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Phantom Limn
No full textThe output was an exhibition at Dovecot Gallery, Edinburgh, 6 – 10 July 2017. It was the result of a one-week group residency at the gallery, conceived as an experimental, collaborative practice based research inquiry into drawing as a method of thinking. The residency brought together eight international, university-based artists: Stuart Bennett (University of Edinburgh), Dean Hughes (Northumbria University), David Mackintosh (University of Central Lancashire), Kelly Chorpening (University of the Arts London), Rebecca Fortnum (Royal College of Art), Chloe Briggs (Paris College of Art), Mark Nagtzaam (Sint Lucas, Antwerp) and Veronique Devoldere (Paris College of Art). The research interrogated the nature of drawing as a form of enquiry, observational tool and end in itself. It also explored the idea of a collective work. The artists – all teachers of drawing within different University settings – were particularly interested in exploring instructions for drawing as a means of prompting reflection on the often implicit values entailed in the pedagogy of drawing. The residency was presented as a live studio environment, structured to encourage public engagement, and this semi-public, collective and participatory nature of the research space sought in part to recreate the environment of the art school. The gallery was used as studio, a conference room, a social space and an exhibition space. The artists designed, and Bennett constructed, a large scale, flexible framework that received the collaborative work as it was made, and functioned as the focus for dialogue and public engagement
Tracing time -- Tracing threads
Get PDFTracing time – Tracing threads is a collection of enamelled jewellery, comprised of three neckpieces and eight brooches. The output was inspired by Elizabethan blackwork, a 16th–17th century embroidery technique that used a black thread made from an iron-based dye. This work was produced for an exhibition, Heat Exchange II – Artists Exchanging Energy (September 2015 – July 2016) which toured four international venues in the UK and Germany. The output was subsequently exhibited at Schmuck –Munich Jewellery Week 2017, the annual International Trade Fair for the Skilled Trades at the International Handwerksmesse, Munich, Germany (8 – 14 March 2017). It was also exhibited in an internationally selected group exhibition, Nexus: Meetings at the Edge m(September – November 2018), which toured in Wales
The Other Travel Agency - Inner Journey
Get PDFThe Other Travel Agency – Inner Journey is a body of mixed media installations and sculptural structures that was produced through collaborative art making and diverse forms of public engagement. Building on Inglis’ longstanding participatory- driven work with Outsider artists, the project explored equality in disability-focused arts studios and communities and involved disabled artist groups across the Nordic countries. The project was organized by the Nordic Outsider Art Network and commissioned by Inuti (a foundation in Stockholm that practices art therapy for people with intellectual disabilities) and the Kettuki Association, (Finland’s nationwide studio network for Outsider artists) for the annual European Outsider Art Association conference (May 2019). Many of the participants were autistic: the project encouraged new forms of communication and social interaction through the medium of art. The output was disseminated through a series of international exhibitions. It was first presented at Inuti Gallery, Stockholm (24–31 May 2019). It was subsequently invited to join a large touring show, The Other Travel Agency, which brought together Nordic Outsider Art Network contributions from the four Nordic countries. This was launched at the European Union Parliament Gallery, Brussels (24–26 September 2019) to an audience of over 5,000. The work then toured to Pertti’s Choice, Helsinki – a cultural production space for Outsider art and culture (11 October – 11 December 2019), where it was seen by over 500 people. The exhibition included a filmed documentary made by Inglis, recording this experience and featuring contributions from the artists involved (see Appendix, page 21). Inglis’ research was ‘highly commended’ by Building Better Healthcare Awards (2019)
An t-Eilean (The Island)
