If you are in London on June the 20th get to the UCL Institute of Making for their Festival of Stuff. It sounds great!

Last years 5-day Festival of Stuff featured masterclasses on the theme of felting, electronics, blacksmithing, and wood working. It ended with an extravaganza of stuff, where we spilled out onto Malet Place for the first time filling it with demo-stalls and making stations. We brought back some old favourites like blacksmithing and rope making, along with some new discoveries and the chance to sample our homemade liquid nitrogen ice cream.

http://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/

They have a library of materials that looks pretty interesting too: http://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/materials-library

One of the books I have been wheeling out on my trolley during this Fellowship is Louis G Le Roy’s ‘Nature Culture Fusion’, it is a publication that talks of two features crucial to Le Roy’s work – time and space.

In the light of some of the discussions that took place in the XL Gallery I thought it might be useful to share a link about Le Roy and his Eco Cathedral, a project he worked on for over 30 years in a meadow in the north of the Netherlands.

http://www.slowlab.net/eco-cathedral.html

I particularly like these quotes from Le Roy under the heading Power Station:

“Free energy linked to organisms is the form of energy that makes naturally transforming processes possible.”

“As long as there are still people who insist on saying there are only limited amounts of ‘free energy’, I will go on showing that wouldn’t be the case if human beings in general were to think of it as a world wide power station and as such would let it operate as efficiently as possible.”

A taste of the discussion that ensued after Stephen Moonie invited the audience to ask questions and add comments (unfortunately this site cannot host all of the files here)

Chris Jones starts off with an observation about time in relation to art and process.

Dr Mark Jackson and colleague Dr Sally Waite respond

Dr Stephen Moonie asks a question about site of Bridget Kennedy and Olivia Turner during the conversation that took place alongside the exhibition “If I could sink my teeth into the whole earth”

The conversation turns to the relationships between art and archaeology, bringing Dr Mark Jackson in to the discussion

This brings up the question art or object?

And finally Stephen raises the issue of the definition of art.

Dr Stephen Moonie then opened up the discussion to questions or observations from the audience.

We have had a bit of contact with folk at Dunston Staiths this year.

Suzanne Hutton who is Co Director of Red Nile and also runs The Staiths Cafe came and gave a visiting lecture and hosted group of students on a visit to the Staiths in January.

The link below gives a bit of information about what Gateshead City Council are doing in that area, there are some interesting looking walks going on…

http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/Leisure%20and%20Culture/countryside/home.aspx

As the whole idea of the experiment in the XL was to keep things in flux the artists were keen to avoid calling it a “show”. However, when Friday afternoon came around things had to be put into some kind of order so people could navigate the space easily and pick up on some of the intersecting ideas amongst the four artists. the artists began to refer to these sculptural interactions as “conversations”

Below are a few images of the sculptural conversations on Friday 17th April.

People where curious, many questions were asked and thoughts shared.

Information about participating artists

Mair Hughes

Through her sculptural practice, photography and drawing, Mair elaborates a vocabulary of matter. Simple drawings hint at absurd material states. Through displacement and dislocation, Mair abstracts real objects into sculptural symbols, unanchored from their linguistic associations. Equally, she reconstructs objects using alternative materials, exposing her own layers of artifice.

Mair Hughes is currently artist in residence with the Canals and Rivers Trust Wales, and is envisioning the archaeological past and the ecological future of a particular post-industrial site, the Montgomeryshire Canal. As the canal in question is only partially navigable, she has observed its ability to be at once industrial ruin, ecological sanctuary, alternative route way and tourist attraction.

She is approaching her initial exploration of this site through an accumulation of adapted fieldwork methods, including photography, drawing, walking, writing, historical research and free association.

Mair Hughes is a Welsh artist, graduate of the Master of Fine Art in Glasgow in 2007. After graduation she was awarded a fellowship by the Royal Scottish Academy. From 2008 to 2010 she was committee member at Glasgow Project Room gallery. She has exhibited widely, and recent projects include Utopian Realism, a two-year multidisciplinary collaborative project.

