Taking time

I feel immensely grateful to have been awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant by Arts Council England. This funding is specifically to allow individual practitioners to take time to focus on their creative development. I will be using mine to feed my growing interest in moving image work. Until now, I've used digital video in a very simple way, and primarily for documentation. I want to master more complex recording and editing techniques and to 'play' with the technology.

I'll be developing material and footage for a film that draws on the the legacy of Alec Harley Reeves (1902-1971), the influential inventor and psychic researcher. This will include looking at the potential of technology to generate ‘supernatural’ phenomena (eg interference and ghosting). Above all, it's a valuable period of risk-taking and experimentation where, for once, I'm accountable but I'm not working to the deadlines of an exhibition or commission.

Running from April to December, it's a self-designed package of hands-on 'learning by doing' supplemented with mentoring from experts and peers. Megan Calver will act as a creative consultant on the film, collaborating with me to utilise our joint research and practice to date that's focused on revealing hidden signals beyond human senses.

Having been rejected by ACE far more often than awarded, I'm only too aware of how defeated some other artists will be feeling right now. If you're one of them, I hope you manage to pick yourself up and try again. Funds are short, competition is fierce and no matter how good your application, you also need a big dose of luck. It was my turn this time, and I'm very grateful.

DECENNIUM

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border (Gorse Cone) | 2022-24

I'm really pleased to be part of Hestercombe Gallery's 10th Anniversary show - DECENNIUM - alongside Tania Kovats, Helen Sear, Simon Faithfull, Alex Hartley, Mariele Neudecker, Philippa Lawrence, Sarah Bennett, Trish Morrissey, Susan Derges, John Newling, Feral Practice, Brendan Barry, Sophy Rickett, Liz Nicol, Jo Lathwood, Lucy Soni, Fiona Hingston, Simon Bayliss and Rebecca Partridge. 

Megan Calver and I will be showing Clouded Border (Gorse Cone), a video work made at Durlston Country Park in 2022, alongside a new collection of objects accumulated over the past year as we've reflected on the legacy of the influential World War Two engineer and paranormal researcher Alec Harley Reeves.

DECENNIUM runs from 23rd March to 7th July 2024

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

More details at https://www.hestercombe.com/whats-on/decennium

(Notes Towards) A Natural History of War

Gabrielle Hoad | (Notes Towards) A Natural History of War | 2024

“Perhaps the most striking aspect of the outdoor world is its peacefulness. Wander where you will along country lanes and footpaths, through deep woodlands or on the dunes and beaches of the sea coast, you cannot fail to notice the absence of organized hostility and open strife. Yet this apparent peace is in truth superficial. It cloaks a never-ending conflict, a relentless struggle to the death…”

The Wonders of Nature illustrated by C.F. Tunnicliffe (1940)

I encountered The Wonders of Nature during a residency with Megan Calver for our project Clouded Border (2021-22). Published in 1940, it turned out to be a useful signpost for a body of work that brought together the World War II landscape of Durlston and its current peacetime status as a National Nature Reserve. This extract, from a chapter entitled ‘War and Peace in Nature’, is attributed to Harold Bastin (1875-1962), a British entomologist, botanist, zoologist and photographer.

I remain curious about the effect of war on nature writing and how far authors writing during, between and just after the two World Wars saw the environment around them through the lens of conflict. The images above are extracted from a new short text that draws on accounts of the behaviour of wildlife during wartime as well as the frequent appropriation of terminology from the natural world to name military hardware and campaigns. It’s a work in progress that might become a publication – a sort of ‘bestiary’ perhaps – or part of the text within a collaborative moving image work.

 

Thanks to Lizzie Lloyd and my Camp Kin at the recent Camp Membership Writing In/As Art workshop for prompting me to take the plunge and make a proper start on this text, which has been hovering around me for a quite a while.

Curator Space Artist Bursary Award

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2021-22

I'm pleased to announce I've been awarded an artist bursary by CuratorSpace. It will go towards developing a new moving image project built around research and work I've done to date with Megan Calver on the paranormal experiments of World War Two engineer and inventor Alec Harley Reeves.

https://www.curatorspace.com/about/news/curatorspace-artist-bursary--gabrielle-hoad/318

Delicate Instruments | Vitrine | 2023

 

Visitors to Delicate Instruments (Vibrating Stillness) at Vitrine, Exeter 2023

“A vibrating stillness like that in a vitrine”

Edmund de Waal quoting Rilke in ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’ (2010)

Shifting between scientific and psychical thinking, Delicate Instruments suggests new ways to tune into hidden signals from the more-than-human.

