Jez Hattosh-Nemeth : 'Maritimia' exhibition, 'Sealine' performance, 'Lavernock' installation
'Maritimia'
- an exhibition of works by contemporary Welsh artists held at Cardiff University's School of Optometry and Vision Sciences and sponsored by the Jubilee Sailing Trust and Cardiff University (30th October-16th December 2009).
'Sealine'
'Sealine' was a collaborative performance that drew a physical line using chalk to link the exhibition at Cardiff University to the sea at Cardiff Bay, a distance of 2.7 miles through the center of the city and performed on the 24th October 2009. Once inside the University building the line continued towards the center point of the exhibition, its form reacting and responding to the architecture and structure of the space around it. The performance and line became instruments to contextualise the art work existing within the experience of each participant and notions of division, border and identity that were being explored in the work. The photographer was Jo Haycock
'Lavernock'
'Lavernock', the second work in the exhibition interpreted a personal connection with the beach landscape at Lavernock Point which juts into the Bristol Channel south of Cardiff. The piece recorded 26 visits to the location over nine years as a series of individually drawn graphite lines on 26 rolls of paper with a combined length of seven miles. The paper rolls themselves were suggestive of the fossils found at the site. The work accurately recreated a 2.5m square section of rock bed which had been over- written with the given names of creatures from the rich paleontological biosphere of the Planorbis/Rheatic beds of 210 million years ago. The beds themselves record extinction events from the late Triassic early Jurassic boundary and are unique. Lavernock Point is also the proposed site for the western end of the Severn barrage and if constructed would render the geology and site inaccessible to future generations.
Weaving with Stones
Summer 2009: The Pebble Beds Project archaeological dig directed by Professor Christopher Tilley.
Some times I wonder how I get out of bed. Not because I might be too tired or waiting to respond to the alarm, but those mornings when I am lying in bed deep in thought, and then suddenly find myself up and off to make a cup of tea. I didn’t tell myself to get up, but I somehow just did! This same disconnect must have happened the day I decided to write to the archaeologist Professor Christopher Tilley, after hearing that there had been a dig on Woodbury Common, Devon last summer. It was an email sent without too much thought or deliberation, otherwise I may have dithered and not gone ahead.
I had been considering embarking on a project that would involve making a cairn on Budleigh Satlerton beach, and monitoring the connection people would have with the cairn, their interest and attraction to the colourful pebbles and the journeys they had undertaken in order to get to the beach. So it was with great interest I heard about the four-year Pebble Beds Project.
One day in the spring of 2009 I met Chris at his home and he talked about the project, and other digs, and his interest in trying to express archaeological investigation through visual interpretation. A past experience of working with artists had not altogether matched his expectations, with the artists often ignoring the process of excavation work, and becoming caught up with the tools of the trade and thus avoiding immersing themselves in the process itself. Having established that I had never undertaken any art-in-the-landscape before, he still invited me to join the dig, and that I should be armed with kneepads and a proper archaeological trowel!
My childhood was spent within earshot of the sound of the sea on pebbles, sometimes the soothing waves rolling on the stones and then that reluctant sound of the pebbles being dragged back out by the tide, and at other times the cacophony of a gale. Pebbles, their endless variety of shapes and colours, have always been of significance to me, a symbol of place, and collected wherever I visit.
I had heard it rumoured that archaeologists often resent artists being on site, and so it was with a little apprehension that I set out to join the dig in August. I was one of the advanced party of five women, four locals and one of Chris’s PhD students, who were to uncover the work started last year and prepare another nearby small cairn for excavation. The ‘real’ archaeologists would arrive at the end of the week! It was good to be broken in this way, being on my knees and bent over from 9 to 5, six days a week, was gruelling for a studio based artist! Agony aside, this is certainly a good way to get to know people!
