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