Press Release

Visual Deflections featuring Piplotti Rist

Curated by Eleanor Lawler and Katherine Nolan
Corbet Place: Sat 29th August 2009, 6.30pm till late

(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler <(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes>, 1988, video by Pipilotti Rist (video still). Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Piplotti Rist’s pioneering video work has been aspirational for a generation of emerging artists. This event will screen a selection of these artists alongside Rist’s (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes. Her influence is reflected in the concept of Visual Deflections, a homage to her use of disjuncture and distortion

The idea of Visual Deflections infers the interruption of the image through distortions of time, movement, light and space. It may also suggest a manipulation of assumptions and identifications that reverberate between the spectator and screen

The works will be shown as a screening from 6.30 Sat, and video installation will continue until Sun 11pm. The venue, Corbet Place , is part of the The Old Truman Brewery at the heart of Shoreditch’s vibrant creative scene. The brickwork of the club provides a stripped back aesthetic for the screening, which will be followed by music curated by Back to the Wood

Artists: Piplotti Rist, Clint Enns, Ted Sonnenschein, Tessa Garland, Katherine Nolan , Eleanor Lawler, Jonathan Gilhooly, Jan Hakon Erichsen, Ciara Scanlan, Victoria Melody, Anders Weberg, Theo Tagholm,Lisa Flynn, Hillary Williams, Mathew Guillford , Alan Magee, Jeremy Newman, Saskia Vermeulen, Angelo Picozzi , Liam Herne, Sarah Breen,Ella Bertilsson , Lia Chavez.

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Photo credit: Gesche Würfel

thenunnery
Bow Arts Lane
181-183 Bow Road,
London, E3 2SJ
Private View: Friday 22-5-09 6pm - 9pm

Exhibition Open: Sat 23rd - Sun 24th & Sat 30th - Sun 31st May 12 noon – 6.00pm
Critical Forum: Sun 24th 3pm - 5.30pm.

Visions in the Nunnery has become an event not to be missed in the moving image calendar. It focuses on recent work produced by global, established and emerging artists. It is the most relevant snapshot and showcase for new ideas and emerging artists, today. The event features a variety of conceptual approaches and aesthetic choices, which highlight an exciting art form thriving with enthusiasm and challenges.

Event curators Cinzia Cremona and Tessa Garland said, Submissions to this year’s Visions have been of the very highest quality, we have had the opportunity to select from over 1000 entries received from 37 countries around the world. Our final selection features 54 artists from 12 countries including South Korea and India.

Visions Special Curated Events:
“The Body and the Beholder” Each year, a unique collaboration with an invited profiled curator complements the international open submission. This year’s exciting programme of work is selected by curator Myriam Blundell, including the UK première of EXerciceS EXerciceS EXerciceS by Isabelle Arnoux, as well as recent works by Michael Nyman and Karen Knorr. (See editor’s notes)

Visions Critical Forum 2009: “Collecting Moving Images”. Sun 24-05-09 3pm - 5.30pm.

The Critical Forum is a pivotal event within Visions in the Nunnery. Its aims are to explore the practices that shape the production, exhibition, and distribution of the moving image as well as establishing connections between practitioners, their audiences and collectors.

This year the Critical Forum will focus on the collection and circulation of the moving image. Topics of discussion will include cultural and economic concerns; the dynamics of private collections, educational archives and changing technologies. The speakers will share their personal experiences and expertise in the field, and activate an open discussion with artists and viewers.

The Forum will be chaired by Cinzia Cremona with invited speakers: Myriam Blundell, Michael Maziere, Neil Cummings and Lucy Bayley (CAS).

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Editors notes:

The body and the beholder Myriam Blundell May 2009

This year’s thematically curated section of Visions in the Nunnery features three artists whose work is mainly concerned with the pursuit of an ideal of beauty most notably derived from the perfection of physical appearances and the exhibition of immaculate and faultless volumes, shapes and proportions.

In an age shaped by virtual realities and populated by cyberspace communities, in which elaborate and faultless creatures are designed to please the deepest recesses of our desires for physical perfection, the contemporary portraiture of beauty in the human body has shifted like never before in the history of aesthetics. Traditionally grounded in innate, physical qualities, this shift has become increasingly subject to cultural specifics and individual interpretations. In “Exercises”, Isabelle Arnoux captures the obsession found in western societies for a specific set of rapports and proportionality. The on-going search for a definition of the Beautiful is evoked in “Lessons” by Karen Knorr, where she applies the perspective of nature and its divine laws, that of science and its Cartesian rationale, and ultimately that of Art and its utopian pursuit of the Ideal. The human body is celebrated for its canonical beauty but also for its ephemerality and submission to the cycles of life. Equally fascinated by the effect of the passage of time on the human psyche and condition, Michael Nyman’s “Slow Walkers” observes a succession of old men and women walking very slowly in the busy streets of urban life. His piece reflects on the lessons learned from the wisdom of age and the temporality of the human body, as a means to achieving a higher state of consciousness. The idea of borrowing the human body as a vehicle to communicate with the unknown and the divine is also explored in Nyman’s second video work entitled “Zoor”. Zoor is a sequence of footage shot in Iran in 2003, featuring a group of body builders performing a sequence of Zoor Kahn, an ancient form of Iranian Martial Arts. The focus in Nyman’s narrative is shifted from the physical to the spiritual, from the beautiful to the divine, and from the transient to the eternal.

