There is Freedom in Constraint

Today from 11am Rachel Smith and Helen Frank will be working under a range of constraints as they explore compliance, misrepresentation, and error within any given system.

Helen Frank works within sets of self-imposed mathematically inspired rules. Her particular focus is on the contradictory potential of these artistic constraints. Both hand and mind are players in the system, and so too are the properties of determinism and free will: diligence, disruption, adherence, and errancy. Often the resulting art works are evidence of a slightly absurdist evolution. 

Interruptions around music hall, performance, ghosts, and narrative

Residency Day 6 - visualising the thinking process

Video sketch of feeling out the thinking process or how we might visualise the process of drawing out thought in action

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

Residency Day 5

Lots of conversation have been sparked today in response to the work
and many interruptions of a useful nature

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.