No full textAn t-Eilean (The Island, Gaelic) is an open-air, multi-purpose space (16 metres square) that occupies a central position in Inverness Campus for the University of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.The space unites sculpture, building, and garden to form a distinctive landscape. Visitors experience An t’Eilean as a floating courtyard open to the sky and the surrounding landscape and connected to the land by a timber boardwalk. The project challenges scale and collapses normative design practices to unite architecture and landscape in ways that are subtle and sensitive to the rhythms of the days and seasons. An t-Eilean is a built ‘concept’ and an interstice – a constructed translation of the designer’s knowledge of theory and her landscape architectural practice. Mackenzie worked with leading expert David Bennett on the concrete specification for An t-Eilean. The concrete mix uses a by-product from coal-fired power stations called Pulverised Fuel Ash (PFA), to promote material re-use in construction. The mix allows a range of surface finishes to manifest through the structure, capturing and animating different qualities of light and shadow through the space. The project was presented and received input and approval from a wide range of stakeholders involved in the Campus development. The design was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2014 before its completion. Over 20,000 people viewed the designs of just ten architects, including MacKenzie, selected for the exhibition, which aimed to explore the relationship between architecture, art and landscape. The design was awarded the Landscape Institute Scotland, Public Vote Prize in 2015. Mackenzie has been invited to talk about this project internationally to professional and educational groups in Amsterdam (2013), Xiamen (2016) and Oslo (2019)
A Requiem for Edward Snowden
Get PDFA Requiem for Edward Snowden is a 50-minute audio-visual work by Matthew Collings and Jules Rawlinson which addresses surveillance, data privacy, loss of faith, moral choice, and personal sacrifice in an environment where we are totally reliant on electronic communication and daily routines; and in which our privacy is routinely compromised. The work is performed by a chamber trio comprising violin, cello and clarinet, with live electronics and live visuals. The work is multi-layered and textured, both sonically and visually, and includes computer generated, fixed-media and live captured imagery, manipulated in real-time. This output makes an original contribution to performance practice knowledge about audiovisual ‘comprovisation’ (fixed composition with open or improvised elements) using audio-visual narratives of surveillance and sousveillance. In addition, it makes an original contribution in terms of experimenting with distributed agency in respect of sound-image production. Collings and Rawlinson worked in the studio together in a series of twelve day-long sessions over an initial period of 6 weeks to develop a set of prototype audio-visual sketches that could be arranged for the full ensemble. These sketches explored cryptographic treatment of live camera input, masking, displacement and distortion together with representations of data, networks, street-level surveillance and drone footage. These studio sessions focused on the opportunities that each of these offered for combination and manipulation and for congruence and contrast with the audio part. For example, visual congruence might be demonstrated by threaded clusters of computergenerated strokes responding to audio feature tracking and represent the slow, detuned glissandi of the string part. The main outputs from this work are seven performances in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Utrecht, a digital release on Denovali Records, and contributions to an international conference in Edinburgh and a national conference in Aberdeen
Daire’s Airc, Vol. 1
No full textDegree Show Catalogue documenting the first year of a two-year ESALA MArch (Integrated Pathway) studio, ‘Daire’s Airc’. Studio Leaders: Iain Scott and Mark Bingham. 2023-2025
Sonikebana
Get PDFSonikebana is a long-form composition designed for nine loudspeakers inside wooden boxes on wheels. The audience is invited to move the speakers around the room in order to shape their experience of the piece itself. Sometimes the slightest touch of a speaker will cause the music to take on a completely new direction, leading to the emergence of new sonic forms. At other points, the speakers react less obviously and audiences are encouraged to listen instead. The formal idea for this piece is based on a model borrowed from the refined Japanese art form of flower arranging called Ikebana. This involves the careful arrangement of plant matter in order to reveal something already present (but hidden) in the materials being arranged. This approach has been applied to a sound piece where audiences take on the role of designer and listener. The compositional structure of the work allows for direct and un-rehearsed audience intervention, but without compromising the ultimate intent. Sonikebana was first realised as the public facing dimension of an interdisciplinary EU-funded research project with biologists, ecologists, computer scientists and artists called City Sounds. Version 1 used field recordings taken as part of the research project and focused on sample manipulation techniques. Version 2 developed from this experience. Having observed audience behavior around the boxes and tested the hardware and software systems, Version 2 focused on sound synthesis techniques, form and audience interaction. It was presented in August 2019 as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival. The sounds of Version 2 were synthesised from analysis of video shot at Little Sparta, the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. The movement of foliage shimmering in the wind was used to excite a range of novel synthesis and computer sound processes
