Notice Board

Kevin Boardman, a Manchester based artist, and I are showing a collaborative work at The Notice Board between May 15 and June 15th. Over the last year we have taken it in turns to work on a single sheet of A1 white paper – posting it, back and forth, in the same brown envelope 12 times. The exhibition temporarily halts the process and reveals the works current combined and woven state. When the show ends we will continue. We have never met or spoken and are in many ways strangers, yet our pen-pal like friendship has brought us into a conversation, which has become richer over time. The flag features work by both of us sewn together.

Mark Richards and Kate Genever
Title: The Land of the Free

The Notice Board believes that art is not just useful as a way of coping but as a place to speak our truths. However, some of these truths have been and often still are controlled by historians, curators, politicians, leaving us with normative narratives and prohibitive policies that reflect the so called ‘mainstream’ and their values. But The Notice Board was, in part, imagined as a challenge to them and this. It’s a place where people and ideas previously excluded, marginalised or overlooked are given voice. The Notice Board opens a window onto a world that has always existed – a world we’ve been led to believe wasn’t there or true. One that’s been written out and supressed, sometimes glimpsed, but mostly kept at the edges or in the shadows. But Mark and Kate’s work tells of this free land – an open, fluid and accepting place which The Notice Board is proud to pull back the curtain on and celebrate.

Mark and Kate said: It started last summer between lockdown 1 and 2. We decided to send postcards to one another. But not any postcards- rather ones that featured portraits or figures and that we had adapted. We decided to use collage, giving ourselves permission to play without worry and to make without expectation. Collage allows you to work quickly, be inventive and invite in chance. Ideas bubble up – it lets your brain wander and gives your subconscious room to reveal the things that matter and as a direct response to the imagery already presented.

When we started we didn’t know where we’d end up or what might emerge. But given everything – our lives, histories, experiences – we maybe could have guessed. Working on postcards featuring historic artworks, our adaptions have invariably challenged the traditional narratives of figurative representation and art history.

Identity, Gaze, Shame, Muse, Androgyny, Commonality, Queer, Drag, Transgression, Fluidity, Defiance, Resistance, Joy, Love, Duality, Disclosure, Conversation, History, Masks, Disguises, Performance, Power, Seeing, Seen, Equality, Now, Forever, Us – seem important words as we invite you into the conversation to see what you see.

Ralph McGaul.
Title: Land of the Free

The Notice Board is very happy to be sharing these print and flag works by Ralph McGaul. His exhibition features two sets of work – changed half way through. Ralph, like The Notice Board, believes in feeling, making and letting the work do the talking. So when invited to write something to accompany his work his said:
Leave the phone, don the overalls, step into the painting shed and sail off to the land of the free…..
Ralph’s work includes painting and printmaking, mosaics, collages and woodwork. His approach to making art is intuitive and visceral with the goal of producing something that is immediate and visually engaging, without the need for wordy explanations. Adopting various different media helps him maintain interest and inventiveness which is key to the work’s vitality.                                                

 ralphmcgaul.co.uk

SA Artists for Climate Action. Based: Kaurna Country, South Australia
Title:#climatebadges