Biogs:

Myriam Blundell has over 8 years of broad, diverse contemporary art advisory and curatorial experience, founding an independent curatorial practice in 2004. Dedicated to uncovering and exhibiting the work of emerging contemporary artists, the practice acts as a coaching medium, providing both commercial and creative guidance to an international pool of artists, who practice in a variety of artistic mediums. She is currently engaged as an associate editor for Enrico Navarra’s upcoming “Made by Brazilians”, which is a part of a definitive series of critically acclaimed, art publications dedicated to depicting contemporary art, architecture and design in numerous emerging art markets, including China, India and the Arab world. She is the Executive Director of the Friends of Signy and Olaf Willums Foundation in Provence, France, which awards an annual residence for outstanding emerging artists. She is also the founding Chair of the International Collectors Forum at the Contemporary Art Society in London.

Tessa Garland is an established moving image artist showing internationally. Her work has been screened at Rencontres International Film and Video Festival, Paris & Berlin. Kino Rialto & BoS, Stockholm. Betting on Shorts, ICA - London, Point Ephemere- Paris, KIBLA Multi Media Centre -Maribo, Romanian Cultural Institute- Bucharest, Mikrokosmos Prince- Athens, CCCB Pantalla Hall- Barcelona, Kadir Has University -Istanbul, Lanificio-Naples, Kulturpalast- Wiesbaden, Germany. She is co-curator of Visions in the Nunnery. She is also an established educationalist working with the BBC, The Wellcome Trust and the National Gallery. www.tessagarland.com

Cinzia Cremona is currently working towards a PhD on video performance and how moving image works establish relationships at University of Westminster, where she is also a member of the Experimental Media Research Group. She is co-curator of Visions in the Nunnery. Since 2007 she has been a core member of Critical Practice, a research cluster hosted by Chelsea College of Art and Design – www.criticalpracticechelsea.org Her photographic and moving image work has been exhibited internationally.

The Nunnery Gallery established 1998, is one of London’s largest independent galleries supporting new and emerging international talent. The Nunnery comprises three purpose built galleries totalling over 2,000 sq ft of exhibition space converted from an C18th Carmelite Nunnery adjacent to the historic Bow Church. The gallery situated on Bow Arts Lane off Bow Rd is a part of the Bow Arts Trust a charity that has been supporting artists for the past 15 years. www.bowarts.org

For more information and digital images

Please contact:

Cinzia Cremona

m:07989 126 466

Tessa Garland

M:07749 848 436

T:020 89235756

contact@openvisions.org

www.openvisions.org

www.thenunnery.org

About Betting on Shorts

‘Betting on Shorts’ (BoSs) is an annual short film festival/competition which brings together cutting-edge venues and film festivals across and beyond Europe in a unique simultaneous screening: “More than a Eurovision of Shortfilm”.

Each year a themed open call for submissions is posted worldwide. 10 – 15 shorts of any genre (but under 10 minutes) are selected to take part in the competition, which is screened simultaneously in all participating cities. A local winner is chosen by a jury of critics, curators and other film professionals in each city. Once all juries have compared their results the overall winner is awarded glory, fame and cash. So the audience can have some fun as well, we invite everyone to bet on which film will win. Bets must be placed before the screening. But no worries: trailers of all participating films are screened in all participating venues and on the website a week in advance of the competition. Those who have placed their bet well, can win cinema tickets, dvds, books and the like.

A Little Bit of History

BoSs was launched in 2005 by Ricarda Vidal and Louise Höjer, as an annual short film competition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. BoSs is now run by Ricarda, Irini Marinaki, Konstantinos Stefanis and Sarah Sparkes.

In 2006 an invitation to programme three screenings in the Kunstfabrik in Berlin (’Vacant Films’) in collaboration with a local artist group marked the beginning of our international presence and formed the starting point of what was soon to grow into a large pan-European network of cultural organisations and institutions. With the aim to make BoSs into a truly international event, we contacted film curators, professionals and enthusiasts across the continent. In November 2007 we launched the first edition of “More than a Eurovision of Shortfilm” in collaboration with 10 partners.

Past and present partners since 2007 have included:

The ICA in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Mikrokosmos Prince in Athens, Kino Rialto in Poznan, Pitkofi in Rostov-on-Don, KIBLA Multimedia Centre in Maribor, NFC Kinoklub in Novi Sad, the CCCB in Barcelona, Bilgi University in Istanbul, Point Ephémère in Paris, exground filmfestival in Wiesbaden, The Romanian Cultural Institute, Bucharest, art|house in Thessaloniki and Teater Scenario in Stockholm.

GHost

Friday 19 December 2008, 6.30pm – 10.00pm
St Johns Church Bethnal Green

Hosted by Ami Clarke, Belfry Project Space
Guest-curated by Sarah Sparkes & Ricarda Vidal

In 1953 Marcel Duchamp made an artwork titled “A Guest + A Host = A Ghost”. The mysterious phrase was inscribed on the tinfoil wrappers of candy that was handed out during an opening of William Copley’s show at Nina Dausset in Paris.

Etymologically “guest” and “host” do indeed go back to the same roots. The Middle English (h)oste meant both “guest” and “host”. It also meant “stranger, alien” and it is only a small step from there to “ghost”, to the disembodied spirit, the shadowy or evanescent form wandering among the living like an uninvited guest.

For this show we take Duchamp’s calculation literally and add an association of our own. As the nights grow darker, the scent of mulled wine and hot chestnuts drifts through the streets, and shining stars and colourful baubles appear in the shop windows, hosts, ghosts, guests and sweets all combine to conjure the spirit of Christmas.

With Ami Clarke as curator of the Belfry project in the role of the Host and artist/curator Sarah Sparkes and curator Ricarda Vidal in the role of the Guests we have put together a night of Ghosts. Following the Christmas tradition of telling ghost stories on the long dark winter nights and in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, M.R. James and the BBC, this will be a night of spooky yarns to warm you up on a chilly winter evening.

