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!