Thursday

We attended the recent 7 Sights meeting at Yorkshire Sculpture Park after being invited by Steve and Kate to participate in the 7 Sights project as artists. As we enjoyed the day, but unfortunately everyone involved couldn’t make it, we have decided to put our scepticism about the use and effectiveness of blogs (is anyone reading this?) to one side and post some information.

As Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman, we have been working collaboratively as artists since around 1997 (a date we both sometimes refute). Alongside working as practicing artists we both teach part-time, respectively in the Fine Art Departments at the University of Leeds and University College Falmouth. As artists we have tried to stay productive and keep the work progressing, hopefully avoiding easy categorisation and also interesting for us, so we have produced publications, gallery based installations, context specific projects and sometimes events and a number of videos. Most of these projects, objects and activities in different ways reveal our interest in sites, places, particular historical figures and events, politics, ideas of community and belonging and how people have and continue to resist the homogenisation of their lives. We have also realised a number of projects where we have invited artists and others to intervene or produced work in response to our own work.

Employed in Fine Art Departments we are both sceptical about the way artists knowledge, approaches to practice and ways of thinking and doing are becoming systematised, streamlined and undermined by the demands of the academy/institution as it moves ever closer towards a business model.

We work collaboratively to realise projects we probably couldn’t otherwise produce and to test and challenge our own orthodoxies. Within the practice we both have distinct interests and particular strengths and weaknesses. Attending the 7 Sights meeting seemed a more interesting use of time than a similar amount spent visiting Frieze Art Fair. We are interested to see how 7 Sights develops and what we might contribute and also extract? We envisage it might produce some work that is interesting and involve some unpredictable exchanges.

For our recent exhibition ‘The Wild’ (2009) a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s ‘cabin in the woods’ was constructed in the grounds of a former Natural History Museum and we are currently developing a new multi-site project ‘The Good Life’ for Lanternhouse in Ulverston, Cumbria, where we will be Artist-in-Residence in 2011. Perhaps there is a way to link some of this to 7 Sights?

thinking through making

just to clarify the ownership of the thinking through making and making through thinking statement - the first part was the RCA printmaking dept mantra, and the 2nd part was added to by a group of us students as a way to impress on them that we should be mindful of the churning out of work with out due consideration.
i am happy it continues to be useful.

Welcome to the world of studio based practise

Just about recovered now from the shared thinking day. I was shagged out yesterday kept trying to do things but just couldn't get going. I tried to read a bit of Tim Ingold Lines which Kate Pahl lent me but just read the first paragraph over and over again. We have had some lovely and thoughtful feedback from people which feels more like what people say after a really good party than on an evaluation form.

We all liked the bit when Bridgit welcomed us to the world of studio practice and Jeff asked "Have any of you guys heard of emails" it seemed to crystalise the idea that in-fact we are very different and it's possibly in the difference that the interesting stuff and knowing will start to happen. Amanda puts it really well in her feedback:-

"The vital difference that came out at the end of last
week's meeting was between making through thinking and thinking through making (Kate's formulation).
Perhaps what attracts many of us to each other is the excitement of looking down this formula the
'wrong' way."

We have our next steps and they all are doable and seem to fit so watch this space.

Amanda Ravetz

I'm a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University within MIRIAD, the research institute attached to the art and design faculty. A long time ago I did a painting degree at Central as it was then, and later a PhD in social anthropology with visual media.

I'm interested in observational cinema and recently made a film about the painter Ian Partridge. One of his works is included in Intuition, the new show at Whitworth Gallery Manchester curated by Bryony Bond (who Jordan knows from his Alchemy residency at Manchester Museum). Bryony has done a wonderful job of selecting work from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, recently donated to Whitworth. If Outsider Art doesn't sound very appealing - and its certainly a contentious term - you might just change your mind after seeing this show.

Brigitte Jurack (who teaches sculpture at MMU) and I were hoping to set up a project in Whitworth park for 7 Sights but sadly Whitworth said they were too taken up with other things to be our hosts, so we have to think again (they own the park, though they let it to the council on a peppercorn rent). Brigitte is at IMMA now doing a residency over the summer, so I need to have a scout around before she gets back and think about other possible places where we might do something. Brigitte's current work is about sculptural representations of youth, and since I did quite a lot of my anthropological fieldwork with young people we thought this was a good point of intersection between our two practices.

I'm looking forward to the meeting in September and seeing everyone there.

Introduction for Tim Neal

As I choose the title for this entry and looking at my name printed there I realise that I could and perhaps should at some point have chosen a pseudonym for myself. It feels so tacky to have a web presence - the coolest people I know just don't have one - it, the web, keeps all those bits of you that usually would be just forgotten by your friends and yourself and throws them back at you for ever and ever until the world comes to a startling standing still stalling stop and you finally get the answer to the question what comes next.

