Island at the UK Pavillion is a great work and gets better the longer you think and read about it. I was really happy to see and experience it, then consider its ambitions in relation to my own. But on the way to the Gardini I was reminded of the everyday attempts at keeping things going and of care which aren’t seen as art. As Yeats says: The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
Curator David Gilbert and I are happy to be working at Haarlem Artspace in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, next February on a new show of my work: Art History – can you draw me a diagram. I am making available everything I’ve made in the last 15 years for him and I to select from. We will draw more new diagrams to try and understand what it all means. Then oin early March, we will invite people to join us in a conversation over dinner at a closing event.
I’ve been offered a new commission to work alongside 3 Ways East in Hull on a research phase of their new initiative. The work will take place in two parts of the city that face significant and complex challenges but that are also full of untapped assets and promise. My work will take a creative approach to the question of how communities and places can best flourish.
This new book contains a chapter I’ve written about the importance of Improvisation. It also features my work Instar and items from the Farm Archive.
George McKay has reviewd the book and says: This sparkling collection of essays, photographs, artwork, creative writing and meditations represents a sustained exploration of and contribution to cultures of the countryside and the liminal spaces of the non-urban. Through it we see the contemporary rural in cultural glimpses and social practices, as we seek to make sense of our desire to escape to or from its diminishing scope. It will be of fascination to today’s pastoralists and re-wilders, but it should absolutely be read too by cool artists of the city, urban designers and policy-makers alike, indeed by anyone curious about life and culture in 21st-century landscapes.
I’ve spent the last 2 days working at Metal Peterborough making a chalk and charcoal drawing. Taped lines extend into the room and sat alongside pressed clay forms. It’s a short lived intervention that, like the drained Whittlesea Mere it was based on, will disapear in a flood of water.
I really like these colouring in sheets visitors, to my show, at the Martello Tower, Jaywick have made. They of course reveal a weird parallel to the projected images from last weekend. I’m not sure which came first my projection or their mark-making, either way I’ve only just found them. I’m pleased that visitors consnected the tower with being colourful and visible, as I do. These dramatic designs declare the landmark that both bears witness and is seen in return.
My commission for Yorkshire Sculpture Park and 14 -18 Now has been developing this week with the help of the Horse Assisted Development work at Glint in Huddersfield. All of us have felt privileged and moved by how the horses enable personal reflection, improve confidence and absorb emotions. Working together – horse and human – we met, connected and offered ourselves. In return we were met with kind gentle horse powered nourishment.
I spent this week at The Bromley House Library working in the garden. The cynatype shown here, made using acollected Forget Me Not, is just one of the 14 made. They relate to The Bromley’s history as a photo studio and draws attention to its hidden garden and the importance this holds for visitors and members alike. The cynatypes, like other works made, will be hidden in books across the library creating poignant finds for sometime in the future.
The Bromley House Library is clearly full of marks left by people, some long since dead, words, grease marks, creases….. Like the scored bark of this beech tree found in the Arborteum nearby, the BHL holds in these marks fleeting ambitions, potentials and of course desires. These limited editions add another layer, another declaration – “I was here”
I spent a great week at Metal Southend making new drawings and collages in preparation for installing a new site specific drawing at the Martello Tower in Jaywick Essex in late June. I explored nearby Canvey Island and its plotland sites, structures on the forshore and other landscaped spaces including the Red Hills. A fascinating place where all is constructed, at risk and adapted – all offering inspiration for this and ongoing works at large
The Museum of Contemporary Farming undertakes its final event tomorrow at The MERL in Reading. As part of this evening gathering, which builds on the Walk Talk and Eat day at Croft Farm on Sunday, Georgina Barney and I will be sharing with 5 other artists ideas for inclusion into this conceptual impossible new collection.
The MERL have accessioned my 12 “You complete me” drawings this week and are currently displaying them until June 10th as part of the Museum of Contemporary Farming exhibition. Here are a couple of photos of them in situ. Our aim was to extend the meaning in them and the objects they are surrounded by and of course bring some of the intangible back to the collected artefacts. You can follow the larger project on Twitter @mofcfarming
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