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