Now that's a reasonable introduction to me I'd say - depending on my mood. I was talking to, well rather complaining at, a close friend that she didn't want to speak to me about 'things' by which I meant 'ideas' - she replied that she found the academicspeak - the use of a technical vocabulary - off-putting. I don't think I do that. I am a sort of academic - meaning I have a reasonable tolerance of research, theory and if I knew the rest of this list I'd be a real one. I'm certainly not an artist although I once wrote this:

I'm a wolf without a taste for blood traveling in crush proof packs of twenty
I make sermons when I'm mounted and donate to war on plenty

and more like that a long time ago.

I still do the poetry bit on and off but I've become too interested in innate divinity for any reasonable people to converse with me. I've written many love songs and painted one landscape that I love and one bunch of daffodils that I almost love. Like Jeff O'Aberdeen and Ian D'Russell I am trained as an archaeologist but my main practice was collecting bits and pieces - although I love all that careful digging stuff it's just not as exciting as putting it in a pocket, washing it in the bath and dreaming of your first complete Solutrean blade. I left all that behind and I practice an anthropological trade nowadays. I'm completing a PhD looking at British people in a French village or perhaps more accurately a French village with British people in it.

I'm very pleased that this 7 sights project is up and running and I think the meeting towards which we will all gravitate will be extremely difficult to manage and challenging. There is so clearly work to be done at this meeting point of the sight and finding how to do this without just speaking academicspeak or reverting to obscene rhymes will be a test of our true mundanity.

Hello: Georgina Barney

Ooh, what an excitement and a fear... introductions!

Here's a photograph of me at 'Apple Day' at Penlanole Farm, mid-Wales. It's a place that's always been important, for imagining and constantly challenging what it means to make art.

Growing up in the East Midlands, it has felt like a backwater to London, or a middle-class commuter network, depleted from its agricultural heritage. But my experience of 'home' has been deeply enriched, since leaving art school (the Ruskin, Oxford in 2006) by spending time here and meeting some great artists interested in farming; I'm very excited to be working with Kate and others on 7SIGHTS.

Georgina Barney is studying for a practice-led PhD at Gray's School of Art, 'Curating the Farm' funded by AHRC (until 2012).

Hello 7Sites
Just a short introduction before i go off to explore some badminton spaces with Steve Poole. (I need to make a post otherwise i'll get into trouble.)
I'm an architect, but have spent my career avoiding architecture and being drawn instead to more peripheral, less 'architectural' spatial and critical practices.
More blurb to follow!

Introduction - Richard Healy

Hello all,

First of all, apologises for taking so long to introduce myself and my practise. I have been working on an exhibition at Outpost in Norwich. I thought i would show images and text from this show as a means of introducing my work, i hope you like it.

Cheers

Richard

PRESS RELEASE AND INTERVIEW

TAKEN FROM 'STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING' AT OUTPOST, NORWICH 2010

OUTPOST is pleased to present ‘Strategies for Building’, a solo exhibition of new work by London-based artist, Richard Healy.

Healy presents us with a series of highly rendered, graphic objects. Four, canary yellow frames support partially rendered pencil drawings depicting prototypes of modernist interiors. Seemingly bleak, the drawings appear as unfinished designs or blueprints. A crisp aluminium shelving system of the same colour houses a projector. The film, anchored through a backdrop of a static horizon, shows a morphing digital landscape of abstract geometry, oscillating between pure abstract form and seemingly recognisable architectural spaces.

'Strategies for Building' continues Healy's exploration of the exhaustion of form, particularly the notion of Minimalism’s search for new possibilities for the object, a search shared and continued by minimal design. Embodied through simulations of architecture and design, Healy’s work explores notions of proposed outcomes, setting his search against the background of ‘future think-tanks’ and ‘invisible committees’.

Addressing the political implications of interior design, the exhibition focuses on a highly regarded and influential colour group. Choosing to remain anonymous this respected group of colour analysts meet twice a year to discuss and forecast colours for various economic outputs based on current observations. Through discussion, a democratic decision is made upon a palette of colours that will be placed into production for use in the next two to three years. Their British palette is then sent, with a representative, to an international colour group workshop, which will form the basis for an international set of colours to be used by multinational organisations. Made up of 23 members, the British group has guided the economic use of colour for over forty years. For the exhibition they have chosen a single colour, which is used throughout as a ‘support structure’ that upholds or contains the artworks.