Originally shared at the Devon & Exeter Institution as a public participatory event, this iteration was made specially for Vitrine, a shop display cabinet c. 1900 which hosts a series of occasional installations by UK and international artists in the Exeter home of artist and arts educator Sarah Bennett.

Obscured by a veil, the vitrine initially withholds its contents. A closer look reveals them as objects held in unstable equilibrium and sensitive to the slightest stimuli: from trembling paper cases balanced on the points of nails, to indigo carbon paper primed to register subtle touch. The cabinet also contains a number of found objects with the potential to make a sound in response to vibrations in the air – an oboe reed, a lead whistle, a tuning fork.

Some of these instruments are drawn from the realm of psychical experimentation, where they might have been placed in a sealed cabinet to isolate them from air currents and other physical influences. However, on the lowest shelf we set up a miniature electric fan that disturbed the air inside the cabinet sufficiently to cause lighter objects to tremble and spin. It also vibrated quietly, filling the room with a just-audible hum.

We took our title from a description of the famous medium Eusapia Palladino (1854 –1918). Oliver Lodge, who went to investigate her for the Society of Psychical Research, told colleagues it was better not to think of her as a person but as "a delicate instrument". The idea of “unstable equilibrium…sensitive to the slightest stimuli” comes from Richard Noakes quoting William Barratt (1867) in ‘Physics and Psychics’ (2019).

Delicate Instruments (Vibrating Stillness) was made In collaboration with Megan Calver. It was installed at Vitrine, Exeter 25th November - 21st December 2023 and shared with visitors by invitation and appointment on 25th November, 5th December, 9th December and 19th December, as well as informally with Sarah Bennett's family and friends.

What kind of an artist am I?

 

What kind of an artist are you? It’s a question people often ask me, and one I struggle to answer. These days I mostly make sound and moving image works, installations and publications - and organisations and funders sometimes even pay me for it.  BUT I have no one craft skill, no postgraduate qualifications and no studio. 

I tend to learn skills as I need them and if I can't learn them well enough to fulfil a specific project, I hire people to help me out. I did not do an MA, even though I have a research-based and critically engaged practice. Having an MA may suggest you’re more serious about your profession but, in my view, it’s an expensive and time-consuming way to make the point.

But now the question of artists and studios has come up. And that is harder to come to terms with. An artist new to my city has initiated a series of studio visits between Devon artists. It’s a great low-cost, easy-to-manage idea for self-development and networking. But what can I offer if I don’t have a studio?

The city of Exeter is well-known for its dearth of studio space, and it’s always concerned me because it makes it more difficult for artists to settle and thrive here. So, back in the day, I made a genuine effort to address it.  For two years I worked really hard with other artists on setting up a shared studio building in the city centre and a Community Interest Company to run it. But, after a strong start, the project quickly foundered and I didn’t have the energy to start over. I managed to secure space in the city’s only other dedicated studio building. But after about 7 years that was sold off and, struggling with my finances,  I decided I would have to manage at home.

Having no studio has now become normal for me. I work on location, on my computer and on my kitchen table. I’m lucky: I’m not in a tiny flat or house share. I have my own home and in it there’s a small spare room where I keep my materials, kit, research, stock, documentation etc but I have no dedicated space beyond my computer for working. 

The artist new to Exeter said ‘Why not share your inspiration shelf? Everyone has one of those, right?’ Er, no! (She was joking - kind of.) I have a folder on my PC.  That’s my workspace, my headspace.

But it made me think. Should I be content with my unconventional approaches (I seem pretty productive) or should I be concerned about disadvantaging myself?  Am I taking my practice seriously enough? Does the lack of physical space I devote to my art practice reflect the way I squeeze it in around earning a ‘proper’ living? Why do I beg other women artists to take up more space with their work in galleries when I can’t even find proper space for my own practice in my home?

Yes, really, what kind of an artist am I?

Delicate Instruments (Vibrating Stillness)

“A vibrating stillness like that in a vitrine”

Edmund de Waal quoting Rilke in The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010)

I’m delighted to announce Megan Calver and I will be showing the next iteration of Delicate Instruments in a new Exeter art space: Vitrine.

Vitrine is a shop display cabinet (c. 1900) which hosts a series of occasional installations by UK and international artists in the Exeter home of artist and arts educator Sarah Bennett.

Megan Calver and I will be making the inaugural installation. A future publication will provide documentation of the longer series.

Delicate Instruments (Vibrating Stillness)
25 November - 21 December 2023
Vitrine, Exeter (viewing by appointment only)

http://www.sarahbennett.org.uk/vitrine.html