Foreign Soil Field Trip

"Throw a hoop to pick a random patch of ground. Log, describe and count everything you find there." Field Trip - 29/06/14.

Nine people came for today's walk at West Town Farm organised by OrganicArts. Five stayed on and generously shared their observations of Easterbrooks, my potential banana-growing site. 

Textually Active with Driftingspace

Gabrielle Hoad  - Data roll

Textually Active took place at Karst, Plymouth on 10 April 2014 with contributions from Tabatha Andrews, Sally Hall, Jason Hirons, Gabrielle Hoad, Rosie King, Holly Knowles and Steven Paige. Fifty-five people attended.

For the event, I considered source data from my flight mapping project (generated by glider pilot Rowan Smith and research scientist Dr Steven Portugal) as text. This included transcribing two seconds of pigeon flight data through automated text-to-voice software and presenting it alongside animated archive images of bird flight by E.J. Marey from the early 1890s.

The session focused on seeing, hearing and holding data (printed out as a roll) which allowed us to appreciate the its rhythms, its sheer quantity and density, and also its narrative qualities (it describes a connected series of events). But, despite their precision, numeric co-ordinates are too abstract for ordinary human comprehension when presented this way. They have to be translated and contextualised. 

Common themes emerged from the evening around data, surveillance, linear progression (narratives), digital processes (binary states), rule-based works, and measurement of space and time.  Details of the other artists' work can be found here.

Textually Active provides a critical space for debate and performative practices in Plymouth and the South West of England. Curated and run by Driftingspace, a collaborative art practice, it's an ad hoc, nomadic event running cultural activities that incorporate art, performance, installation, and writing.

Art that isn't looking away #4

Emily Speed Littoral Zone - Plymouth Arts Centre

I had a bit of a moan a while back about the art world's seemingly wilful attempt to distract us from the big issues confronting the planet. However, there are two excellent exhibitions in Devon galleries at the moment that run counter to this trend.

S Mark Gubb's 'History is Written by the Winners' at Exeter Phoenix (28 March -10 May 2014) draws widely on the social and political culture of the 1980s and 1990s -- from fake Libyan hit squads (supposedly sent by Colonel Gaddafi to assassinate President Reagan in 1981) to conspiracy theories about the assassination of President Kennedy. The most prominent work (possibly because its familiar smell pervades the entire gallery) is A New Physics Based on Nightmares. This invites you to prepare Pot Noodles while timing your snack against the four-minute launch protocols for a nuclear attack.

Reading the gallery blurb is a must to get the best from this show - it's definitely art that needs commentary. Amusing yet pointed, it encourages a healthy scepticism about the structures of modern power.

Emily Speed 'Littoral Zone' at  Plymouth Arts Centre (22 March - 25 May 2014) is a much gentler, subtler show that takes its name from the unstable, liminal space between the high and low tide marks. Exploiting a small, gloomy gallery space to maximum effect, Speed uses projections, sound, sculpture and airstreams to create a space reminiscent of the drippy, dark, decaying spaces under a British seaside pier. There's a sense of shelter but also of vulnerability.

An improvised structure of timber and draped fabric (with feet of clay) is used as a rippling, unstable canvas for film of people doggedly erecting windbreaks on a bleak and breezy South Devon beach.  It's matched by images of sea defences and empty sands, and suggests our noble yet ultimately futile struggle against time, tide and the elements.

With the main railway link to Devon and Cornwall only recently re-opened after catastrophic sea damage, this work seems perfectly timed and perfectly placed.

Documentation I

Gabrielle Hoad Five pigeons, 74 seconds (2014) Photo: Jamie Morrison

Work in progress for Solid Air, shown as part of PILOT in Artspace 101, University of Plymouth 24 March - 17 April 2014.  Laster sintered nylon model.

Documentation II

Gabrielle Hoad Interloper (2014) Installation view. Photo: Kevin Burrell

Part of my work Interloper in the conservatory at Oxford Botanic Garden. This large-scale vinyl banner is paired with an edition of 80 booklets for 'Breaking of tulips'  22 March -  26 May 2014. http://www.unwrappingbooks.info/#/breaking-of-tulips/4560059824

Listening to Oxford

Hannah Rickards To enable me to fix my attention ... Installation at Modern Art Oxford (2014)

My recent visit to Oxford coincided with some brilliant exhibitions. At Modern Art Oxford I enjoyed Roelef Louw's Pyramid (Soul City), a carefully constructed pyramid of 6,000 oranges which gradually disappears as visitors help themselves to fruit (15 February - 6 April). It's rare for an art gallery to smell so good.

However, I was really there to see Hannah Rickards' To enable me to fix my attention on any one of these symbols I was to imagine that I was looking at the colours as I might see them on a moving picture screen (15  February - 21 April). Exploring extraordinary natural phenomena (thunder, the aurora borealis, mirages), the work consists of attempts to describe the indescribable. Rickards deconstructs, then reconstructs and transcribes these phenomena through text, light, sound, colour, first-person accounts and re-enactments. At first pass, it's a very restrained and minimalist show, but one that richly rewards proper investment of time and attention. I didn't want to leave.

A friend recommended the Audiograft Festival (12 March - 28 March at Oxford Brookes University and other city locations), which included Gordon Monahan's A Very Large Vinyl LP Constructed in Acoustic Space in The Glass Tank. You sit (alone and very conspicuously) in the centre of eight loudspeakers, where you hear a collage of surface scratches and vintage easy listening records, spinning to create the illusion that you're the hole in the middle of a virtual vinyl LP.

Even better was Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walk. It's a self-guided walk around the Oxford Brookes campus wearing special, sensitive wireless headphones which make the acoustic qualities of above-ground and underground electromagnetic fields audible. From lift control panels to vending machines and cashpoints, every electrical item has its own unique electromagnetic signature. Slightly ominous, but nonetheless a whole new way to experience the everyday.

Looking at other people's work is never easy when you've been obsessing about your own during an exhibition install, so it was a lucky coincidence to be able to spend so much time listening instead.

Oddly enough, the listening theme continued back in Exeter when I went to see an artist's talk by Marie Toseland. Rather than talk through a series of images, she played her own Desert Island Discs, as well as video clips of rapping and beatboxing.  All preparation for a new 'experimental opera' she's starting work on.

AA2A interim exhibition - Plymouth University

Kayleigh Hill The Balaclava Experiment PILOT AA2A show (2014)

PILOT: AA2A - Artspace 101, Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth PL4 8AA

24 March - 16 April 2014 (by appointment only after 28 March, due to university holidays).

Exhibition of work in progress by the five artists resident at Plymouth University for the academic year 2013-14 as part of the national AA2A (Artists Access to Art Colleges) scheme:  Tabatha Andrews, Sally Hall, Kayleigh Hill, Gabrielle Hoad, Lee McDonald.

Features my work in progress The being beyond. A model representing 74 seconds in the flight of five flocking pigeons is shown alongside a digital reproduction of Pigeon En Vol (1891-92) by Etienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demenÿ, an early attempt to understand bird flight through the application of recording technology. Bird flight data provided by Dr Steven Portugal of the Royal Veterinary College, London.