About

Interrupteur

interrupteur holds both the mistaken notion of the interruption and the actual translated sense of the word – switch: as exchange, shift, or transformation.

Forging conversations and collaborations between artists and academics is at the heart of the project’s endeavour, but initially Rachel Smith as artist in residence will be present in the foyer of the Jessop West building on selected dates (see below), working, making art, and being interrupted by conversations and the unexpected encounter. 

Smith uses drawing, photography, and writing to explore the materiality of the peripheral details in the acts of reading, writing, and listening. The grasping action of finding sense in the face of the excesses of language sometimes pushes the work towards wordlessness. Equally gaps, voids, misunderstandings, and errors are opened in the work, containing the potentiality of that which has yet to happen. Producing these generative spaces allows room for other voices. These gaps in the practice may contain no visible language, but they are not empty – they possess a latent energy. These are the spaces inhabited by the other, the as-yet-unwritten, the as-yet-unread, the as-yet-unspoken, or the as-yet-unheard.

Beyond producing her own work Smith will host conversations, events, performances, staged dialogue, and even accidental occurrences. The project explores how artists might open spaces for dialogue and collaboration between and beyond expected outcomes, engaging across disciplines and inhabiting liminal and in-between spaces. In her occupation of the foyer at Jessop West, other artists will move through the space, stopping to collaborate, discuss, perform, and workshop ideas. 

Not-knowing, error and misrepresentation, hybridity, constraint and improvisation, are some of ideas explored during the conversations and work in progress during the residency.

Quotations selected for each day of work will act as provocation or a filter through which to work and think.

You are welcome to interrupt, join in, exchange ideas, observe, listen in, or merely glance and walk by.