Art in public spaces

Phoebe Cummings | Duties | 2022 | Commissioned by Honeyscribe

Out and about in Exeter this morning I encountered Phoebe Cummings' intricate clay work Duties that's being shown in the stairwell of Exeter's Custom House.  It's a sensitive response to the building's extraordinary 17th century plaster ceilings by John Abbott, and also to its history as a site for weighing and measuring. Deliberately fragile, it's made of unfired clay, which is destined to shrink, crack, break and turn to dust over time.  However, in a well-meaning attempt to preserve it, the work has been fenced in with various large pieces of signage and a rope, and its base tagged with a sheet of A4 paper 'Fragile - please do not touch'.

It brought home to me yet again the hazards (as well as the rewards) of placing work in non-gallery spaces. Showing work in heritage sites, gardens, farms, shops, hospitals and other public spaces means artists and curators reach a far wider and more diverse audience, but these are also places where there is no established structure or etiquette around the way art objects should be treated. They have to fend for themselves. Inevitably compromises have to be found, and the work can sometimes be lost or overwhelmed by what surrounds it.

It takes a certain amount of generosity to hand over your work in such circumstances and trust it will be looked after well - not just protected from theft or damage but presented properly too. I am full of admiration for an artist and curator who placed such a delicate, friable object in this public thoroughfare. In many ways, it adds to the tension and poignancy of the piece.  But I am also reminded how difficult it can be to make art that respects and responds to a context when there's no guarantee such care will be reciprocated.

Phoebe Cummings Duties
Installation & exhibition of works on paper 30 May - 24 July 2022

Exeter Custom House, 46 The Quay, Exeter, EX2 4AN

https://www.honeyscribe.org/custom-house

Colour by numbers

Image credit: NASA/JPL

It may not look like much compared to today's amazing footage from Perseverance, but this pastel drawing is the very first image of Mars. "Nasa's Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby of Mars in the summer of 1965. The spacecraft had a camera onboard to capture Martian vistas, but transmitting all the data to Earth was slow, taking 19 days. So while waiting for Earth-bound electronics to convert the data into fully processed images, Richard Grumm of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to take matters into his own hands. He stapled strips of paper with incoming pixel brightness values onto a wall and then hand-coloured the numbers with corresponding pastels."  A lovely example of art science crossover.

Image credit: NASA/JPL

 

Image credit: NASA/JPL

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-view-of-mars-was-a-paint-by-numbers/

Opening up The Luminous Envelope

Gabrielle Hoad | The Luminous Envelope | 2015

Last year I was invited by Exeter University's Arts & Culture team to reflect on work I had made as a result of working with the university's Environment & Sustainability Institute (ESI).  The work appeared in an online exhibition called Catalyst. 

I chose to feature images from The Luminous Envelope, a series of photographs I made in 2015 in response to a collection of 19th century teaching aids held at Oxford University Mathematical Institute. They relate to my interest in the notion of the scientific model as a simplified representation that assists prediction or understanding, which began back in 2014 with the ESI-sponsored project Foreign Soil.

As a result of revisiting this work, and at the request of the university, I began to write about the work. Interalia magazine have kindly published the results in their 'Emerging ideas' section, where I reflect on the notion of 'boundary objects' and models as types of fiction. This writing is something of a work in progress, but it felt important to bring it to a concrete form, from which I could build future thinking and making.

https://www.interaliamag.org/emerging-ideas/gabrielle-hoad-the-luminous-envelope-visualising-the-invisible/

High wood

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2022 | Work in progress - bell of an oboe

For Clouded Border, Megan Calver and I have been researching Oboe, an innovative radio-navigation system developed and deployed at Durlston during World War II. The system directed aircraft to targets in mainland Europe that were obscured by cloud or darkness.

