I have worked closely with the Mead Gallery as resident artist since 2007, leading the family art event programme to compliment and interpret the exhibition programme.  From Saturday 14th January to Saturday 10th March the exhibition is The Indiscipline of Painting International Abstraction from the 1960′s to now, a collaborative project between the Mead Gallery and Tate St Ives.

The first family event Marks to Music was a huge success. After an inspiring visit to the exhibition the children were keen to start painting – the group turned out to be a lively bunch, which worked well! Their energy translated into vibrant busy pictures, triggered by a variety of music which included Cirque de Soleil and jumpy tunes like ‘Sugar Sugar’.  The children were filling up A3 white paper fairly quickly resulting in every surface, including the floor becoming a drying area.  The once empty room from an hour before had been transformed into a busy artist’s studio whereby mini artist took ownership and created a flurry of excitement.

The Mead Gallery have a Facebook page, where you can see all of the photos from the event:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.346263208727075.79527.162850363735028&type=3

If you have not visited the exhibition yet, there’s still time, the exhibition finishes March 10th. more information about the exhibition and other events can be found here:http://www.warwickartscentre.co.uk/events/visual-arts/the-indiscipline-of-painting

The photos of you hanging in the web gave an immediate sense of action, motion and time passing, which linked up with the message on the door.

A pile of stuff was spilling in from the corner; packaging, cartons, boxes, cheap stuff, which initially invoked words like ephemera, discarded, unwanted, mess, rubbish.

Pushing beyond the glare of the harsh floodlight, I wanted to rush into the curtain of videotape that was dividing me from the rest of the room. Noticing the destroyed cassettes, I felt I had just walked in after some kind of action – anger, fun, violence, relief or something else. I wondered what memories were embedded in the tapes, that seemed tentacle-like when blowing in the breeze of the household fan. They lured people in, tangling them up and tripping them, but never giving anything away.

The artificial lights split the shadows. With the artificial breeze, and piles of stuff, they colluded to pull me around the space. The projection, at first, acted as an obstacle: I crossed, casting my shadow over the image of a delicate, rippling iridescent disk. (Later, after reading the chalk writings on the floor, I internally referred to this disk as Saturn). By doing this I interrupted it’s gentle repetitive cycle. I came to realise the space was filled with interruptions, divisions, stop/starts and the perpetually intermittent. The sound accompanying the disc – or Saturn – is a close distorted sound, maybe breathing, rubbing something near, too close.

More piles of stuff. This isn’t discarded rubbish. It’s intimate remains. It is familiar; it’s from my house – over here – clothes, fabrics, fairy lights. Over there; glass, mirrors, picture frames. Stuff of reflections, stuff of the past. This isn’t a room, it’s a lifetime. And I am the voyeur.

The space was at once chaotic and ordered. When the dreams meet the lines maybe. Discovering your careful intent to ‘place’ the seemingly disorganised maybe added to this.
The desire to prod and poke and discover the story conflicted with the uneasy atmosphere that sought to repel me – something has just happened and I shouldn’t be here.

Finally, thinking about what you have said to me about life and art and it all being one: You left chalk and string and party poppers from the previous occupants of the space. By doing this, those remains become part of your space and your history. Your space is therefore made from parts that are neither ‘art’ or ‘real life’ but essentially both. So I get the sense that process and life is the same as art, which is a feeling I really empathise with.

Tony Cragg
Ecritis Writings (81- 92)
” Simple processes. With materials nobody else wants. Ideas that interest me. Images that interest me. Made where people let me make them. The rooms, the walls, the floors. The physical framework. Emotional responses. Intellectual responses. Elegant works. Humorous works. Beautiful works. Decorative works. Ugly works. Works in which I learnt from the materials. Works like pictures. Meanings I intended. Meanings that suprised me. Personal references. Cultural references. No references.”

First published in Tony Cragg, Van derHeydt Museum, Wuppertal, 1981

I photocopied these writings many many years ago and when I had a tiny bit of a clear out recently they leapt out again ready to be attached to my pinboard, added to this blog as it seems particularly relavant to the work I am doing at Unit 4. During the Where the House of Lines meets the House of Dreams residency I have worked in a way that I want to refer to as honest, I have used simple processes to once remove myself from the hands on aesthetic decisions (that previously restricted me) and began to explore new methods such as throwing and kicking materials around in the space.

Where the House of Dreams meets the House of Dreams - Limited Edition Posters

Come and visit the space at Far Gosford Street and collect a FREE Limited Edition Print, made especially during the residency.

In the moment

Looking forward to the opening night tonight!

Where the House of Lines Meets the House of Dreams
@ Unit 4

Here is a glimipse of the space, on the first day. The process of throwing the tape over the beams and leaving the tape in whatever way it lands, seemed an instictive way to bring my studio practice to the space. This attempt at finding ways to remove myself away from the decision making process in how work looks aesthetically, feels like a turning point in my practice. I am still fascinated by the concept of ‘arranging’ and how do one decides what goes where, but found that in my own work this perhaps restricted me – as with all process’s I needed to go through that bit to get to where Ive arrived (if that makes sense?). Within the studio I recently found it liberating when I began to experiment in ways to lose the control, such as throwing work together and stitching together a carrier bag of someone else’s fabrics they were throwing out. I can best descibe this as an honest way of working for me, especially when working in a space such as this empty unit, which sets out something for me to respond to. I plan to seek out more spaces that offer this stimulus – get in touch if you know of anywhere!

FLYER

As part of the Space Programme, curated by Talking Birds, at Far Gosford Street, I am resident at Unit 4, FarGo Village, Gosford Industrial Estate, Coventry, for the month of March 2011. The residency will end with a series of events for the public.
All Invited! Please get in touch if you need further directions.

(If you see a cafe called Piggy in the Middle, the entrance to the estate is opposite)

Hill Farm Year 3 Journals

As we evaluate the projects at Hill Farm Primary School, last academic year, I always knew the sheer amount of qualitive information we had collected from the children would be a challenge to disseminate. When sharing conclusions with Creative Agent Philippa Cross from Cre8us, she soon identified how attached I was to each drawing the children had done to describe their journey, for example. Learning how to communicate an overview when one is fascinated by all the wonderful details, is an area I am going to build on. To be overwhelmed is not something I would consider to be a negatitve, indeed learning creatively can often lead to surprising outcomes and can steer new directions. In addition to this, as was the case with Hill Farm, the sense of delving into new terrritory, for me and for them, had no or little comparable measure.

As creative thinkers do, I will now embrace the feedback and work through ideas and analyse ways to evaluate throughout projects, in collaboration with partners. Thanks to Philippa for sharing the idea of working with teachers to track a selection of children, as a tool to track the journey of individuals as representative’s of their peers.