Healy displays a dichotomy through making simultaneous references to both recognised, existing design histories as well as unrealised ones. His drawings and films imply a time that exists somewhere between or outside the past, the present and the future, where minimalism, an exhausted, historic movement, rubs shoulders with a digital landscape purveying an unrealised environment, a future space. Putting to question the pragmatics of design and its potential to function within an art context, Healy eloquently incites a conceptual playoff between disparate languages and values.

A conversation between Richard Healy and Samuel Jeffery, 1 June 2010.

Samuel Jeffery: You have spoken about the framing devices in the show as ‘Secondary Structures’ although they play a critical role within the conceptual underpinning of the work. How did these ‘Secondary Structures’ come to play a primary role?

Richard Healy: Yes their role is critical but equally pragmatic. It is interesting that as I have been discussing these objects I have called them ‘secondary structures’ but also ‘support structures’, in any event they have always seemed dissimilar to the drawings or film. All apart from the aluminium structure, which in its making became increasingly rarefied to the extent that it warranted a title. Interestingly I called it ‘Divider’, so how much can a designed object escape it function? I am not sure, in any case the system of support in the show isn’t universal and that really interests me, especially as they are all a single colour. Monochrome was such a modernist obsession with order, so it’s interesting that the yellow supports are, in fact, unequal to one another.

SJ: The works in the show are pregnant with implied practical and design functions. Even the film, which is potentially the most ambiguous of the works, seemingly manages to retain the quality of a prototype, a draft or maybe even something like an architectural mood board. Is it important that all of the artworks maintain a functional implication, that they seem that they could go on to live different lives outside of the gallery?

RH: It is important that they maintain their elements of function, however I always see these functions through the prism of the gallery space in order to highlight and question their value. The idea of them going into the ‘real world’ to follow their functions is obviously implied, however the reality of that occurring seems less appealing to me.

SJ: You have made a decision to place the printouts of the press release and this interview inside the gallery on a purpose made shelf. These are usually placed in the foyer in racks but between us we have decided to change this system. This way the shelf is almost in the real world and seems to be fulfilling a function that we know was once in the ‘real world’. How would you justify that?

RH: Yes it is fulfilling its function, however I would argue that the gallery is not the ‘real world’ but a ‘pseudo-world’. The distinction between the gallery space and the other areas of OUTPOST like the office, foyer and kitchen are apparent. Choosing to place my works, like the shelf, into those spaces would hinder what that object has been made to do. In that situation I would just be making a shelf for OUTPOST. The fabricated, clean space of this gallery offered the opportunity to question its position and the value of its fellow objects, simply because there is less to interrupt these relationships. I would like to point out that gallery can exist in real spaces, galleries can be in peoples living rooms, if that was the case here my approach would have been very different.

SJ: There appear to be worlds illustrated within the drawings and within the film. These are definitely un-real and fabricated worlds but this is a significantly different kind of thing. In what way is it important for these two types of pseudo-space to come together?

RH: I think it is about control, the opportunity to edit a space. The way in which I have been talking about space as real or unreal is problematic I think. What the white-cube gallery offers is control for the artist, less compromise than in the world outside, hence feeling unreal. The drawings and film are a double of this relationship. The way in how I construct space offers meaning to me, where a chair goes in relation to another object etc. Working in OUTPOST has mirrored this mode of using interior space to construct meaning.

SJ: Looking at the work I have become occupied with a notion of time or, more importantly, a lack or uncertainty of a sense of time. Could you talk about that?

RH: There is a definite sense of nostalgia. Visually, the show feels like it could be in the late 1990’s, I like that a lot. There are also references to the late 1960’s with objects I placed in the drawings. However these elements never anchor the work to timescales, like the objects in the film everything is adrift.

Richard Healy lives and works in London. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2008. Recent exhibitions include ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ at A-Foundation, London (2009), ‘So Much More’ at Meetfactory, Prague (2009), ‘Entry Points’ at Subvision, Hamburg (2009), ‘No Bees, No Blueberries’ (as part of i-cabin) at Harris Lieberman, New York (2009) and ‘Earth not a Globe’ at Rokeby, London (2009)

Hi folks – a pleasure to meet everyone, virtually at least. And sorry this is a little late! While not a working artist, I’ve always had an interest in art. I grew up (in Vancouver) drawing and painting; something picked up from my mother who is herself an accomplished artist, mainly of watercolour and acrylic landscapes – but not so much the conceptual sort. Unfortunately, my participation in the doing of art rather went by the wayside since university – something she’s gotten after me about for ‘giving it up’.

