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