Katie McGown

Katie McGown translates sites and structures into cloth, a shift that moves the built exterior into scales and substances of the domestic interior. Often documenting these transitions with photography, this process ruptures ideas of permanence, gender and received hierarchies of materials to instead present narratives of structural and social instability.

For XL Gallery, she has produced a new series of photographs and sculptures in response to the Oare Gunpowder Works, now a country park near her home in East Kent, but formerly a major site of explosives manufacturing first established in the late 1500s. Production ended in the 1930s as another war loomed, and it was deemed too vulnerable a target for attack. The site abandoned, an anticipatory ruin was created; the quiet remains of the factory buildings and dense vegetation disguising the destructive history of the grounds.

Originally from Canada, McGown moved to the UK in 2005 to pursue an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art.  McGown has exhibited widely in across the UK and Europe and was made a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 2011. She is presently completing a practice-led PhD at Northumbria University under the supervision of Professors David Campbell and Christine Borland.

Bridget Kennedy

Interpreting and responding to the specifics of a place forms the foundation of Bridget Kennedy’s creative practice. Through sculpture, installation, photography and video she investigates the impact and evidence of societal change on the landscapes she encounters. By re-presenting different types of information about these places Kennedy looks to bridge the gap between conventional forms of knowledge and a more sensory, material experience.

Through her association with Power in The Land, a visual arts project involving 10 artists from across the UK, she has become engaged in research relating to the planned closure of Wylfa Nuclear Power Plant. This research has led her towards new ways of thinking about the interaction between non-human species at a specific site. She is considering these non-human entities in the role of witness; within the context of The Power in The Land project they have been witness to the life span, over 50 years, of the last Magnox fuel rod nuclear power plant. For the duration of the XL Gallery installation Kennedy will be exploring some of the materials she has gathered during her research into the Wylfa site as well as those that relate to the nuclear power industry in a wider context.

Bridget Kennedy is based in Northumberland. She gained her Masters in Fine Art in 2007 at Glasgow School of Art and is currently Innovative Teaching Fellow in the Fine Art department of the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

Olivia Turner

Olivia Turner’s practice encompasses sculpture, installation, video, performance and drawing. Her work is deeply rooted within the idea of knowledge gained through making and from this, the concept of excavation becomes implicit to her work, and how it manifests itself in processes and objects. Turner’s presence is felt throughout her work, gaining elemental understandings of material and matter through the haptic, primitive validations of touch and observation.

Turner is currently working within a research collective, Anatomy of Site, a cross-discipline collaboration between Fine Art, Archaeology and Medical Anatomy. Anatomy of Site is centred on an industrial ruin: a one hundred year old object shipped from Norway. For the XL Gallery, Turner will conceptually, representationally and physically depict the object’s transformative journey, displacing the found object and re-contextualising it through conversations of space and matter.

Olivia Turner is a Fine Art student at Newcastle University, influenced by her research at Shotton Colliery of found and excavated materials, and her studies at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway. She is the founder of Anatomy of Site, a work supported by Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice, and connected to the international research group Topographies of the Obsolete. She has also been awarded the Bartlett Travel Scholarship 2015.

13th
‐
17th
 APRIL 
2015
MAIR
 HUGHES,
 BRIDGET 
KENNEDY,
 KATIE 
McGOWN 
& 
OLIVIA
 TURNER

Were 
in 
residence
 in 
the 
XL
 Gallery over 
a 
5‐day 
period 
exploring 
their 
common
 interest
 in
‘site’
and 
place 
through
 the
 development
 of 
an 
open‐ended
 collaborative installation.
Their 
residency
 was an 
opportunity 
for  dialogue 
not 
only
 amongst
 the artists 
but
 also
 with 
visitors 
to 
the
 space 
throughout 
the
 week.
The
 project 
culminated 
in 
a 
chaired
discussion
 between Bridget Kennedy, Olivia Turner, Dr Mark Jackson and Dr Steven Moonie.

Alas the blog has been woefully neglected but here are some images Olivia Turner took on the Train Walk Train adventure way back in March.

It was a glorious day, we were very lucky with the weather and ended our day with a well deserved beverage at Wylam Station!

Evidence of mining just outside Stocksfield.

Reflections in the woods.

Close up, peeling bark