Since that time art for me has become more of an academic interest – although I must admit I’ve never thought of my work being related explicitly to ‘art’. Like Ian, I studied archaeology at university – in this context art was often the object of study: a beautifully carved stone bowl, for example. In graduate school (I moved to the UK in 2000) its meaning shifted as I became interested in analysing the formation and meaning of cultural landscapes – particularly those created out of the social inequalities of colonialism. Here, art objects (whether sepia photographs, lithographs or oil paintings) became wonderful things for shedding light on the history of peoples and places. More recently, as a teacher and researcher, I’ve become interested in how art (and a host of other things that wouldn’t normally acquire this label) intervenes in society and culture; so in this sense, I think I agree with Kate in that we should also try to understand its consequences.

I live and work in Aberdeen with my lovely wife Ana – it will be two years this September that we left ‘home’ in Sheffield. Indeed, Sheffield is my link to this most interesting project. It was there that I met Steve, serendipitously, through my good friend Tim, who I see has yet to introduce himself. I look forward to meeting the rest of you in the near future.

me

Well, i wanted to add a picture of me to show you all who i am, but that has been hard, as steve will confirm i hate having my picture taken - so the above is about as best as it gets, plus as a bonus it includes my dog and some crazy topiary!

What to say - i am an artist and as some will know a farmer. [currently my father has taken to introducing me as a fartist... based on the tradition that a parson in the past who often were also farmers were called a farson - how true this is is currently under debate....he also has a big bang theory that involves a bus analogy..!] The family's farm is in South Lincolnshire and as a bit of background is a traditional mixed farm with sheep, suckler cows and arable. I have for years combined the two careers and see them not as separate but all part of the same thing. Like Steve everything i make or undertake art wise is also what i consider to be my practice, so the teaching at Leeds Uni and the relational /participatory/public art commissions are all like the farm they do not have a hierarchy, all relate to my primary concerns. These different elements all provide a lens through which to see and show.

I find art hard, in many ways and often loose the point of it. With 400 sheep lambing, for example, it often seems to be removed far from something that seems urgent or real.
I also believe that my history of 'community'[i hate this term] related work and commissions has impacted on my sense of what art does and who it does it for. I like steve want to be an artist in the world, not just an artist in the art world. I believe in art as agency.

I only make work that is part of a continuing relationship with people [often just an individual]and a site, often it is this farm. Perhaps it documents, comments on or records moments in time. I heard somewhere that it deals with the problem of death... Not sure if this is true - more like the pointlessness of life - but i know that it is about the understanding and representation of landscape/place/site, my connection to the people, place and things we use there and its about looking. Function is at the core of my interests both in what i make and how it is kept. As a way of conceptually getting round not making [increasingly it gets harder - to much stuff in the world - shit stuff at that] my work needs to be useful, as a record of my understanding of place, in the thing that it is and does, in the revealing of a relationship and as an archive for the future. The diagram below is how that archive works.


As a final thought i am really looking forward to getting this project off the ground and working with you all. With an interest in looking the potential to look from so many points of view is exciting.

Hi my name is Ian

I hope this finds you all well. As requested, here's a brief introduction...

The grandchild of Italian and Scottish/English immigrants, I was raised in the US - Richmond, VA by way of parents from Wisconsin and Connecticut. Identifying in some ways as an itinerant intellectual, I decided at 18 to move to Dublin, Ireland - not to reconnect with roots or Irish heritage (of which I had none) but rather to have a lived educational experience as part of one of the most dramatic socio-economic periods in recent history - the rise & fall of the Celtic Tiger.

My undergraduate degree was in Archaeology and Ancient History at Trinity College Dublin augmented with a healthy amount of student theatre and photo-journalism, and as I decided to embark on a PhD career studying the power of the past in contemporary socio-political discourses, I also was fortunate to pick up a part-time job as an invigilator and installer at the Douglas Hyde Gallery.

While I interrogated the role of cultural objects in Irish psycho-social discourse, I received a practical crash course in contemporary art theory and practice with some of the world's most renowned contemporary artists. As I shared my misgivings about the reductive and authoritarian role of museums, archaeologists and curators, artists whose work I was installing introduced me to Duchamp and the Dadaists and the Surrealists. I became fascinated with how modern art could produce decisive criticism of essentialist and positivist interpretations of objects/images, while over the 20th century archaeology and anthropology seemed to have developed a disciplinary structure immune to these critiques. Simply put, while art became subjective, conceptual and post-object, social sciences became increasingly object-oriented and Cartesian.

Both art and archaeology deal in things, relationality, process and mediation, and through my PhD, I began to research the roots of this schism, exploring both a shared history in the predisciplinary work of early antiquarians and the impact of technological process on the development of distinct disciplines with distinct intellectual agendas and trajectories.