The physical process was not unlike digging up potatoes, and they actually looked like potatoes when covered in the red/brown soil. Each stone was weighed, measured, washed, categorised, its location measured and all this information documented. Reams of it! The information will be fed into a computer and analysed, at a later date, to see if there are any patterns for specific pebbles within the structure. When wet, the pebbles disclose an array of colours and patterns, which probably had as much of an attraction in the Bronze Age, as they still do for some of us now. The jewels of the time.
I found it hard to break away from the activities of the dig and start really concentrating on what I wanted to create. Somehow I felt guilty, as though creativity is not work! Time was moving on and I felt a sense of urgency.
There were two sites to be excavated, with the main dig taking place on Woodbury Common, my preferred site. This place is special. It is a place suspended between the earth and sky, separate from the real world. Safe. A secret place. We are our own community or tribe without the hindrance of the high tech world we usually live in. This is Avalon looking down on a sea of luscious green, cultivated landscape. A powerful place of lost knowledge and spirituality. I love it!
I had become interested in the process of building a cairn. The Bronze Age people would have been brought the stones up from the riverbed. What type of container would have been used? Would this have been a pilgrimage on special occasions such as the Equinox or Solstice? The panoramic landscape aligns itself with sunrise locations. Would it have been a group activity or a personal journey? Built over many years or a single build?
My intention was to weave a container, a large structure to contain pebbles. My first attempts to weave a basket were hindered by my lack of knowledge regarding the harvesting of materials and trying to fashion a regular shaped structure. I became frustrated by the whole process and technique of basketry, which seemed to detract from my initial response to the place and materials available.
I started to collect gorse and heather and was engrossed for hours stripping the needles off the gorse There was a repetition of walking, collecting, sorting and stripping back, a meditation of sorts. The making of cairns would have required many journeys back and forth with the pebbles. Creating paths, creating stories and remembering.
Weaving became a metaphor for life on the heath lands. The weaving of narrow paths across the landscape mirrors the structure of plant life. The gorse and heather grow together creating a dense undergrowth. The pebbles may have some weave like order in their placement within the cairn, and as work progressed on the excavation, so stories were woven around its revelations.
The weaving took on a life of its own! The inflexible and random nature of the roots and branches inevitably dictated the form. Not surprisingly the structure related to its surroundings. I felt more frustration again as the wayward nature of the weaving started to collapse under its own weight. It would never become the shape I had in mind; in fact it looked more like a large nest! At this point I decided to take the basket to its final resting place on Great Tor Barrow. Much to my surprise it looked finished. It belonged there. A woven flame.
I felt less connection with the Aylesbeare Common site, and others on the dig expressed the same feeling. Its difficult to pin point what it was about the place that evoked such displeasure. It didn’t have that other-worldness, somehow more earth bound and connected to habitation. It lacked mystery. With a week to go, and the excavating completed on Woodbury Common, I knew I had to find some way of working with and on this site.
Categorizing and defining the different colours of the pebbles was a constant task on the dig. With this in mind I utilised a metal grid used for recording information on an excavation. The metre square grid, with its twenty-five squares, is placed over the area to be recorded and the information laboriously drawn onto graph paper.
I had to be creative with the definitions in order to fill the grid with different pebble categories, referring to some as ‘body parts’, not because of shape but a combination of colour and texture. Once again the process was one of walking, gathering, selecting and repetition. The end result, when wet, magically reveals the range of colours and textures of the pebbles.
Through out the year, I will return regularly to visit both sites and see how the passage of time plays a part on the art works. I have also left paper and fabric in the landscape with a covering layer of pebbles for weather and time to produce its own drawing on the surfaces. I was surprised to discover that, over the four weeks we were on site, very little had happened to my paper experiments. The heath land terrain drained quickly after a rainfall and the dew dried rapidly in the ever-present wind.
So the weaving continues. The diary of daily found objects, pebbles, photographs and the shared stories of our lives and the ones recreated from the past will, however subliminally executed, inform the visual work that will evolve during the coming year. It has provided me with a wealth of information and experience that could only have been informed by ‘being there’. Being there was magical.
