Wolverhampton wanderings

A selection of works from The Library of Lost Books  is currently on show at the Bessant Gallery, Wolverhampton,  25 April - 23 May 2013.  The show includes my contribution Mutter Erde. http://gabriellehoad.co.uk/mutter_erde.php

Creative collision

Exeter is rapidly becoming a real hotspot for innovative theatre. This includes many performance and participatory activities that don't take place in buildings, so the crossover into fine art practice is very pronounced.

Kaleider is one of the organisations driving this movement and, a few weeks back, I accepted an invitation to attend one of their 'Open Fridays'. It was odd walking into someone else's office space just to hang out and eat a packed lunch, but they offered a warm welcome and good conversation.  And it turned out we had a little more in common than I first thought. Their work as producers and mentors of live performance is rooted in a concern with climate change, the fiscal crisis and the end of oil.

So a month later I was back delivering an informal talk: the first proper public articulation of my ongoing project Foreign Soil. This documented attempt to grow edible dessert bananas outdoors on a Devon farm is meant as a provocation for thoughts about the sustainability of our food supply.

From there I was coaxed into joining their Ideas Lab - designed as development tool for writers and performers applying for Kaleider commissions, but in fact a really exciting forum where environmentalists, activists, artists, performers, educators, poets, actors, directors and many others met to share ideas.

All the stand-up, quick-fire brainstorming and improvised role play was hard work for me - an artist who thinks on paper (or with her hands) and who looks to research and reflection for ideas rather than riffing with other people.  But it was good to see how another group of artists went about their business and to share in their amazing energy.  It was also a great opportunity to network with like-minded people - and much more may come of that.

Questions of reputation

I feel it's time to retire my blog about the Exeter Studios Project on a-n.co.uk Artists Talking. It's now five years since I stopped writing it (seven since I started) and, as many of the issues are out of date, its educational value for other studio start-ups is on the wane.

More importantly, I'm not the same person who wrote that blog. I was a new artist and so desperate for workspace that I ignored my instincts about some of the people who volunteered themselves as directors. I started writing the blog as a way of logging our progress, raising our profile and gathering support. Much later, as part of a genuine attempt to rescue a project I'd sunk my heart and soul into, I alluded to some (and only some) of the very serious problems in its legal, financial and general management.

Although I stand by what I wrote, I don't want people judging me now on the basis of it. You can still find out about the Exeter Studios Project here. It's also featured in an article on artist-led activity and an article about blogging, both by Jane Watt. I'm also very happy to talk in person about my experiences - please contact me via my website.

The lure of endurance

Forced Entertainment Quizoola!

A live webcast of two performers sitting side by side, asking and answering a series of questions, proved to be compulsive viewing over the weekend. I was watching Forced Entertainment's 24-hour performance Quizoola!  Spanning comedy double-act, trivia quiz, psychoanalytic exchange, philosophical investigation and much more besides, this bizarre Q&A shifted mood minute-by-minute from friendly, flirty teasing to hostile, sinister interrogation - with moments of sadness, exhaustion and vagueness in between.

It was brilliant stuff but it made me wonder what is it about endurance that we find so attractive in a work? Epic durational events seem more and more common in the arts, especially in live art (see Marina Abramovich for one extreme example), but are also evident in other cultural spheres (from telethons to ultra marathons).

Are they a reaction against the increasing short attention span we seem prepared to offer any activity? A reflection of the relentlessness we feel in our own everyday lives? Perhaps they're a sign of a decadent society, so pampered we demand pain and exhaustion as entertainment? Or do they grow from the often misguided notion that if something's worth doing it's worth doing even more of? 

I don't know the answers, but it seems only appropriate that Quizoola! should raise so many questions.

Quizoola! took place in The Pit, Barbican as part of SPILL Festival of Performance, 11.59pm 12 April - 11.59pm 13 April 2013.

Enter the ecoids

My banana-growing project Foreign Soil entered an exciting new phase last week, with a field trip to the site of my future plantation: West Town Farm at Ide. I was working with Chris Hunt, an MRes Digital Art and Technology student at Plymouth University, to install a number of data loggers loaned by i-DAT.   

Known as ecoids they allow remote sensing of environmental factors such as light levels, temperature, humidity and wind strength. We're running a month-long pilot project, to see how the technology gets on with the farm and the farm gets on with the technology. If things go well, we'll install them across a wider area for a longer period of time in the hopes of finding microclimates where tender plants might thrive. http://britishbanana.blogspot.co.uk/ 

People are strange

Becky Beasley Spring Rain, Spike Island (2013)

I find myself asking if it's possible to see a bad show at Spike Island. There's something about the gallery spaces - so generous, so bright, so peacefully focused on the business of good art - that everything feels right within them. 