The Kurds
Get PDFThe Kurds is a group of six wooden portrait heads of members of the migrant Kurdish community in Edinburgh. The output builds on Dagg’s longstanding practice research into figurative sculpture, in particular techniques and processes of woodcarving, including novel approaches to polychrome. It brings this research expertise to a focused interrogation of the meaning and potential of portrait sculpture with respect to a particular, marginalised community. It investigates how portrait sculpture can meaningfully function as a mode of community engagement and through this foreground broader questions around migration, identity and exclusion.Three of the heads were exhibited in After The Storm, Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh, April 2017. Two heads were selected for the Society of Portrait Sculptors Annual Exhibition in London: FACE 2019, 3–8 June 2019 in La Galleria Pall Mall, the only forum for contemporary portrait sculpture in the UK. One of the sculptures, The Poser, was the only sculpture to be selected from over 700 entries for the Scottish Portrait Awards, which was held at Scottish Arts Club, Edinburgh, 26 October – 1 December 2018, and Glasgow Arts Club,Glasgow, 21 January – 9 February 2019. The Poser was shortlisted as one of six finalists by a distinguished judging panel (including the artist John Byrne, and deputy director and chief curator of the Scottish Portrait Gallery, Imogen Gibbons) and was awarded the Glasgow Arts Club Award for Fine Art. The Matriarch, won runner-up in the Heatherley School of Fine Art Prize for the best 3D human portrait, June 2019.
Tremble Tremble
Get PDFTremble Tremble was an exhibition curated by Tessa Giblin for the Irish pavilion of the 57th Venice Biennale 2017. The exhibition was a collaboration between Giblin and the Irish artist Jesse Jones. It built on Giblin’s curatorial practice of ‘exhibition dramaturgy’ – methods of theatricalising contemporary art installations and enhancing their effects through modes of performance and immersion. The exhibition explored the relation between women’s struggles in the 21st century and the oppression of women in the middle ages, with a focus on the witch trials. It was developed in the context of the national conversation about women’s rights in Ireland, amidst the intensifying debates concerning the right to abortion. The exhibition brought this politically charged backdrop to the international stage. Following its Venice presentation – seen by audiences of over 600,000 – the exhibition toured internationally to four prestigious venues
Metis : On the Surface
Get PDFMetis : On the Surface is an exhibition of seven projects that range from installations to large urban restructuring proposals. The exhibition and the projects are by Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism founded by Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker at the University of Edinburgh in 1997. The projects aim to connect architectural research, teaching and practice. As this exhibition attests, the projects research the city and the complex ways in which it is imagined, inhabited, and representationally encoded. The research produces rich, multi-layered outputs that resist immediate consumption and that are instead gradually unfurled over time through interaction with them. The work demonstrates a poetic but critical approach to the city that is sensitive to the city’s cultural memory but is also articulated in relation to its possible futures. Working between two contrasting scales, the exhibition itself constitutes an original research output. The seven projects have been redrawn, crafted, reinterpreted and combined into a complex topographical surface. Visitors entering the exhibition encounter a vast drawing on which they walk, carpeting the floor of the gallery. Through this, an internal terrain is inserted within the display space, which is then inhabited by glass display tables that hold detailed drawings and models. The viewers of the exhibition thus not only see a series of projects, but find themselves – as they travel across scale and space – active participants in a speculative architectural imaginary, one in which the architectural object is always in communication with the broader historical, cultural, material and representational conditions of the city or landscape within which it is positioned. The exhibitions ran from: 10 October – 14 November 2014. Arkitektskolen Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark. 27 March – 6 April 2015. Sculpture Court, Edinburgh College of Art, (ECA), Edinburgh, UK