The show will spread over the whole of St Johns Church, spilling from the cobwebbed dark alcoves of the belfry into the entrance hall, past the red velvet curtains and into the church proper. There will be performances, video, sound and scent installations, and sculptures in the foyer and the belfry. The church itself will open its doors later in the evening, when we will screen a programme of artist films followed by Jonathan Miller’s “Whistle and I’ll come to you” (1968), an adaptation of the eponymous M.R. James story.

Drawing on Life at the Wellcome Trust 2008

The Campaign for Drawing and Bow Arts Trust present ‘Drawing on Life’ at Wellcome Collection, UCL and the Wellcome Trust, 26-28 September.

A three-day festival extravaganza hosted by Wellcome Collection, UCL and the Wellcome Trust in central London this September will draw on science, medicine and art to launch The Big Draw 2008, a national month-long celebration of all aspects of drawing.

Artists will join forces with neurologists and geneticists, combining their talents to inspire people of all ages and abilities to draw in celebration of life and what it means to be human.

‘Highlights of the weekend line-up at Wellcome Collection include illustrator Steven Appleby drawing in response to the live music of beatboxer Nathan ‘Flutebox’ Lee, and workshops where participants can draw graphic scores for the premiere of a new choral work to be performed by members of the public together with Exaudi, one of Britain’s most exciting new music groups.

On Saturday 27 September. Visitors can participate in an interactive installation and work with artists Tessa Garland and Albert Potrony to create works based around the ex votive display. Other highlights include creating body maps, ultraviolet mobiles, slogans on body issues and characters, sets and dramas for the Little Theatre of Disease and Desire. Professor Semir Zeki, Director of the Institute of Neuroaesthetics at UCL, will talk about ‘Ambiguities in Art and the Brain’, while Professor Ray Dolan investigates the emotional brain, and science historian Professor Arthur Miller compares the thought processes of artists and scientists.

Participating artists include: Steven Appleby, Ben Ashton, Daniel Baker, Heather Barnett, Sam Belinfante, Rebecca Birch, Patrick Blower, Matt Caines, Natalie Gale, Tessa Garland, Antony Hall, Abbie Hunt, Jonathan Huxley, Tess Laurence, Jared Louche, Mobile Studio, Christian Nold, Albert Potrony, Matty Pye, Sholto and Hugo Brown, Andrew Stahl, Finlay Taylor, Tim Wainwright, Richard Wentworth and Gary Woodley.

About PureScreen

PURESCREEN - FILM & VIDEO PROGRAMME

PureScreen, Castlefield Gallery’s regular screening event. The programme provides a platform for outstanding recent film and video work and aims to support new and emerging practitioners and curators. In addition, we distribute touring programmes to partner venues, and provide a resource for other organisations involved in contemporary moving-image practice.

PureScreen #21 - Follywood

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 (18:30 - 20:00)

The third curated programme in the 2008 season of PureScreen artist film and video events is PureScreen #21: Follywood.

PureScreen #21 draws together a selection of new international work, from the open submission call, to examine the various ways that artists draw on the history of cinema in contemporary experimental film and video practice.

This curated programme explores ideas around the cinematic, from feature film to art-house to B-movie, and mimics or overturns their traditional filmic conventions. It features experiments with montage, the re-structuring and re-presenting of classic and cult films, and works that embody or directly reference aspects of different genres.

Incorporating the deliberately low-tech alongside high production values, with themes varying from horror and suspense to comedy, and Lolita, ninja, robot and zombie characters all making an appearance, Follywood embodies a sense of playfulness and draws inspiration from films including Alien, An American Werewolf in London, Badlands, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and King Kong. Trailers and credits are also utilised, and the importance of soundtracks highlighted as a means of altering a viewing or scenario, and presenting an alternative fiction.

]]> http://www.tessagarland.com/publicity/follywood-purescreen-castleford-gallery-manchester-2008/feed/ http://www.tessagarland.com/publicity/another-roadside-attraction-2007/ http://www.tessagarland.com/publicity/another-roadside-attraction-2007/#comments Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:17:44 +0000 tessa http://www.tessagarland.com/?p=619

Preview: East End Film Festival, Various venues, London

East End’s odd couple on screen

By Charlotte Cripps

Wednesday, 18 April 2007

The documentary film-maker Julian Cole’s portrait of Gilbert and George is the opening night film at the East End film festival - appropriately enough, as the director spent a great deal of time with the artist duo at their Spitalfields home and studio during the 17 years he spent filming them.

Cole first met the couple when he modelled for them in 1986 while he was a film student at the Royal College of Art. When the student film-maker saw himself in the photograph See with Gilbert and George lying at his feet, “it was almost a sign” says Cole, to ask if he could make a documentary about them. “At the time, nobody was interested in a film about them,” recalls Cole. “What a different story it is now.” The last of Cole’s footage shows the pair at the opening of their major retrospective at Tate Modern in February.

Other festival highlights include a sneak preview of Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer: the Future is Unwritten, the UK premiere of John Pilger’s The War on Democracy, a masterclass withThe Last King of Scotland producer Andrew Macdonald, whose new film 28 Weeks Later is set in Canary Wharf, and more than 100 shorts about the East End - some by local film-makers, including Tessa Garland’s three-minute supermarket horror film Zombie, shot on a mobile phone.

Video, 4:3, 5.55 mins.

No 1 Wilwyne Crescent takes the viewer on a short walk around a suburban model house. The atmosphere of oppressive safety is broken by a surreal and other worldly force that lurks within the confines of the greenhouse.  Early science fiction films such as ‘The Day of the Triffids’ and ‘Revenge of the Bodysnatchers’ that play with notions of the everyday and collective fear have influenced the work.

