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.