The Notice Board is a piece of activism both practically and conceptually. Forming around the ideas of reciprocity and mutual aid, which are mirrored in this month’s work by an artist collective from Australia. SA Artists for Climate Action each have their own artistic careers and trajectories, but act together in response to the inaction shown by leaders who refuse to embrace renewable energy and put the care of our ecologies foremost. One of their actions is #climatebadges, which aims to bypass the seeming inability to communicate with leaders bent on economic growth and instead offer encouragement to those fighting for our planet to keep going in the knowledge they have continued support. It’s an interesting approach that The Notice Board is proud to platform while also reinforcing ‘positive reinforcement’ as a change agent.
SA Artists for Climate Action say:
This is a call to action.
As artists we declare a climate emergency. Let’s act as individuals together into the future. It has been shown that contacting our leaders, our decision makers, in a targeted way, directly, personally, and individually, is the most effective strategy to create and continue change. This project is about encouraging those that are part of this change.
We invite you to make a climate badge that addresses your climate emergency concerns. Send this to your politician/leader/local member/decision maker/researcher/board member/influential person of choice with an explanatory note (there’s a template at #climatebadges). Do this to propel their good work further, to give encouragement to keep going, or to spur someone into action who can do more.
Work individually or gather your friends, run a badge-making session in your home, studio or your place of work, take this project wherever you can. Share this call to action far and wide. Your art voice is valuable.
Post your badge and note to your leader of choice. Share your badge and note on Instagram using #climatebadges and tag your selected badge recipient where possible. Follow this hashtag to see other contributions. And thank you for taking action. Collective action has power. 

SincerelySA Artists for Climate Action

The Notice Board is now part of the Social Art Library. Led by Axis this is a great resourch of projects and artists The Notice Board’s entry can be found HERE:

The Notice Board is one of the featured Home Gallery spaces that Rhiannon Edwards has celebrated her on this new website.  She writes: Home galleries are spaces in the homes of art lovers dedicated to the work of artists. This is an open-ended project that attempts to reach forward and backwards in time and right around the planet. Right now the galleries shown are overwhelmingly from the western world, however there are more locations to come and the intention is to show the global picture. To bring together the work of people all over the world who keep some of the most exciting ideas in art thriving – often with little or no external support.  Im glad my work is part of this great growing collection

Robert Johnstone.
Title: Lands of the Free?
The Notice Board brings international artists work to Uffington inviting you to consider their responses to an ongoing theme: The Lands of the Free? This month we feature a series of photographs taken by Robert Johnstone who since 2010 has lived outside of the UK. He is researching how recipes travel in the Mediterranean. Alongside this work he documents handmade interventions in the communities he visits. A selection is offered here; hung in pairs to create a conversation which you are invited to join.  @noticeboardunited

TNB: How have you understood the theme?
RJ: The Land of the Free? wasn’t a theme when I took these photos, it has come as I thought about which images to show. Over time, during my travels, I’ve had the realisation there is no free place. Instead there are lots of boundaries, permitted spaces, prohibitions. People, all of us, limit things, we demark space, control how others view or navigate and those with ownership delineate to reveal their possession. This of course affects people moving freely. It’s about control. We can see it here in the white lines, the stones piled up, the walls, the grapevine trained to grow over the rock, the greenhouses on the Libyian Sea with vegetables from the Americas and workers from Bangladesh. 

TNB: Is place important to these handmade improvisations too?
RJ: Yes of course. I like that in most cases the responses are frugal and local; done with resources and skills at hand. People have responded to the place and their needs and used what they have – its grass roots creativity. The things I photo are not made by artisans, just regular people who have been clever, problem solved and provided often elegant responses.

TNB: Why the double sided flag?
RJ: All the photos are taken in either of those countries. It represents the commonality found rather than the division, these 2 countries have a complex and often troubled relationship, now and in the past, but they share The Aegean Sea, but define their differences with language and hide their similarities with the same. 

You can follow Robert here @insightofthesea blog & his website is coming soon.

@noticeboardunite

My commission for the South Holland Centre and LOV1 Venues has seen me, amongst other things, collecting photos as I walk and talk in the village. All things I snap seem pertinent to lockdown times and how this community are coping. An Instagram archive is HERE .

I’ve also been collecting, in the form of notes, all the learning, noticing and making people have been doing since March. This contemporary collecting, via listening, has proved to be joyful, fascinating, and moving. Many talk of the resourcefulness of the community and how, with its small businesses, this isolated village is ‘simply enough’. People have also spoken of the kind acts and support that’s been forthcoming from across the community. All of which has reinforced to residents, and me, how care-full art-full living is alive and well in places many consider to be lacking.