Video 16:9, 45 seconds Jackie’s house is part of a series of works that explores the theme of suburbia. This developing body of work was triggered after the artist made a visit to a relative’s house. A small representational model of the house was then constructed in the artist’s studio and used as a macro film set.

Underground City, Divus, Undergound City, Shoreditch, London, 2009

Please download the press release.

Behind this name stands a group of people interested in art and film, and they made a dream become true…

“Culture” in a mountain valley governed by farming and tourism, oscillates between folkloristic activities and touristically important big events. Between these poles it is difficult for modern art, off mainstream and commerce, to make a stand. But they exist, the small oasis in the mountain desert: There is an active scene of artists around the former galerie wandelbar and the present gallery simple, www.simplegallery.ch. Also for more than 10 years the Filmpodium Saanenland has been organising screenings of less known studio films. And the dream was to connect both and to start a festival for films produced by artists.

Gstaad is connected with many famous names from the world of film – Roman Polanski, Roger Moore, Julie Andrews among others – and so the place was ideal for a film festival. With the cinema of the Grand Hotel Bellevue we found the place corresponding perfectly to our dreams - the red carpet included… It was clear that we had to start small, because the sponsoring money flows elsewhere. But with a lot of enthusiasm and goodwill from all sides the 1st International Short Film Festival for Artist films and the competition for the Golden Cow of Gstaad took place in March 2004 – a small but fine event and a great experience for all persons involved.

Visions in the Nunnery
March 24 - March 26 2006

Eleanor Duffin, Samantha Donnelly, Oreet Ashery, Amy Sharrocks, Lela Budde, Simon Jacques, Heather Phillipson, Riccardo Iacono, Simon Woolham, Sanna Maarit, Tessa Garland, Kelly Richardson, Raksha Patel, Benn Northover, Pernille Holm Mercer, Imogen O’Rorke, Max Attenborough, Erica Scourti, Akiko and Masako Takada, Tomoko Takahashi, Rose Butler, Lewis Paul, Guler Ates, Jack Southem, Suzanne Caines, Philip Newcombe.

Visions in the Nunnery 2006 is the sixth annual open submission event for artists working in digital media. The short film screening and exhibition is the result of an open call for submissions. The selection of work reflects developments in emerging and current contemporary arts practice.

Review by Ed Krcma

Collaboration with Marcel Baettig

On a small television screen, a man (actually Marcel Baettig, one of the two creators of the work) is seen sitting at a table apparently carrying out a conversation with an absent partner. He talks to space – to an empty chair – prompting the immediate questions: what is he saying? To whom? Are we, as spectators, involved? Does he address us? He does not look at us or acknowledge our presence as watchers of the film, so it is tempting to regard ourselves as (somewhat voyeuristic) secret spectators of whom the man is unaware. Are we then in a position of comfort, free to move about, discuss, react to the action without detection? Is our dialogue with the artist as one-way and dislocated as his mysterious conversation. Are we able to maintain a discrete distance and remove from the art work? What is at stake in our involvement?

The action changes. Now we see another figure on the screen, occupying the space of the other actor in the dialogue – the person that the man is addressing, yet now the man is absent. Who is this new figure and why does she not appear to be engaging in the conversation as we expect?

About five meters away is a small room, sealed from the rest of the gallery space by constructed walls and a pink bead curtain that covers the door. A sign says ‘One at a time please’. Another exhibition-goer comes out of the room and we realize that she was the incongruous other actor in the artist’s conversation. We enter the room and in front of us is a table with an ashtray (complete with extinguished cigarettes) and other domestic paraphernalia. There is a seat glued to the floor inviting us to occupy it. On the other side of the table, in the corner of the room, is a small camera above a television set. Displayed on the screen is the artist (as seen on the TV outside) and ourselves as we watch. We occupy the space of the person he addresses – and we can see ourselves being spoken to. But what is being said, and how to react? To just watch and spectate seems faintly ridiculous and feels uncomfortable. We see ourselves being spoken to, assimilated into a narrative we don’t understand and have no control over. We are not complicit or secure. Moreover, there is a leather jacket hanging up behind us with a large pink plastic phallus protruding from the pocket. Are we in danger? And remember the TV outside – who is watching us now? The power of an unknown, voyeuristic gaze is unsettling.

Between us and Baettig on the screen we are watching is a mirror. Indeed, we can see the actual mirror in the room beside us. But there is movement in the mirror in the film that we glimpse and it compels us to remain in this uncomfortable situation and watch. Figures appear and disappear in the mirror – they are lovers, and they are playing games. It is another story, another narrative that intrigues us but that we cannot understand; it flickers in the mirror tantalizingly. How does that action relate to the bizarre situation in which we find ourself? As we attempt to piece together and decipher, to make sense by looking, so we are aware that others outside are looking at us.

Dynamics of the gaze, control, disorientation and comprehension are all at work here. The emphasis is on narrative, theatricality and performance. We might feel that there is a script to be followed in our response to this piece – a set of actions, codes and practices that would make the situation comprehensible, coherent and comfortable. Like actors spliced from a different performance, we can only watch awkwardly as the new, disorientating play carries on around us. Nevertheless, we are involved and we are necessary. We complete the piece – give the action its focus, its object. It is our performance, which seems not at all like a performance, that pivots the play.

