On instinct and irrationality

 

Gabrielle Hoad | What the world becomes - work in progress | Oil on window | 2006

While I’ve been convalescing, I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on where I came from and where I want to go in art. For reasons to do with background and finance, I’m a very late starter and, looking back, I can see I’ve often been in an almighty rush to move my career along. With maybe only two days a week to work as an artist, I’ve really burned the candle at both ends. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, but it has not come without cost.

One thing I do know is that I haven’t protected my intuition fiercely enough. I’ve applied genuine creative thinking in all sorts of ways: to find my way past administrative obstacles, solve technical issues, write proposals, build connections, create opportunities, be a breadwinner etc.

But while I’ve run around making things happen for myself and others,  I have let the flame that feeds my practice grow very faint indeed. While I've thought a lot about art, I've lost my instinct for making a random but right decision (for example a mark, a gesture, a placing of an object, a quirky edit). The kind of things that might be irrational, inconsequential, even sloppy, but very occasionally are also mysterious, profound and highly charged. 

I think about a painting I made years ago in life class where a thick drip of hot pink spilled down over a pristine silhouette of the model and muddled with some luminous green below. A fellow student exclaimed in pity at this accident assuming I would paint it out, but I already knew it was the best thing that had happened all day. Or the angry moment in my final year at college when I started scribbling on the windows with an oil bar and a gull flew past and I followed it with my hand. It became the degree show piece that finally felt like my own work as an artist, rather than something I was making to meet assessment criteria.

These are things that make art amazing. And in my race to make up for lost time, I think I have let slip my ability to notice and to nurture them.

A pause

Gabrielle Hoad | Sign (Shep's Hollow) | Digital photograph | 2023

I shall be out of action for a few weeks while I deal with some urgent health issues. I'm disappointed that I'll miss out on a lively summer arts-wise in Exeter. I've also had to put a number of planned projects on hold. But I'm trying to see it as a positive opportunity to pause, rest, reflect and take stock.

On career luck

Gabrielle Hoad | Lucky Catch (Dawlish Warren) | Digital photograph | 2023

 
I'm a firm believer in the idea that as an ordinary working artist, you must make your own luck: work hard, play fair, be generous to others, network regularly and never give up. But none of that sticks without a little extra glue. And that glue is credibility.

Credibility is something you can earn, but more often it is gifted: a friend or relative who's an art world insider, being taught by a well-connected art school lecturer, inherited ease with middle-class interactions. Talent is important, of course. But it's a myth that the best artists invariably rise to the top. Even for the best artists, it's credibility in the eyes of commissioners, curators and funders that makes the networking accumulate into opportunities, the hard work accrue into a reputable career.

Mainstream curators are rarely in the business of 'discovering' new talent - and if they are it's usually because they are pursuing a short-term inclusivity agenda. Otherwise, they tend to select artists that other people have already validated through a track-record of exhibitions, awards, recommendations and so on. 

Do I feel lucky? Well, I am a white European, which I realise confers considerable  privilege, but I am also female, older and from a background where a career in the arts was never considered a viable career option, hence being such a late starter. The question of credibility is rather tougher. On paper, my career as an artist is hardly glittering, but I've found - or more often, made - sufficient opportunities to create satisfying work, even if they haven't always had the level of funding or support they needed to really get off the ground. I am happy with my working life, if a little disappointed in the art world. 

Foxhole radio

Foxhole Radio (work in progress) | 2023

Following on from my work with Megan Calver at Durlston Country Park, a location that played a key role in the development of radio communications, I've become interested in making the simplest possible radio receiver. And this is it. No battery, no amplifier, no real tuner ... just some copper wire, a razor blade, a safety pin, a pencil lead and an earphone. (It also needs to be connected up to an aerial and an earth.)

Different versions of this receiver were built by soldiers during World War Two. Traditional radios could be traced by the enemy, so soldiers built crude radios (using blued or rusted razor blades as diodes), which were capable of receiving AM (amplitude modulated) transmissions. There are relatively few AM broadcasts these days, but it feels like some kind of magic even to hear static on it.

Edward Krasiński

Edward Krasiński | Spear | 1964

Returning to my own preoccupation with movement and the strange business of trying to represent it, I was delighted to discover this work by Edward Krasiński in Tate magazine. 

'Spears hung from the wires stretched between the trees created an illusion of movement. They were swishing [in the air]. It was all about preparing the spear to perform its function. Once prepared it could act on its own.’

Delicate Instruments - CAMP Research Residency

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Delicate Instruments (work in progress) | 2023

My CAMP Research Residency with Megan Calver is now concluded, but the ‘Delicate Instruments’ work we conceived while supported by them (and our insightful critical friend Kate Paxman) continues.

The two-month residency proved to be an invaluable and intense period of collaborative research and making, and also gave us the opportunity to share our findings with the public in the extraordinary surroundings of the historic Devon & Exeter Institution.

We used our time to explore the work of Alec Harley Reeves (1902 -1971). Reeves was a brilliant engineer, who also conducted experiments to test psychical phenomena. By reconstructing some of those experiments, we’ve been seeking new ways to connect with the more-than-human.

We began our research process thinking about Reeves’ pioneering work in digital communications and how he had applied his engineer’s rigour to “mechanising the process of mediumship” as his colleague Richard Epworth put it.  As a radio and telecommunications engineer, Reeves spent his professional life attempting to extract signals from unwanted ‘noise’, and his digital innovations were one way of achieving this. However, when it came to the paranormal, Reeves seemed to be attempting to deliberately generate random ‘noise’, assuming that ‘spirit’ would be able to influence it and that, when properly translated, it would convey meaningful messages. Reflecting contemporary developments in science and technology, these experiments involved everything from Geiger counters to cathode ray tubes.

As new work evolves from this residency, we’re hoping to take our discoveries about Reeves back out into the landscape and to tune in to the ‘noise’ emanating from the more-than-human.

This work was supported by the CAMP Research Residency. CAMP is a member-led support and professional development network for artists, arts producers, curators and arts writers in Devon and Cornwall www.camp-membership.org

Delicate Instruments Event

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Delicate Instruments | 2023

Join me and Megan Calver at the atmospheric Devon & Exeter Institution to explore the paranormal experiments of Alec Harley Reeves (1902-1971). Reeves was a brilliant engineer, a pioneer of digital communication and the inventor of a World War II radio navigation system called Oboe; he also devised many practical experiments to demonstrate psychical phenomena. We've used our recent CAMP Research Residency to explore these experiments as a cue to finding new ways to tune into hidden signals from the more-than-human. This is an interactive session with opportunities to experience some of Reeves’ methods and the hints they give of multiple ways of knowing. There is time included towards the end of the session for informal discussion, with refreshments provided.

Delicate Instruments
Saturday 22nd April 2023, 5.30pm - 8.30pm
Devon & Exeter Institution, 7 Cathedral Close, Exeter EX1 1EZ
Open to all, free but booking via CAMP essential

If you can’t attend in person, you are encouraged to participate remotely in one of the experiments. Download the instructions

CAMP is a member-led support and professional development network for artists, arts producers, curators and arts writers in Devon and Cornwall www.camp-membership.org