Hide #4 (Lie)

Hide #4 (Lie) | 2016 | Photo: Susie David

I've recently spent two days working with Megan Calver and Susie David at Dawlish Warren Nature Reserve as part of our collaborative project The Buffer Zone. It's a chance to challenge each other, to explore joint working, and to look at areas where our individual practices intersect.

I'm continuing to work with the idea of the hide as part of this project, which includes seeking opportunities to blend into the landscape. Such actions align with themes of mimicry that cut across all of our practices, as well as being part of a shared inquiry into the possibilities of live experimentation.

EX has lost its SPACE

Spacex at Preston Street, Exeter

At 7pm on Saturday 2nd April, Spacex closed its doors at Preston Street, said goodbye to its role as a permanent gallery space and began a new future as a commissioning organisation. From now on, rather than running a rolling programme of gallery shows, it will collaborate on projects with different curators, spaces, organisations and artists.

Spacex was an internationally important contemporary art gallery that punched way above its weight in terms of the art and artists it attracted to the south west. It was one of the reasons I moved to Exeter and one of the reasons I've stayed. However, the removal of regular Arts Council funding a couple of years ago put it on a path where operating out of a permanent building was no longer viable.

The city will feel the loss of its only dedicated contemporary art space, just as it felt the loss of its art school. We are running out of public spaces that aren't devoted to shopping. I hope it's a creative shift that makes room for new ideas, new participation and new opportunities, but only time will tell.

Placement and displacement

This photo gives a taste of what I've been up to this week with artist Charles Richardson, along with another member of Preston Street Union and two students from Exeter School of Art. We were helping Charles construct one of the works for his forthcoming show at Exeter Phoenix: Displacement Behaviour. Runs 18 March to 30 April 2016.

Poetic fieldwork at Dawlish Warren

Gabrielle Hoad | Hide #3 (Hand/Twigs) | 2016

I'm pleased to announce that I've been awarded an a-n Professional Development Bursary with Megan Calver and Susie David. This will allow us to undertake a self-organised residency at Dawlish Warren National Nature Reserve during 2016.

You can read the a-n announcement here.

Sticky fingers

One result of today's experimental photo making.

Co-labour versus collaboration

1. 

   Collaboration:  1.  the action of working with someone to produce something. 2. traitorous cooperation with an occupying enemy.

Filing away some old emails, I felt a jolt of anger when I was reunited with an aggressive missive from a former collaborator. It wasn't unusual behaviour for him, but this particular communication (kept all these years in case of legal ramifications) had turned out to be the final straw for me. I made the decision to walk away from two years of hard work rather than risk my wellbeing and reputation any further. 

Since then I've had many, far happier, far less complicated collaborations with other artists. Messy, inefficient, awkward, frustrating, exhausting - yes, but all ultimately worthwhile. But I will admit I'm often wary (and even a tiny bit cynical) whenever I hear the words 'artists collaboration'.

You see, being part of a self-organised artist collaboration isn't like joining an established team or workplace. There's rarely a structure of responsibility, no established ways of behaving as a group, no etiquette, nowhere obvious to turn for mediation when things go wrong.

When permanent groups form, there are certain things you might expect to have to negotiate formally or informally: workloads (and how much each person has to take on), responsibility (who's accountable), and organisation (how much of it is necessary). But there's rarely much incentive to formalise these aspects when you're being as nimble as artists need to be. And so you stumble along, sometimes with positive results - but not always.

Meanwhile you learn more than you ever wanted to know about your collaborators' attitudes to trust, privacy, fairness, personal property, honesty, money, the law, the welfare of others. And your own will be exposed too. Of course, we all think our own attitudes are the normal ones. Which means collaborations can be very tense, especially if it's how you first get to know someone.

Working with existing friends can challenge friendships, but it also means fewer surprises, greater ease of communication, and a prior investment in a relationship that you don't want to lose. It also means you're a little more forgiving of each other's foibles.

But strangers can be successful collaborators too, as my recent involvement with the Preston Street Union proves. This loose collaboration, which grew out of artist Trevor Pitt's residency at Spacex in 2015, brought together a slightly random collection of around 20 local artists, and focused on the idea of "artists making things and making things happen". And that's exactly what we did for a few hours each week, over five weeks. Facilitated by visiting artists, we improvised short-term collaborations in small groups, making work with what was to hand (most often ourselves).

Previous collaborations have often meant grappling with long-term bureaucratic processes such as funding applications and project planning - usually during lengthy meetings. By contrast, these swift, spontaneous bursts of working with other artists opened up new and exciting avenues. Along with some genuinely thrilling moments, there were also times when the process led to little more than anxiety, paralysis and failure - but it didn't matter because each 'project' was quickly done and I always learned something. 

So if I have some guidelines for myself after all these years, they are these. Collaborate freely but keep collaborations short or at least time-defined. Move carefully: be generous with your time and energy but keep in step with others. The success of a collaboration is everyone's responsibility and you won't save one that's in trouble by powering ahead alone. Avoid bureaucracy wherever possible, but if you're doing anything that involves signing contracts, handling significant amounts of other people's money, or other people's property or safety, beware of collaborators who insist you don't need to organise. You do.

Hide #2 (Exposure)

Gabrielle Hoad | Hide #2 (Exposure) | Digital photograph | 2016 

Building on my interest in animal surveillance and the way scientific knowledge is constructed, I have been working with the idea of the hide, a camouflaged structure that seeks to efface the presence of the human observer and encourage 'natural' behaviour in those observed. 

I'm interested in the hide as a means of surreptitiously entering the territory of another, but also in the alternative definition of hide as skin, a notional boundary between self and the world. This series of long-exposure photographs seeks to dissolve figure into ground.