We might feel then that our subjectivity is usurped and appropriated rather aggressively by the artists. So what is our relationship to the artists? And to the work itself – can it be regarded as external to us, as an object to which we can maintain some detachment? We are embroiled in an unfamiliar world, one constructed by the artists and one that, curiously, we both complete and have no influence over. It is at once amusing and disturbing to view ourselves being spoken to; we are glad and amused to be so thoroughly involved, yet we cannot forget the threat of the dildo behind us, and the fact that we are likely to be being watched by unknown eyes, and we cannot ignore the glimpses we catch of dark sexual performance in the mirror.

Garland and Baettig set up narratives and dialogues that have no resolution. We can never be sure of the logic of the narrative in which we are involved, and we are made acutely aware of our unfamiliar position by the fact that we are able to view our own incongruity.

Roles: artist, curator and organiser.

PALP (Penwith Artist-Led Projects) is a collective of artists aiming to re-establish West Cornwall as a locus of progressive and experimental artistic activity. ‘PALPitations’, the group’s second site specific show, took place on the ground floor of the otherwise disused BT exchange building in Penzance over the last weekend of February.

The space is vast and still haunted by its past; remnants of its former usage proliferate, providing a loaded context so markedly different from the attempted neutrality of the art gallery. Here the signs of an industrial past, intimately linked with ideas of communication, comprehension and exchange, are the springboard and inspiration for this event. A relationship of mutual dependence is enjoyed: the building and its history prompts, sustains, and layers the meanings of these installations, and the installations serve to reinvigorate and revitalize the dilapidated space, injecting it with renewed purpose.

A sense of vitality and humour is introduced early on in the exhibition with Tessa Garland’s Aquarium . The viewer passes a fish tank at the back of which a small camera is installed. Seen through this aquatic environment, the various intrigued reactions of viewers are projected on a large screen in the next room. Having already entered the work, we are then afforded the luxury of watching others, similarly unknowing, loom foolishly into vision to join the fish and the bubbles. Playing with notions of spectatorship and the viewer’s role in completing the work of art, as well as providing numerous giggles, Garland ’s piece augurs a fresh and witty ambience.

In the dwarfing, open, industrial main exhibition space, the installations and constructions are more firmly rooted, both thematically and aesthetically, to their context. Both ideas related to and mechanisms of communication dominate: from voicemail to cans on a string, and from transatlantic cables rescued from the seabed to snake-like concrete tongues writhing out of an old GPO crate.

In Anagram , Carole Dodds uses anagrams of the name Alexander Graham Bell to provide bizarre and nonsensical subject matter for a series of images resembling primitive digital drawings. Although visually unexciting, this series stands as a witty new method for the generation of imagery in a way that still relates to the exhibition context. In the three-part work Cable , Marion Taylor employs the physical vehicles of communication: huge bundles of wires, cable from the ship that laid the transatlantic cable off Porthcurno, and a piece of such cable retrieved from the seabed. These elements are arranged monumentally, occupying a large amount of space and using that space to suggest undulation, conveyance, connection and dislocation.

It is in two dark rooms at the back of the building that the potential of this evocative context is most successfully activated. In Dead Silence by Amanda Lorens, five monitors showing videos of human mouths are set on plinths and covered by draped white sheets. Although the mouths appear to be talking, nothing can be heard. The room is dark, lit only by the filtered light of the veiled screens. The pervading quality is a feeling of absence; a ghostly and sombre poignancy issues from the distanced and dislocated human presences. Linked to the exchange building in the focus on the mouth and on speech, and pertaining to its history in the evocation of the activity that once invigorated this space, Lorens nevertheless transcends this specificity to address broader ideas and provoke deeper reactions. The viewer is moved to contemplate such concepts as transience, mortality, and the impossibility of true communication.

Louise Short’s Feeling Faint also utilises the moving image to evocative effect. Using several projectors, films of details of the room in which the piece is installed are imposed onto those details. For example, film shot of a stopped clock is projected onto that clock (and so with a screw, a clothes hanger, a bare corner). The projected images move with Short’s breath as she was shooting, never aligning with the reality from which they were taken, but rather always floating and hovering around it. There is no attempt to create new realities, only to highlight aspects and details, previously mundane and aesthetically undistinguished, to be perceived differently. This project has nothing to do with self-expression, nor politics per se, but rather is the result of meditation on the nature of this space, as well as on the perception of spaces in general. The hovering projections have the effect of layering reality, allowing poetic connections to seep between the layers.

Cohered by the physical space and industrial history of its context, this show was a fascinating event. Although not all the work shown was entirely convincing (some pieces lacked visual impact), the weaker elements were validated as part of an innovative and vigorous project. Seeking to re-engage with social spaces and re-integrate art and modern life, PALP is sure to make considerable impact on the largely commercial, gallery-based Cornish art scene.

The artists included in ‘PALPitations’ were Carolyn Black, Tessa Garland, Carole Dodds, Gillian Cooper, Sue Bleakley, Marion Taylor, Amanda Lorens, Louise Short, and Nick Harpley. The show ran from 23 rd -25 th February.

Ed Krcma, March 2001.

Best Western: PALP (Penwith Artist Led Projects) Review wrttten by Dr Alan Bleakley

In continuing to promote practices of private ‘expression’ based on a stale, modernist ethos and aesthetic, the art establishment of the St Ives area of Cornwall has failed to address the possible expressive life of the local community. Such art becomes another commodity, not a wellspring for ideas. Ambitious artists with a commitment to collaborative, experimental work promoting social inclusion, networking and educational opportunities have been forced to seek project work outside the region. PALP was formed in January 2000 as a response to this dilemma.