October 2009
Fieldwork : An Tobar, Tobermory, Isle of Mull - March/April 2009
Land2 and Mull
It feels like the earth
is moving slowly, a step at a time,
concentrating,
like someone carrying
a bowl, full to the brim.
From Salt and Sweet by Jan Sutch Pickard, Bunessan, Mull
The work exhibited as Fieldwork comes out of a week long visit made by ten members of LAND2 to the Hebriddean island of Mull. I was the only member of the field trip to have any previous connection or prior knowledge of the island (Mull being home to maternal ancestors). Other members of LAND2 involved in the project arrived with varying degrees of knowledge; some with knowledge gleaned from visits to other parts of Scotland and from research carried out before travel and some with barely a hinge at all - but we all came with a degree of expectation.
Suze Adams, April 09
Fieldwork: Making Connections
Fieldwork was exhibited at An Tobar, Tobermory, Mull during March and April 2009. The individual works that came together in the gallery space to comprise Fieldwork were made as a result of a week long exploratory field trip to the island during April 2008. Our venture on Mull has been a stimulating episode in an ongoing ‘conversation’ based around understandings of landscape and place in all their complexities has provided us with our first opportunity for a group from LAND2 to work from one location giving a shared context and catalyst.
The resultant range of conceptual approach and media is enormously varied - from the performative to the representational, from a direct engagement with the raw material of earth to a consideration of the digital, yet what every artist in this exhibition shares is that the work is grounded in a reference to the phenomenological experience of being in place. Whilst each artist developed their work from their initial explorations independently, it is only when viewed together in the gallery space, and thought about in relation to each other, that something innovative might have been considered to have been created.
The exhibition was greatly enriched by an informal symposium: Methods of Engagement and Articulation of Landscape. Very often LAND2 events are characterised by a meeting of social history, geology and autobiography through creative practice, this occasion was no exception. Doctoral students Suze Adams and Claire King explored this relation in their presentations. Through the symposium, two other artists were able to join our conversation: David Faithfull and Jane Kelly who live and work in this kind of landscape. We were fortunate to have contributions from the geologist James Westland and the archivist of the Mull museum, Jean Whittaker. Their detailed, fervent local knowledge was a really distinctive contribution to our symposium and the Fieldwork exhibition.
Judith Tucker, May 2009
Fieldwork: an exhibition
An Tobar, TheTobermory Arts Centre, is based in the Victorian school building overlooking the picturesque harbour on the Isle of Mull. Our programme includes a busy music schedule and our gallery features around eight exhibitions a year. As well as showing some of the best work from this area, it welcomes many of the best artists and makers in Scotland and, occasionally, work from beyond this country.
“Fieldwork” was An Tobar’s opening exhibition for 2009 and the work was created by the artist network LAND2.
Many of the artists who work here are inspired by the surrounding landscape – no surprise there then. From our side it is equally inspiring to see an objective view of home and the LAND2 artists succeeded in bringing insight and illumination with their work which covered a range of disciplines. They dug under the surface, revealing aspects and angles that were certainly new to me. This kind of collaborative project is exactly the kind of direction that works well for An Tobar, allowing us to involve many members of the community with the visiting artists and pointing out that art is in everything. Fieldwork has got the gallery programme off to a great start.
Gordon Maclean, Director, An Tobar, April 2009
I enjoyed working with LAND2 on Fieldwork and the symposium. I particularly enjoyed selecting the presenters from Mull and I am delighted that the screening of SOURCE by Dalziel + Scullion was so well received. All in all I think our joint efforts paid off well.
Lee Hendrick, Visual Arts and Crafts Officer, An Tobar, April 2009
John Harper : Broken and Breaking Ground
Throughout 2005-2008 I have been engaged on a series of related projects that have centred on the rural landscape of Northamptonshire, each of which has financed by bursary and development funding by The Arts Council of England.
