a series of scores (instructions) for action, quarried from the Durlston Country Park online Daily Diary, in which rangers record their observations from the site.

Durlston is a 320-acre park and nature reserve on the outskirts of Swanage, Dorset. It includes the remains of two quarries: one for Purbeck Stone and the other Portland Limestone.

Both Megan and I know the site well as we share family connections with Swanage. We had worked together as artists for some time before we discovered this coincidence. This year, instead of visiting our relatives, we are connecting with the site remotely via the Daily Diary and using it as a source of new collaborative work.
https://www.durlston.co.uk