A group whose name pitches you into place must answer why. Penwith is the big toe of Cornwall , almost an island, the land’s end. The drift westward isolates – in Neolithic times the dead were brought to the setting sun. While the place educates a peculiar sensitivity to land, sea and weather, it misses the urban pulse. Penwith is, paradoxically, post-urban, offering the first post-industrial landscape in Britain after the collapse of the tin mining and fishing industries. The scars are evident in both landscape and people, for parts of this area are amongst the poorest in the European Community. PALP is responding to this not with subscription to a literal ‘regeneration of the economy’, but regeneration of a place-sensitive language of ideas, metaphors and images, getting people to think about issues through arts-based interventions.

Three site-specific exhibitions, all including invited artists, have confirmed PALP’s commitment to increased public access to art that enthuses and excites curiosity rather than bullies, playing on themes of a ‘history of the present’. ‘Shed’ was held in outbuildings on a Cornish farm of historical importance. Responses offered contemporary narratives on issues such as housework as unpaid labour. ‘PALPitations’ was held in a disused BT Exchange building in Penzance , responding to its unique history. ‘Field of Vision’ (part of a successful RALP bid) invited responses to a spectacular rural site, including residencies, commissioned new works and educational collaboration, focused upon environmental concerns.

Important dilemmas were raised by these shows. PALP does not place itself in opposition to contemporary art conventions, but recognises the restrictions of the traditional gallery space, aiming rather to create conceptually rigorous, site-responsive work addressing local needs through international themes. However, possible transgressive experimentation may be compromised by the desire to draw in a sector of the public that would normally not attend art events. A running discussion within the group centres on the notion of ‘intention’: advocates of purity of intention deny the possible ‘death of the author’ that allows the work to speak for itself, open to audience interpretation. A growing unease pervades the group with respect to how funding opportunities are seen to dictate and restrict more radical ambitions. However, what makes such a group possible is a fervent common conviction that art-based interventions can act as a catalyst for constructive social insight and change.

The group’s mission includes an ‘aim to create links and facilitate exchanges with other professional artists and artist run organisations, nationally and internationally, for the benefit of both artists and the local community of a rural and geographically isolated area.’ PALP has made links with women artists in Albania , where ‘art for art’s sake’ is definitely not on the agenda given the white-hot political and social climate. One planned collaborative project is to turn dismantled guns into art objects and auction them to the new wealthy elite of Eastern Europe , turning the proceeds over to schools. A proposed collaboration with artists in Bologna will investigate site-specific work in a disused hospital that may inspire the local community to re-imagine the place and its history. ‘certainly, probably, maybe’ is a local collaboration looking at how the language of visual artists may help to educate doctors who make decisions on the basis of visual inspection of non-art images (signs and symptoms of disease).

‘Coal, Salt, Tin’ is a funded commissioning of work through a National Touring Programme award. An important objective of the group is to create sustainable opportunities for contemporary visual artists in the region and one of the best ways to do this is to generate strong, visible networks on a national scale. PALP has formed a consortium with artist led groups in Leeds and Newcastle . Collective involvement will include visits to artists across the country culminating in six commissions for new work responding to the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial era, where knowledge and information are the new commodities and notions of place and identity are contested. Networking also underpins ‘Wish You Were Here’, a project to be completed in 2003. PALP will commission thirty new works of art, nationally and internationally, to fit into, or spring from, suitcases as a mobile exhibition touring coastal locations.

PALP is: Sue Bleakley, Gillian Cooper, Tessa Garland, Amanda Lorens, Rory McDermott, Marion Taylor. www.palp.co.uk

Alan Bleakley is a psychologist and writer who works in medical education and is interested in the links between medicine and art. He lives near Penzance.

WAY FROM THE LIGHT Written by Dr Alan Bleakley

Shed’ – a site-specific installation by the PALP (Penwith Artist Led Project) group of visual artists, Boscathnoe Farm, Heamoor, Penzance, Cornwall, 11-13 August 2000.

Despite the presence of a major art school in Falmouth , there is a peculiar, obstinate denial of contemporary art in West Penwith . The peninsula is home to a significant slice of Modernist experimentation that now can best be described as ‘oedipal’ art – tamed, socialized, homogenized, decorative, often insipid. Yet the galleries are full of this stuff, inspired by the ‘quality of light’ of the peninsula. The art-in-safe-hands school regularly scorns what might be called ‘anti-oedipal’ art (explicitly transgressive, destabilizing normalised form and idea) for what the anti-oedipalists might see as ‘tourist art’. But the modernist-traditionalists should be reminded of Gustave Flaubert’s acid comment on the imagination: ‘When you lack it, attack it in others.’

Disillusioned by the knee-jerk response to West Penwith that seems to bring out the Modernist in us through representation of sea and light, an adventurous group of visual artists has turned its collective back on the shimmering sea and gone to ground, to the peninsula’s agricultural interior. In a return to the farm, they have appropriated its most disreputable buildings – the shed (donkey shed, tool shed, garden shed, coal shed), the outhouse, the disused lean-to – and inhabited them and infected them with their work and imagination. In this turn, the reflected light of the sea is replaced by a variety of interior shed-lights illuminating objects and ideas stimulated by the presence of the sheds and readily dissolving any artificial boundary between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.

Penwith Artist Led Project (PALP) is a collective of inspired and insightful artists who want to see community action as arts-led, not economy- or politics-led, in an area of the country historically famous for its art but in decline in relation to recent movements in the art world. PALP’s manifesto focuses upon ‘workspace issues and support structures for visual artists in Penwith’, but also expresses a wish to link with other artists and collectives in the UK and Europe who might ‘find new ways of working together in different spaces and places to reach new audiences.’ Shed is the first in a series of site-specific shows aiming to meet these goals, and offers installations inspired by a variety of dwellings and spaces (‘sheds’) in the extensive and wonderful gardens of two Penzance-based doctors, Jane and Neil Armstrong.