The related bodies of work have all progressed from earlier projects concerned with challenging our conditioned view of the picturesque and the related fixed frame through which we are traditionally invited to view the land. In ‘Landmarks and Signs’ 2005 – I produced a series of site related photo-works each of which was centred to a village location along the Nene Valley Way. This led to a yearlong commission for Fermynwoods Contemporary Art. During my year of residency I researched the topography of a tract of Forestry Commission land adjacent to Fermynwoods Gallery, Brigstock, North Northamptonshire.
The aim of the commission was to pilot a programme of international artists residencies at the gallery through the production of new work and an accompanying publication. I termed the project ‘Broken and Breaking Ground - Ideas taken into and out of a landscape’ The outcome was a series of monthly bulletins which were published by Fermynwoods; an exhibition of more conclusive work and a book covering the full procedure of the residency published by RGAP (Research Group For Artists Publications), distributed by Cornerhouse press.
Two versions of the book are available - a limited boxed edition that contains an additional folio of works - available through the publisher; and a hardcover single publication available through Cornerhouse.
The project is to be further developed through an exhibition at Spike Island Gallery, Bristol throughout October and November of this year.
For more information on John Harper's Broken and Breaking Ground publications and project, visit The University of Northampton NECTAR website. RGAP and Cornerhouse websites.
LAND2: Mull Transect
During the week of April 14th, 2008, seven members of LAND2 and three PhD students, together with the photographer Josh Biggs, visited the Isle of Mull with a view to working separately and together in its geologically unusual and historically rich landscape.
What follows here is an evocation - in text and images - of a single collective project that took place over the period of a day.
The site chosen is reached by way of a rough track that runs through a communally-owned larch plantation to reach a small-holding overlooking the sea. Below this small-holding lies an area of dune, sandy beach , rolling banks and rocky outcrop that together form the landscape of a curved bay around the mouth of a small river. The transect ran from the bank of the river to the summit of a steep bank rising above it. Its site was chosen as being, in a number of respects, typical of the environmental diversity found everywhere on the island.
I would like to thank the participants both for their input on the day - the clear sky was due to an arctic wind - and for allowing me to use the material they produced here.
Iain Biggs
Bristol May 2008
This presentation was converted from Powerpoint to Flash, and can be viewed here.
LAND2: Field Trip April 08
Five nights, four days on the Hebriddean isle of Mull, Western Scotland
Participants:
Iain Biggs, Judith Tucker, David Walker-Barker, Lily Markiewicz, Jane Millar, Gail Dickerson, Ray Lafferty, Claire King, Mel Thompson, Josh Biggs and Suze Adams.
Why Mull for the field trip, what is the link between LAND2 and Mull? The link is me, Suze Adams, the island being home to my maternal ancestors.
Mull was chosen as the location for a field trip partly due to my connection, this personal link and prior knowledge of place, but also due to the richness of the geological history which is so strikingly evident in the topography of the island. The field trip was centred in the north west of the island around the small town of Dervaig. As well as being the focus for a multi-faceted exploration and examination of the locale, the trip was the meeting point for a broad range of approaches and practices all grappling with over-lapping concepts of landscape.
LAND2: Field Trip April 08
LAND2 proposal January 2007
Melanie Thompson has been working as an artist for 30 years - the body has always been my base line, my material, but where the body finds itself - it’s place and space are equally important in the equation.
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‘The body is a fluid signifying system, which
in the 21st century is continuously undergoing challenging and liberating
transformations’.
The Artist’s Body; Tracy Warr
2 Current Projects
Project 1 : Palace Intrusions
Palace Intrusions is a new year-long public arts project, curated by Melanie Thompson and Helen Ottaway of Artmusic. The project is taking place in Wells, Somerset, with monthly events and arts interventions, called Benchmarks, beginning in October 2007 and culminating in a spectacular site-specific performance in the grounds of the Bishop’s Palace in September 2008.
All events will be free and many will be participatory ,involving the general public of all ages, local schools and community groups.
Each month - starting October 2007 an event will occur around or on one of the benches that stand looking at the palace and moat and surrounding countryside. There will be 12 events in all, involving local and visiting artists. The benches themselves will be used as a platform for the presentation of a commission.