Curious about the precise signals used, we cross-referenced a number of sources – including recordings from the Imperial War Museum and technical papers by Oboe’s inventors – to come up with a definitive score for the coded Morse sequence that would have been heard by RAF pilots in their headsets. The signalling tone was said to mimic an oboe, hence its name. We’ve now commissioned an oboist - Paul Sartin - to create and perform a new contemporary sound work for the exhibition based on this score.

The name of the musical instrument itself derives from the French haut bois or 'high wood’. We are intrigued by its correspondence to the wooden Mosquito planes chosen to carry Oboe navigation equipment. Mosquito aircraft were capable of flying at sufficient altitude to send and receive radio signals over long distances. So they too were ‘high wood’.

However Mosquitoes were too small and light to carry many bombs and so usually acted as pathfinders, dropping flares to mark the targets for the heavy bombers that followed.

Paul will perform the piece live in the exhibition space at Durlston Belvedere at 2.30pm on Saturday 24 September.

Signals and transmissions

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2022 | Work in progress 

I spent the last week in March in residence at Durlston Country Park in Dorset with Megan Calver, generating ideas and material for our September exhibition Clouded Border. 

This site-specific project draws inspiration from Durlston's history as a lookout and signalling station. Named  after a variety of night-flying moth found on site, the project also references an innovative radio-based navigation system developed in part and deployed at Durlston during World War II. Known as Oboe, it allowed RAF bombers to precisely locate targets in Nazi-occupied Europe -- at night or in heavy cloud or smog. 

We benefited from extraordinarily clear and bright weather conditions and we made the most of them, going out for morning, afternoon and evening working sessions every day. We imitated clouds, caught light in paper cones, chased bumblebees with an improvised parabolic mic, looked at the stars on moonless nights, read to night-moths, conversed with skylarks, and eavesdropped on bats.  It was an amazing, if exhausting, experience. 

Clouded Border

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Clouded Border | 2022

I'm delighted to announce details of a forthcoming installation and live event to take place at Durlston Country Park, Dorset, in September. This site-specific project, made with Megan Calver, draws inspiration from Durlston's history as a lookout and signalling station. 

Named Clouded Border after a variety of night-flying moth found on site, the project also references an innovative radio-based navigation system developed in part and deployed at Durlston during World War II. Known as Oboe, it allowed RAF bombers to precisely locate targets in Nazi-occupied Europe -- at night or in heavy cloud or smog. 

Durlston's history as a site for the transmission and receipt of signals goes back even further: Marconi carried out some of his early experiments in wireless communication from the castle. It also has a lighthouse and a defunct foghorn. And then there are the diverse signals exchanged by plants, insects, birds, wind and water at Durlston – many of them undetectable through normal human perception.

The September exhibition is open for two and a half weeks. For our closing event, we've commissioned oboist Paul Sartin to play a short piece composed especially for the project, based around the sequence of Morse signals transmitted to aircraft via the Oboe ground stations.

   

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver: Clouded Border
The Belvedere, Durlston Castle, Durlston Country Park, Lighthouse Road, Swanage BH19 2JL 
Thursday 8th – Sunday 25th September 2022
10.30am-5pm daily 
Meet the artists: 23rd – 25th September, 2pm-4pm daily, at the Belvedere
Live event: Saturday 24th September, 2.30pm, with oboist Paul Sartin at the Belvedere

Having begun during the 2021 lockdown, this project has been a long time coming to fruition. Initially working remotely from the site (and each other) we generated scores and actions based on the Rangers’ Daily Diary. We then spent several days on site in June 2021, getting to know Durlston County Park, its inhabitants and its custodians and were offered a week-long mini-residency at Exeter Phoenix to develop our ideas further. We'll return to Durlston again in late March 2022 to start producing the work for our on-site exhibition.

Work for sale

I've taken the plunge and launched a new online shop. There's a selection of work for sale including original drawings and prints, digital prints and artist publications. A few (pigeon-themed) items are available now and I'll be adding new pieces over the coming weeks and months

http://gabriellehoad.co.uk/shop.php