Residency day 9

Drawing, mapping, diagramming, exploring the gap between the location and the representation:

An experimentation in contact with the real. The map […] constructs the unconscious

I will be in Jessop West Foyer all day for the last time.

Louise Finney and I will be engaged in collaboratively mapping the Jessop West foyer and beyond. 

We will employ a range of drawing techniques, archeological mapping methods, rhizomatic mapping, and notations of interruptions experienced while working in the foyer. 

This will result in constructing a record of the space that is beyond the expectations of the traditional map or territory 

Come and see what we are up to, interrupt, and join in

Insolent in that it interrupts the text, and smitten in that it keeps returning to it

Joining Rachel Smith, from 1-3pm, the Roland Barthes reading group will read their found haikus produced using text appropriated from Barthes’s ‘The Desire for Haiku’, a chapter in Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel, The collection, The Desire for Haiku, has been recently published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE. (The current group includes the artists and doctoral students Emma Bolland, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Bernadette O’ Toole, Rachel Smith, and is convened by Sharon Kivland).

Following the readings those joining or interrupting are invited to read, and to find their own haikus through further appropriation.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

Andrew Conroy will be joining me in Jessop West Foyer today 10.30-12.30 to talk about his photography projects. Walking the Railways and the Coalfields of South Yorkshire and finding a path through the social landscape 

Please come and interrupt our conversation and join in

Andrew Conroy is a curator, writer, lecturer, and photographer. He is interested in the connections and disconnections between space, place, identity, and capital.

@andrewdconroy

Interruptions on Day Seven

Interruptions aplenty from a range of people and disciplines today.

Conversations about paradigms, the multiplicity of meaning, the need to push fixed ideas around towards matters of concern

Talking and writing haikus, exploring ideas around found language, reading in public spaces and performative acts

Engaged in constraint based processes

Conversations about the productive space of a foyer, the unexpected encounter, how to push our thinking into new spaces 

Historical ghosts, musical hall, performative acts and how our expectations can be challenged or disrupted

Following the constraint, but pushing the rules

 Haikus found in the books of Rachel Smith, typed by Brian Lewis from Longbarrow Press

Thanks to everyone who stopped by today for lot of interesting and productive interruptions

See you tomorrow

Residency Day 6

Jo Ray has been working in the foyer with me today. We have been exploring common interests and improvising, pushing materials around to help make sense of theoretical concepts

Lots of interruptions and interesting conversations around hyphens and the meaning acquired when using compound modifiers as the words connected influence our understanding.

The connective nature of thinking while moving materials in the hand

Knowing in the body and how to express this outwardly

I fight for improvisation, but always with the belief that it is impossible

Rachel Smith will be working all day in the foyer today

from 1pm onwards:

She will be collaborating with Jo Ray on timed diversions to explore the area within a 10-minute radius of the foyer, bringing back fragments of footage and digital images which will provoke the making of further impromptu responses. 

Jo Ray is an artist, researcher, and lecturer based in Sheffield. Her current practice explores encounters with models and sites of model use. Scale play is recurrent in her work, which uses diverse methods in response to spatial and social situations, archives material, and artefacts. She is interested in the potential of spaces where speculation, play and enthusiasm are possible, and the tipping place between emulation and improvisation. During her practice-led doctoral research, Ray has used artistic practice as a means of exploring ‘model-ness’ and modelling in enthusiast and self-organising communities, undertaking residencies in the autonomous township Christiania in Copenhagen, and a model railway enthusiasts club in Sheffield.

Residency day 5 work in progress

Work passed back and forth between Rachel Smith and Bryan Eccleshall has initiated some tangential thinking

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning

Today I will be continuing my residency in Jessop West foyer.

Bryan Eccleshall will be with me making additions to his Digital Rain collages live in the foyer. 
I will be interrupting him by adding diagrammatic thoughts into the images he makes and passing the images back and forth 

Please come along and interrupt as the conversations will no doubt influence the work that gets made

Bryan Eccleshall is an artist who works across disciplines. The works that make up Digital Rain draw on art history, current affairs, classical myth, and religion but also reflect his interest in 1970s dystopian science fiction and pop culture. Images are taken indiscriminately from the internet and collided with one another and with photographs of Eccleshall’s own work. The project began as an exploration of the issues surrounding Europe's so-called refugee crisis, but it has expanded to encompass many other subjects. The resulting work is complex and baffling, not least to its maker. The works might be thought of as latter-day conversation pieces. The collection currently contains over six hundred images. The work was recently exhibited at the Green Rooms Hotel in London.

Residency day 4

Images from todays work:

exploring space, line, internal and external liminal boundaries...

Attempting to follow a repetitive process and the difficulties of breaking free from the constraint and control

Following the material which seemed to fight back today