Becky Beasley's 'Spring Rain' is a great example. From the cucumber-coloured linoleum in the first part (with the footprint of Duchamp's Etant Donnes inset in black) to a pair of gently rotating black lacquered objects at the end, the show is sparse and yet rich with connections, complex and yet easy to engage with.

At its heart is the theme of pairings - male and female, his and hers, peg and hole, positive and negative, object and cast. There's a bawdy humour at work, but only of the gentlest sort. It's almost as if Beasley has put Duchamp's voyeurism and potential misogyny back in its (surprisingly small) box.  This is England. This is domesticity. This is comical home-grown veg and married sex.

Large-scale hand-coloured photographs of curly cucumbers and spinning casts of tiny brass gherkins sit alongside images of a tablecloth and a handkerchief, both of which have mysterious yet apparently functional holes at their centres. The title of the show is taken from an affecting short story by Bernand Malamud that touches on distance and intimacy - the fragile connections between self and others.

In an interesting move, Beasley has chosen works by Richard Hamilton and Charles Jones to accompany her show. Hamilton's precise and witty photographic montages echo her concerns with interior space, but it's the photographs of everyday vegetables by Jones that best match her emotional timbre. Never exhibited in his lifetime, the images were only discovered by accident in 1981 in a suitcase at a Bermondsey antiques market. They are so intimate and tender they could almost be classed as portraits.

'Spring Rain' shows alongside the fascinating video installation 'Back to Back' by Uriel Orlow, which utilises sound bleed between two video pieces to talk about the past haunting the present in Armenia/Turkey.  Runs 26 January - 31 March 2013 at Spike Island.

I also visited the rather chaotic 'No Borders' at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (until 2 June) featuring Ai Weiwei's Ton of Tea and Yto Barrada's Sleepers.  And 'Version Control' at the Arnolfini (2 February -14 April), a survey of performance, performance documentation and appropriation in contemporary practice.  There was too much to take in during one short, crowded visit,  but I especially liked Eva & Franco Mattes' The Others. This collection of appropriated personal photographs and song recordings found on other people's hard drives was oddly touching.  It seemed to tie up perfectly with Becky Beasley's reflections on the familiarity and strangeness of other people.

Open studios and closed shops

Sissy Lange Not Open Space (2013)

It was good to see a little collaboration, mutual support and sharing this weekend in Exeter between the well-established annual Exeter Open Studios event and the inaugural fringe event, NOSE 2013. This pairing helped to blur the boundaries between commercial, craft-based and ideas-led practices and give audiences an opportunity to encounter and experience a wider spectrum of art than is usually available in a traditional open studios set-up.

Shadow-curated by Stuart Crewes, NOSE stood for Not Exeter Open Studios and set out "to frame the entire City as a spectacular event, albeit at times elusive and surreptitious." While chance discovery of art is always fun, there's also the risk that too much elusiveness and secrecy will defeat the attempts of committed audience members to see the work. Indeed, unable to plan much of schedule in advance, I missed a quite a bit of what was on offer.

Events included 5 minutes dreaming, part of a wider work called This City's Centre by Blind Ditch (cancelled due to the bad weather on the day I went looking for it), Sissy Lange's Not Open Space (see above), Unexpected Collected's Open Museum, and Sam White's portable camera obscura.

I found a copy of Nick Davies' Psychogeog pack but have saved the psychogeography-inspired run around Exeter for a sunnier day. I also made it to the glorious chaos that was the PUNY GODS pop-up film festival in one of the city's empty shops. This cinematic marathon showed work by more than 60 independent Southwest film makers for nine hours a day over three days.

Puny Gods: Exeter Open Studios Edition - 52 Fore Street, Exeter

I finished the weekend with Felicity Shillingford's Trip Hazards and Sharp Edges, a tour of some of Exeter's public sculptures which were draped in hazard tape under the watchful gaze of city centre CCTV, and concluded with the inevitable arrival of private security personnel.

Felicity Shillingford Trip Hazards and Sharp Edges (2013)

During the weekend I also visited some very interesting open studios shows by Richard Rochester, Jilly Edwards, Jenny Southam, Stella Tripp, Karen Ringrose and James Romain, as well as the event's taster show at Gloss.

NOSE 2013 ran in conjunction with Exeter Open Studios from Friday 22 - Sunday 24 March 2013 at sites across Exeter.