There was great feedback from the exhibition. Approximately 60 people braved the wet and windy bank holiday weekend.
Wonderful experience - with eyes closed, I’m in all my favourite places
Great sensations! Close your eyes and you’re there.
Brilliant work. Animation was fantastic and the interactive countryside experience was wonderful! Thanks to the artists and all people involved.
Sounds and barefoot. Brilliant idea, relaxing - I enjoyed it.
flip-flop is a series of short videos by Clare Carswell made in the mobile phone whilst the artist is working on other projects. The portability and immediacy of the phone camera and software mean that ideas can be grabbed and realised in a few moments. The mobile phone takes on the aspect of a multi-media sketch-book with the phone functioning as a drawing tool. These videos can be shared with others via MMS or downloaded to the computer for further working and sharing over the internet.
Two of the flip-flop series will be projected at BEAM for the first time and are viewable here :
Journeys through industrial landscapes
My work in this exhibition shows work in progress on a project concerned with industrial landscapes in Britain. I am trying to capture what I experience as I walk through some of our industrial heritage. I take advantage of the digital camera to capture images quickly and instinctively, and then process them without editing or compensating for under or overexposure.
I am also exploring those landscapes through research into old maps, with the aim of linking these landscapes today with their industrial past. Sometimes all that remains may be a place name.
Manchester
9th October 2006 : A 42 minute walk from Ancoats to Miles Plating along the Rochdale Canal
I’m showing a series of 12 painted polaroid images at Beam-Art. The Dunbar Series is my painterly response to the place celebrating the ‘extra’ and ‘ordinariness’ of its buildings and somewhat down-at-heel atmosphere. Dunbar is a small fishing town on the edge of the North Sea, 30 miles SE of Edinburgh, and where I lived for three years. I am a Professional Member of the Society of Scottish Artists, a printmaker and painter.
Listen to some of the sounds from Outside In online:
Photos of the Outside In installation by Alun Ward at BEAM, Saturday 24th May.
You are invited to remove your socks and shoes, don the headphones provided (with optional hygienic covers), step onto the raised platforms, close your eyes, and listen…
OUTSIDE IN invites you into three micro-environments linked, via similar sounds, to very different locations and places in time. These sounds are then mixed by the artist according to your location within the piece, allowing you to be both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, to travel and to stand still.
Saturday 24th May 12 - 6pm
Sunday 25th May 12 - 6pm
Monday 26th May 12 - 6pm
North Oxford Association, Diamond Place, Summertown, Oxford
Since the finish of Metron the exhibition on 20th May I have been training for the 5k Race for Life which I ran in Oxford’s University Parks along with 3,000 other women yesterday. Due to the intense heat I interspersed running with walking and made it round the course in a very sedate manner. It was great fun despite the blistering heat and I have raised a nice sum for Cancer Research through sponsorship.
Doing the training and the race re-connected me with my enjoyment of running after a long period of injury and physio. I like the solitude and the ease of doing it - just stepping out of my door. I have thought a lot about Alun’s RUN video and the meditative quality that it has. It really does capture something of the beauty as well as the pleasure of running. I do find beauty in moving in a different way through the environment I live in and know well, in experiencing it in another way. I like really looking at details I don’t generally notice, smelling the streets and the hedgerows, feeling the weather. I like the directness of running, of listening to my body, learning how it can move, being so aware of my footfall and in competing with myself by testing my fitness and age.
Interaction with the audience at Metron was more intense and more dynamic on days three and four this week-end. In the performance work YOURS, I invited the audience to participate in the work. This was following on from MINE, that I performed last week-end, where the audience were witnesses to my actions. I talked to each about the symbolism of the objects I was working with, that I was crushing the rosemary in an attempt to invoke memory in the space through the scent of it. I then offered each a sprig of the herb to invite the idea of remembrance for them. I asked them if I might then photograph their hands holding the piece of rosemary. Everyone agreed and all seemed pleased and quite touched by the simplicity and sincerity of the gesture. Many wanted to talk about the significance of it for them and offered me personal recollections.
This was the most engaged with the audience that I have been in a performance work. It was an enjoyable and rewarding experience and gave me a sense of real connectedness with the audience. I think that they enjoyed the opportunity to talk with me and to get more understanding of what I was doing. I think that for some it all appeared a little daunting and inscrutable when they first entered the space. They were pleased to speak with me and have me answer the most usual question ‘what are you doing ?’.
This is actually a hard question to answer, and one that artists often resist. It felt a challenging and positive process for me to go through, of testing what I was doing, my intentions, whether my ideas were reaching the viewer and the overall relevance of the work.
Interaction with the audience represents a new direction in my performance work and I am intrigued by the possibilities of working in this way. It is the next development I am introducing to my work following my decision to return to performance work in 2006 and to perform solo works. It is progressive and challenging for me to do and is helping me to gain confidence as a solo performer.