During the deinstallation of the artist Kathy Prendergast's work 'A Dream of Discipline' (1989/2006) which consisted of a pile of white chalk obfuscating its internal architecture of a wooden plinth to effect the appearance of an archaeological cairn, something clicked. I was fascinated by the exacting, painstaking methods deployed to construct precise architectures and placements to execute abstract artistic gestures and statements, and I wondered whether archaeological process was no less constructed and affected. I wanted to locate my practice at this point of intersection - of contemporary creativity, mediation of constructions of relationality, materiality and temporality. Thus began a career in curation...

Since 2006, I have been working as a curator and a researcher. I've been fortunate to work in a number of scenarios from galleries to museums to sculpture parks to site-specific and site-responsive projects in Ireland, UK and the United States. Broadly interested in the creative mediation and recalibration of contemporary temporal and social relations through the activation of historical contexts and deposits, I have strived to open 'heritage' spaces or spaces with perceived 'stopped time' to artistic activation and intervention.

Currently I ama fellow at Brown University in Public Art and Cultural Heritage, and I am working on a series of collaborative projects between Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. Intellectualy, I am working on articulating a theme within contemporary artistic practice (site-responsive arts practice in particular) which I am describing as contemporary antiquarianism.

Some notable projects:
2011 - Dennis McNulty @ Brown University
2010 - Nigel Rolfe @ Sculpture in the Parklands
         - Roadscore @ Brown University
2009 - Clanbrassil Street 'Zines by Sean Lynch
         - The Home Project by Ursula Rani Sarma
         - One & Other
         - Camera Obscura with National College of Art & Design
2008 - The You That Is In It @ Irish Museum of Modern Art
         - Chronoscope with the Green On Red Gallery
         - Glass House Stone @ UCD
         - Abhar agus Meon Exhibition Series
2006-present - IRAC

Introduction

Hello to you all (especially those I have yet to meet). As requested, a bit of background:

I started out with a traditional Scottish education, where the normative assumption at that time was that anyone male will be an engineer in adult life and that you will be beaten with a leather strap by your teachers.

I attempted to be an engineer, but dropped out of university after the first year in order to undertake the much more fulfilling job of hitching around Europe and getting wasted.

Having 'found' myself I went to university again, this time to study drama with the sadly-to-be-frustrated ambition of becoming an actor, writer and director. After producing a lot of very worthy but unpopular experimental theatre I realised that a successful career in theatre involved doing lots of crap jobs, such as panto, so I decided to go another route, which eventually led me to curating visual art.

I operate across several fields - curator, educator, consultant - and my current main things are Wirksworth Festival, where I curate the visual arts programme (www.wirksworthfestival.co.uk), re:place, a 2-year programme of site-specific commissions across Derbyshire (www.re-place.co.uk), and work with schools through Creative Partnerships. There's a bit more background stuff on my embarrassingly unfinished website (www.davidgilbert.org.uk).

I am interested in the Situation of art, and site-responsiveness, but I also feel the need to have an emotional response to art in order to like it - I want to laugh, cry ...

Looking forward to working with everyone.

I like confusing images but I found that too hard.

One thing about working across the divides of art and ethnography is to define the images

to me, this image is ethnographic not art.

A Formal Introduction

Below is a crazy diagram which Kate Genever worked on which makes sense of everything.


It feels great to set up a Blog which actually has people looking at it but I suppose this makes it important to say something interesting rather than just ramble on about walking my dog. Well seven Sights finally looks like it's going to happen, It feels like a long time since we had the idea - me and Kate have been like birds sitting on eggs waiting for them to hatch.

We had a blackbird nest in our Garden which I exposed when I cut the rambling Rose a couple of weeks ago. The mum sat on it till the the baby birds hatched - then my dog ate her, which is why I include him licking his lips, all the babies died of starvation, but they still looked fat which was weired, maybe they had swelled up in the heat. It felt sad to see all that effort go to waste. I think I may be making some sort of point about feeding this idea and us all chipping in with the odd worm to keep things going.

So to introduce myself properly. I'm Steve Pool and I call myself a Journeyman artists as for most of my work I get paid by the day. I like to make work which is at hand in the world and I try to work with people in the places they live rather than in a gallery space. I really like the idea of art but I don't really like much art or Shart as my Mrs has recently started calling it. This project makes me feel a little worried and a little excited as it offers an opportunity to do something different and it's rhizomatous rather than arboreal and for anybody who has an allotment it's much easier to chop down a tree than get rid of brambles.

perfume disco coma

Hi

Where was this image taken?

HELLO