Heidegger’s 1951 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ asks how humans can dwell, or inhabit spaces, ‘poetically’. Heidegger does not address building architecturally, but traces building back to two questions: 1). What is it to dwell? 2). How does building belong to dwelling? We only dwell, says Heidegger, by means of building. Dwelling is the goal of building.

Sheds are unique in that we build them for the dwelling of others – livestock, tools, plants, wood and coal. Yet we also dwell in them because of the enticing presence of these others. Everybody knows the wonder of the peaty smell of the garden shed, the allotment shed, or the rich manure and straw smell of the animal shed. In these dwellings we do not dwell on ourselves (the limited horizon of introspective and autobiographical art), but dwell in the presence of the tool and its maintenance, the donkey and its droppings and mucking out, the coal and its shifting, the plant and its tending, the abandoned paraphernalia of the farmyard and its hoarding. Children inhabit these places through games that make such dwellings ‘camps’ (inviting us for a while to go ‘wild’ or ‘native’, to be anti-oedipal, anti-family values), places of retreat, secrecy, initiation, experimentation and exploration, immune from adult interference.

Heidegger’s insight draws us away from the things of the world to the business of being with those things, again, tending or extending, cleaning, shifting, dumping. He raises the question: how do we dwell with that which is not us? How do we ‘live’ the building itself, beyond the function of shed as mere shelter or storage? This is to give dwelling character. In a site-specific project, such as that of PALP’s Shed, the indwelling of a variety of outhouses is given character through elaboration and supplement. Oddly, in such a rural, earthy setting, the show adopts a baroque method: by adding to, extending, convoluting and involuting, by folding the thing upon itself to increase surface, a whole new meaning is derived. For audiences raised on Penwith’s tourist ceramics, seascapes and interminable modernist abstractions capturing ‘the quality of light’, this presents a darker challenge. Each shed in the show is explicitly ‘worked’, re-inhabited, dwelt upon as a space and space, as location, and then in-dwelt in inspiration. It is as if a previously hidden fold in the shed’s character has been unfolded for inspection, demanding a new interest and a different eye.

Artists are prone to claim a kind of child-like innocence about their work, resisting a theorizing: ‘it’s just what it is’, or ‘I just made it’. But this is not the case with a site-specific installation that demands a response to a space and place. Besides, each artist is embedded in a moving stream of historical ideas, images and languages of articulation that dictate to them and is bigger than each individual. Taking the shed as a theme already raises a language from the earth, to which each artist must respond not just aesthetically but ethically. Each has a responsibility to respond to ‘shed’ in its three meanings. First, as shelter or storage place, where it first entered the English language in the 15th century: ‘a slight structure built for shelter or storage, or for use as a workshop, either attached as a lean-to a permanent building or separate, often with open front or sides.’ (The Shorter OED). Second, as ‘to separate or divide’. In the 16th century, ‘shed’ also came to mean the ridge that separated two valleys, and the parting of the wool of sheep in order to grease their skins. By the 18th century this ‘parting’ came to include the parting of human hair, and ‘shed’ was used specifically to refer to the opening made between the threads of a warp in weaving. Third, is the meaning of ‘shed’ as to get rid of something: to shed a tear, to shed a burden, to lose or cast off. The silkworm sheds its cocoon; the evening sheds its light.

A shed also came to mean, by the 17th century, the hiding place or lair of an animal, an image used to great effect by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Who can forget those eerie scenes where Frankenstein’s anomalous ‘monster’, as yet unschooled, holes up in an abandoned shed and there, eavesdropping on the inhabitants of the cottage, terrified of being discovered and rejected as a wild animal, learns language, manners, emotional expression, or is civilized through ‘distance learning’? The ‘monster’s’ shed becomes both temporary dwelling and schoolroom for the indwelling of a culture. It is a familiar motif in literature – the hideaway, the humble and temporary dwelling, becomes the site of a great birth or an idiosyncratic education, from Jesus to Huckleberry Finn.

In The Ethical Function of Architecture, Karsten Harries (1998, p.174) raises the dilemma produced by a diasporic, postmodern world of identity distribution, and the loss of foundations and centres for multiple, relative meanings and the value of peripheries, so that there is nothing to build on but movement itself: ‘The more technology carries the attack on place into our everyday life, the more we can expect that life to be tinged by a sense of being on the road, of not belonging, of being denied the possibility of really dwelling somewehere.’ This may produce a ‘terror of space’ in the sense that the world is suddenly boundary-free. The shed is a liminal space and place that satisfies both the urge to wander (sheds are temporary and easily abandoned), and the urge to inhabit (sheds provide shelter). The shed is not a home but a ‘stopping-off’ dwelling, a temporary experience, as Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ discovers. Sheds are not made to last, they are ‘mobile’ by nature, constantly patched up, often abandoned, the work of the bricoleur rather than the architect-builder.

Bernard Tschumi (1996, p.31) reminds us that the modern idea of inhabited space can be summed up in the notion of ‘felt volume’, denoting a substantial space, and revealing a character. This returns us to the differentiation of a variety of ‘felt volumes’ of the shed: an animalised shed (the donkey shed), a carbonised shed (the coal shed), an instrumentalised shed (the tool shed, the tractor shed), a nurturing shed (the garden shed, the poly-tunnel). Surely there must be sheds that are also shelters for ideas (the workshed, the writing shed?) If museums are shelters for fossilised, grand ideas, then sheds are good shelters for temporary, liquid, effervescent, shifting ideas. Our third definition of ‘shed’ above was to leave, to abandon, to get rid of, to let go.