I am pleased by how much people are willing to engage and to talk with me. I obviously make people feel at ease and able to offer their own ideas and feelings to the work which is positive. I am aware that this is a format that some artists, notably female performance artists, do use in their work and have done since the earliest days of it. There are early precedents like Valie Export, Annie Sprinkle, Yoko Ono. Their contact with the audience in the main seemed to be provocative and about confronting them with images or to participate in actions that were designed to unsettle and challenge them. I emulated this posture in the performance work,TAGS that I made earlier this year.
Contemporary artists like Ann Rapstoff and Sonjia van Kerkhoff appear to use interaction in a more conversational manner as I am now doing, as a means of making connections with the audience and offering ideas and images through identifying shared experience.
If I feel any dilemma with developing the work in this way it is that there is a conflict between my desire to engage with the audience and to make the work more transparent for them and my own need to absorb myself in the ritualistic aspects of the work I have made.
The work changes for me when I am not in conversation and I am able to perform the repetitive actions that I have built into the work – in this case the crushing of the herb in the pestle and mortar. I am able to sink into the rhythm of the actions and synchronize them with the sound of the footfall in Alun’s video piece. It quickly takes on a contemplative aspect which feels as though it is approaching the core of the piece – an attempt to invoke memory. I hope that Alun and I will be able to show this work again and if so I will build into it periods when I am able to sit and work the piece without distraction – with or without an audience.
It is difficult talking with the viewer and yet maintaining my ‘performance head’. I was aware even if the audience were not, that even though I looked like I was chatting to them I was in fact still performing and they were participating in an art work. This was implicit rather than explicit and few were perhaps aware of this until I pointed the camera at them and photographed them.
This illustrates for me the necessity of adopting different performance persona within a work. As long as I maintain mindfulness of them and pay attention to where I am in the work then there need not be a conflict.
Most of the time I live in a world which doesn’t need an audience, but here we are, into the second weekend of METRON, and not just showcasing work to the public in Oxford, but disclosing the process to a wider world in the form of this online journal. A lot of my work comes out of just playing with materials, whether those materials are chalk and charcoal or Adobe Premiere and Audacity. Over the last few years, that playing has also been with my legs, while exploring a new found activity, running. Bringing that play into the exhibition environment was a challenge, but one I feel I’m beginning to meet.
It’s always fascinating to hear what people think about a new work, and also initially scary. Some people have picked up on a feeling of oppression about the film RUN. This is understandable, since the world is presented upside down in the video, and the earth is over our heads, falling onto us. Running is often described as a constant state of falling forwards, but hopefully that sense of relentlessness is relieved because the pace of travel in the video is actually quite slow. The video was filmed at slow walking speed, but the audio is recorded on runs of varying speeds.
Having a performance take place at the same time as this exploration of space and pace is a unique opportunity. I feel really invigorated (despite a full-blown cold now, Day Three) when I’m in the space: RUN is playing and Clare is performing, or talking about her work with the audience. Ideas for further collaboration do spring to mind immediately, but with me, as Clare has pointed out, the thought process is inevitably different. How could it not be? It’s taken me three or four years just to get round to producing RUN, and I feel like I’m only now re-emerging from a cocoon after a period of great personal change.
Avoiding the canvas and sketchpad for the time being, materials I was previously very engaged with, but forming new work in time-based media has been a really exciting process. Now I’m confronting, with Clare, the idea of work-in-process, of continuing to explore the themes in a work further with another artist. Not only that, but exploring these themes while exhibiting the work to an audience.
I think we’ve found some intriguing unifying elements between our ways of working, but a week isn’t long enough to fully explore these, and with the audience interaction in the space it’s hard to find the time to do so. I do hope the process won’t end here though, since the web site will continue to exist, and we will continue to communicate. I love the melding of sounds in the space, and this seems the most immediately striking connection between the works. The issues of memory and rememberance that Clare is dealing with may seem less prominent in my work, but the film is an attempt to condense experiences from a period of many months into a sort of memento. I can distinguish each audio clip and remember where and when it took place, even if the location isn’t the same as that shown on the film at the same time. So of course there’s a process of rememberance going on, and people coming to the work will inevitably weave their own memories of walking or running in woods, or on quiet morning, into the viewing.
The video and audio editing processes do tie in very nicely with Clare’s interest in the perceived veracity of an artist’s work. For the piece RUN I did initially think of showing one complete run, uncut, from beginning to end. But in the end I prefer to disrupt any idea of linear narrative. The video is unlikely to be watched through from beginning to end, it’s on a loop and visitors to the space drift in and out of watching it, as they talk to Clare or myself, and pay attention for snippets of time. It also expresses for me part of the joy of running as an activity, which is, for me, at its best, a goalless activity, when you can lose a sense of what time of day it is. Of course there’s another side to running too, when every second is precious, and every metre covered crucial. This was to have been hinted at by recording audio from Sunday’s Oxford Town and Gown 10k race, but this may have to be put on hold, as I’ve tried racing when ill before, and it really isn’t a great idea. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. There’s plenty to be getting on with in the space on Day Four - editing audio already captured, uploading it and making the sort of audio mixer available on this site that I produced earlier in the week.