2021
Museums and Galleries
Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia
Space YZ was a group exhibition of the student and early career works of eighty eight practicing artists/graduates from the now defunct Art School at Western Sydney University. I completed an undergraduate visual arts degree at that art school in 1986. Three of my works were selected for this exhibition by the curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham. They were School Fire x 2, and My Grandad always said, ‘It’s easier to clean up after a fire than a flood’.
The art school is described on the home page of the Space YZ website as
‘From the first graduating class in 1986 to the final cohort as the curtain closed in 2009, the art school was a pioneering hub for experimentation and risk-taking across a broad variety of media.
The exhibition curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham wrote in the reader on the Space YZ website that
An exciting environment of confusion is the best way to describe these undergrad years at Z block. Recently, former lecturer Terry Hayes explained that the first-year Foundation Studies curriculum was deliberately intended to create a sense of confusion as a strategy for critical thinking. The Latin etymology of confusion is to mingle together and fuse. The curriculum placed a foundational emphasis on ‘confusion’ so that thinking was challenged as part of the creative process
Screenings
5th Indian World Film Festival - 21
A re-edited version of a suite of three fairy tales Once upon a time, long ago and far away x 3 was selected for the 5th Indian World Film Festival in Hyderabad, India.
These three fairy tales deal with the interaction between a patient and Death. Strongly influenced by Ingmar Bergman's film, The Seventh Seal where death, the weather and the physical world are either actual characters or strongly imbue those properties. Click on the image on the left to watch the suite of fairy tales.
As with many film festivals during the time of Covid-19 the 5th Indian World Film Festival was exclusively online. This presentation format can be difficult for the independent maker. Networking with other makers and with industry professionals is all online and can be problematic but very occasionally can also be rewarding. Similarly and most importantly it is difficult online for a film festival to develop an audience.
Coming from outside the film world I have been pleasantly surprised by several features of an online film festival. The first is the generosity of the industry validation offered to the filmmaker as each step on the path in career development. These steps such as selection, are marked by the awarding of a logo sticker containing a laurel wreath. Thinking about about the equivalent event in the visual art world it is almost impossible to imagine that when your work had been selected for an exhibition you would receive this overt sign of excellence, of acceptance that is intended to then be used both by the filmmaker and the festival as a form of publicity.
Performance
Two ephemeral and unrecorded performances by the Australian Before Bed reading collective were part of the programme put together by Unfix which describes itself as a festival of live performance, dance, film, installation workshop and debate that wants to unravel he knots in how we’re living. The festival was started in Glasgow in Scotland and has expanded to undertake programming in New York, Tokyo and Bologna. The festival ran from the 11th-27th June. I joined Audrey Newton the founder of the collective for the two performances along with other members of the collective. For session one, I read the script from my video Once upon a time, long ago and far away: Shutting down in isolation followed by a small extract from Azadi by Arundhati Roy. These readings were translated into British sign language by two BSL interpreters.
Before Bed is an intimate experimental reading collective located in Sydney, Australia founded by interdisciplinary artist, Audrey Newton in 2019. Before Bed encourages a shared, interconnected, and comfortable reading and listening experience for its audience. For the 2021 Unfix Festival, Before Bed will extend its invitation to international guests and will ask its guests to return the favour by participating and reading to its Australian audience.
Before bed invites readers and listeners to come together in exchange before it is time to sleep. The focus of this exchange is for the participants to read to the audience, and be read to. Before Bed is collaborative in nature and invites participants to choose a 500-1000 word reading in response to the theme of ‘Touch.’ Readings can be the participant’s own or excerpts from essays, novels, poems, news reports, novellas or theory. The possibilities are left to the reader to decide.
Before Bed is not the time to multi-task. It is the time to slow down and listen to readings or be part of a group of people reading fragments of text about touch. When part of the group of readers you can write a short piece of text or select one by another writer to read. Conversations about the texts build as the sequence layers more and more elements in a random and poetic construction.Make it stand out.
Online Merchandise
The Plague Doll-Covid19
The plague doll is a do it yourself (D.I.Y.) kit. Cut it out, sew it together and fill with your own clean stuffing. Then keep it close for luck. This kit comes in four sizes - life sized adult, life sized child, life sized baby and handbag sized. Beautiful and slightly creepy the doll sits between being a good luck charm, a companion, a memorial of someone to whom you were unable to say goodbye, a talisman, a carrier of harmful intentions, a toy or a memento mori. Each kit comes with a certificate of authenticity.
For details of price, availability and postage please use the contact form under info.
Community
Telephone- a game of art whispered around the world. Online at https://phonebook.gallery/
My work Double X Marks the Spot was made in response to a work by Pauline Cinnety in Paris and subsequently influenced the writing of a poem by Susanna Kittredge in Boston and the making of a construction by Sam Talbot-Kelly in Vermont.
‘TELEPHONE is just like the kids’ game. A message is whispered from one person to another and changes as it is passed. We whisper a message from art form to art form. A message could become a painting, then music, then poetry, then dance. We whisper each finished work of art to multiple artists so the game branches out exponentially.
Halfway through the game, we reverse the process. We start assigning multiple artworks to a single artist.
We ask each artist to find what the works have in common and to create a translation of that into their own art form.
So — TELEPHONE begins with one message, passes that message through more than 900 artists from 72 countries and then concludes with a single artwork.’ quoted from the telephone website about section.