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.

Looking inward and looking outward

Finding the common threads in our practice, Gabrielle Hoad with Amy Shelton and Bettina Amtag   Preston Street Union  | Photo: Martyn Windsor/Spacex

Exeter is an isolated city that tends towards the parochial. It needs an outward-facing, internationally focused contemporary art gallery -- far more than it needs another local arts organisation. And it used to have one in Spacex. But since Arts Council England axed Spacex's regular (NPO) funding, they've had to work with what they've got.

In some ways, this shift in focus has been good news for local artists. In the old days, because of that international remit, local artists were very much the audience. Now we are participants: direct beneficiaries of the new programme of community engagement and education that has - for now - replaced the rolling exhibitions programme.

The most recent and exciting manifestation of this was the crowd-funded residency of Birmingham-based artist and curator Trevor Pitt. His Preston Street Union (PSU) was an affiliation of artists from in and around Exeter that came together over a five-week period (13 October – 7 November 2015) to explore collaboration as a strategy. It drew on and extended elements from Trevor's earlier experiment in alternative education, the Cannon Hill Art School, and referenced the work of influential artist and educator Josef Albers. It gave participants the opportunity to hear from artists such as Juneau Projects and Clare Thornton, and explore their approaches through short, super-intense practical exercises. We were also invited to participate in Cathy Wade's Shaun Ryder Beermat Show. The final full-day session was run by Emily Warner as a more extended opportunity to examine and respond to the context of the Spacex building at 45 Preston Street.

My personal practice is very focused on research and reflection, which meant I found PSU tough, tiring and occasionally bewildering (as with the Kaleider Ideas Lab a couple of years ago). But being driven to make live work with others, and with very little time to think, opened up some new freedoms for me, and also a chance to experience some of the more positive aspects of artistic collaboration. (On which, more in a later post.)

If I have any reservations, it's that the doors were never fully open to the public. Local school and community groups attended workshops with Trevor, alumni of Exeter's now defunct College of Art & Design came together for a reunion evening, and those who helped to fund the residency were invited to a social event with Trevor where he talked about the project.

But if you're someone who knew and loved the Spacex of old, but wasn't involved in PSU, it must feel like a very long time since Spacex was part of your life. Those golden days when you got to wander into the gallery at a time of your choosing and reflect quietly on some interesting contemporary art -- ideas from the world beyond Exeter.

Starlings by Dennis Hlynsky

Dennis Hlynsky | Starlings take off at 200 fps (still)

I've seen this technique before but never so well used. Technology has finally caught up with the aspirations I had 10 years ago to track bird flight paths. It's wonderful stuff, but part of me still prefers my wobbly window tracings. With thanks to Helen Drever. View the full animation here.