Dwellings ‘gather’ suggests Heidegger. But they gather in a paradoxical way. The Greeek paras means ‘boundary’ (‘parameter’), but does not indicate where something stops. Rather, it indicates the place from which something unfolds towards a horizon (a horizon of form as well as a horizon of meaning). Accordingly, a boundary setting, as a site-specific installation in a bordered garden, can offer an unfolding out from each piece of work, rather than an inward dwelling of each ‘shed’. Such an unfolding can be seen as an essaying of place and space in terms of a broadcast of the character of a locality. The installation then gives the locality form, voice and value, offering both an aesthetic and ethical response. Uprooted after only three days, the show dissipates into photographs and essay, as well as personal memory, as the migrant images move on to inhabit spaces other than sheds and places other than gardens.

References

Harries, K. (1998) The Ethical Function of Architecture . Cambridge , Mass. : The MIT Press.

Heidegger, M. (1978) ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings , ed. D. F. Krell, London : Routledge.

Tschumi, B. (1996) Architecture and Disjunction . Cambridge , Mass. : The MIT Press.

The work

Tessa Garland Prelude 2001

Gillian Cooper’s ‘Thicker than Water’, installed in a large, open-fronted shed using the floor space, has around seventy metal pails and half that number of brushes (scrubbing brushes and hairbrushes) perched on the pails, or abandoned on the floor. Some of the pails have tipped, all their contents have evaporated. The title suggests blood ties and family connections, and the objects invite classification into family groups, such as types of brushes. The work signifies domestic toil, and going into service.

Amanda Lorens’ ‘Bath’ transforms the archetypal abandoned bath one always finds outdoors on a Cornish farm by cladding it inside and out in white towelling. The clean and the dirty, bath and towel, become one, absorbing the elements during the three days’ of the show. Cleverly, the towelling stops at a tide line, so that the rusty base of the bath is left. Amanda’s ‘Coal Shed’ turns from the water and air of the bath to fire and earth. An electric fire sits atop a heap of coal in a bricked coal shed. A chair is placed in front of the fire. The small space is stiflingly hot. Disconcertingly, a vicious fire, like a building burning down, crackles and roars away through an installed tape-loop, creating a disorientating spontaneous combustion without real markers of flame and smoke.

Susan Bleakley lights up the corrugated-roofed donkey shed with small night-lights. It is as if it is Christmas in August, as we enter the cobble-floor stable in anticipation, to greet a strange amalgam of fairy story and postmodern superwoman. Here is the outfit of ‘Donkey Girl’ hanging from a beam. Above a pressed white dress with scrubbing brushes at knee height (donkey girls are working girls) is a pair of silver-grey donkey ears. A broom completely gilded with gold stands by the outfit, and at the foot of the broom is a small pile of gold-gilded donkey shit. Some transformation is happening. There is more gilded shit mingled with the real stuff in a heap topped by golden straw. It is a changing room for a super-heroine. In her ‘Plant Labels and Plants’, Sue infects small area of garden with vibrant, brightly-coloured plastic plants, described by ghastly names written on accompanying sticks of alabaster, such as ‘Mists of Malice’. This is the alternative garden centre, the future Eden .

In a three-piece suite, Tessa Garland also makes futuristic flowers. On a theme of surveillance, ‘Prelude’ is sited above the ‘shed’ that is the outdoor loo. It is a construction at giant’s height, accessible by ladder, into which you look to be greeted by an eye looking back. ‘Big Flower is watching You (Part 1)’ is reached by a trail through the garden, leading to the ‘shed’ that is a roomy plastic tunnel, a small hangar. Tendrils of red filler-foam have greeted you on your walk, and now you walk into a hothouse of red Amazonian flowers and overhanging vines. The flowers reach out with their finger-like petals, and at the centre of one is a surveillance camera. In ‘Part 2′ of the same piece, you are led away to a garden shed where a CCTV screen glows with the image of the watching flower. You see others watching the flower that is watching them while you watch, distanced, in a hothouse of surveillance and simulation.

Fergus Murray’s ‘The Drying Room’ is an alternative peepshow. At the entrance to a small shed you lift a cloth veil to reveal a room packed with hanging and drying forms, lit by a hurricane lamp. This could be tobacco, or hanging meats, or the fingers of dead gardeners. The impact comes from the stillness of the piece. It is like the model for a Dutch interior painting, in which the model itself is now given an airing as a room of hanging history, episodes drying out, events desiccating.

Marion Taylor’s ‘Losing Time’ explicitly adopts the theme of time in a small room illuminated by torchlight, but here, time is explicitly renewable, through musical score and rhythm. Set against a clock-face circle of light on a back wall, a metronome ticks. The room is stacked with pianola rolls and sheet music is scattered on the floor. Time is both suffocating and opens up, through rhythm. An egg timer and an everlasting flame signify time lost and time regained.

Lucy Willow’s ‘Shed, Shed’ plays on two meanings of shed, as shedding skin or fur (or sheep’s wool in this case), and shed as shelter, for a childhood moment, or a revelation of quiet interiority in a child-like meditation. A trail of sheep’s fleece leads through a portion of the garden to a small concrete shed, coiling around a child’s chair and flopping onto a cushion. At the end of the expansive thread is a French-knitting bobbin. Is the ‘shedding’ an outgrowth from the small, or a return to the seat of wisdom that is a child-like regression to a small quiet space?

How can such a show be judged? The work speaks for itself, but, given that PALP’s manifesto calls for ‘working together in different spaces and places to reach new audiences’, the show must be judged an unqualified success. 350 people turned up on the opening night, extraordinary for a ‘small’, ‘local’ show.