The final Benchmark will be an exhibition in the Bishop’s Palace gallery throughout the month of September 2008. Benchmarks will take many forms sculpture, live art, sonic walks, lectures, banquets, musical performance, photography and much more.
Up to date events:
Benchmark 1 : Bronwin Bradshaw - October 2007 - see images
Benchmark 2 : Melanie Thompson and Jane Hazlewood November 2007 - see images
Benchmark 3 : Helen Ottaway and Melanie Thompson December 2007
Benchmarks will continue through 2008 and the work produced by the artists and local participants will form an ongoing and developing exhibition on view at the Wells Museum throughout the year,
for all details and up to date info look at : www.palaceintrusions.org.uk
Project 2
IIn 2006 I was invited to join the team of Bristol Zoo’s new conservation project the N.W.C.P as initially an arts consultant but to develop into a lead artist role. The project will open in 2011; there is a desire to create a fully integrated design in collaboration with commissioned artists as an integral part of the conservation park and visitors experience. My brief is to expand and activate that vision. All my past public art work has been based on active ongoing conversation and negotiation, this project will continue to develop this interactive discourse between all members of the project and later the visiting artists.
Winter Growing Fields; Landscape and Estrangement : Andrew Langford
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“Place and non-place are rather like opposed
polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally
completed: they are like
palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten.”
Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places, An introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London/New York: Verso.
The research involves working in specific locations in the Andalucian countryside centred on Almeria. On one hand the region attracts visitors for its exotic and experiential value – climate, natural landscape, history and heritage, local culture and lifestyle. On the other hand the region signals an adoption of architectural standardisation and the application of sanitised processes around monocultures. Much of what one sees in Almeria is directly affiliated with the dominant monoculture industries. Almeria’s so called, ‘edgelands’ extend to such a degree that most villages and towns physically connect through the labyrinth of greenhouses and associated services. The key motivator for change in the landscape is the profitability of modern greenhouse horticulture on an industrial scale. Over a thirty year period the sector has grown to a staggering 2,500 hectares of land coverage (2001) and is still accelerating. Construction involves the complete eradication of the existing land surface and the building of plastic or glass clad, steel and wire frames. When zones reach saturation the greenhouses are seen as a continuous and seamless plastic membrane with mainly narrow roads between them. Alongside the greenhouses, wide ranging supporting industries evolve until what was open semi-desert landscape has become a fully industrialized city edgeland. They signal an expanded and excessive utilitarian future which might result for many in a profound alteration of awareness - a sense of loss of belonging and limited sense of place.
Additional information and images can be found at: www.andrewlangford.co.uk
Bridges
Bridges is a publication / exhibition project where each member of LAND2 was invited to provide a 'postcard' comprising an image and, if appropriate, a text and to invite a friend to join them in doing the same. The aim is to gather together a set of diverse visual images and texts related to the word 'bridge' as a means of indicating what that word evokes to a broad range of individuals - not all of whom are visual artists by profession.
The resulting works will be published in a limited edition box set and we hope will be exhibited in Bristol, Leeds and Falmouth as part of LAND2's ambition to make the diversity of contemporary landscape-related art practice more widely known. Bridges was devised and edited by Iain Biggs, designed by iSophia and published by Wild Conversations Press for LAND2 (ISBN 1-902595-07-6) find out more>>
Graduate Projects:
The Dig Project
The Midsomer Norton Dig Project, Summer 2005 was a pilot inter-disciplinary project that aimed to use a local Archaeological Dig as a method of locating art practice(s). The project consisted of 5 female artists, 1 undergraduate student, 3 postgraduate students and 1 postgraduate. Although the project had not aimed to be all female it is important to point out as this element influenced the dynamics and progression of both the primary experience and the translation into artwork over the subsequent months. The project was motivated by both the experience of Place and the experience of Power negotiating self within and beyond their boundaries. find out more>>