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>> main commission - Alec Finlay, White Peak
Alec Finlay (b.1966) is an artist poet and publisher, currently based in the Northeast of England. In recent years Finlay's work has been primarily concerned with contemporary visions of nature and landscape. The range of forms that he has employed is myriad, from neon text and nest-boxes, to major interventions working with windmill turbines; as well as multiples, paperworks and all forms of print and web-based media; and such innovative poetic forms as the renga, circle poem and mesostic. His two-volume Selected Poems (1990–2009) will appear later this year.
Recent major artist projects include a long term vision strategy for renewable energy, in collaboration with NaREC (National Centre for Renewable Energy, Blyth); a series of major new projects for the Royal Horticultural Society's gardens; a permanent artwork for the Bluecoat gallery in Liverpool, Specimen Colony, as part of the Capital of Culture; as well as growing two fields of wheat as a public artwork considering the themes of agriculture and biogenetics, commissioned by Milton Keynes Gallery.
Major public artworks include a Xylotheque in the hidden gardens (Tramway, Glasgow) and Field Guide (Dysart). New projects which will open in Scotland this year include a series of permanent artworks for Springburn Park (Glasgow), Home to a king (3) in George Square Gardens (Edinburgh), and interleaved, a text based work in the newly renovated Basil Spence main library at Edinburgh University.
In the past, Finlay has worked on long-term residencies and exhibitions with BALTIC and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and performances for Tramway and Tate Modern. His most recent publication is One Hundred Year Star-Diary, an artist project for the new star observatory at Kielder. His publications have won numerous Scottish Design Awards.
Visit www.alecfinlay.com for further information on past projects.
"My intention is to creatively map ‘white peak’, using a hybrid form that I call a word-map. This will involve renga poetry that describes specific views. Heard as audio, in situ, these poem-scapes will be interfused with field recordings of the rivers and becks that flow through and define the Peak landscape. Streaming water will find its contemporary counterpart in technology, as we will use the mobile phone and QR code to create access points throughout the region, allowing people to stream the recordings and experience each view. Finally, the entire text will be collated into a website, with each poem typeset as a skyline or river course, allowing anyone in the world to wander through the word-map."
"Having outlined the idea of approaching white peak in the form of a proposal, i'm a little daunted now, to have it accepted; and also curious and excited about what I, and also each of the poet's who are working with me, will find as we walk to each viewpoint. Laying out the maps last night I couldn't wait to get started, but for now there is the work of planning our sorties to do, and this gives me a lovely sense of anticipation."
Images: Mam Tor Renga 1 and 2 (click to enlarge)
re:place commissions 2009
>> intermediate commissions - Kate Genever | Matthew Smith
Kate Genever - Kate's proposal outlines a practice based intensive period of research and making on two working farms in the Peak District in order to reveal and celebrate their unique homemade tools and technologies. The commission will culminate in the creation of a new archive of site responsive work that will exist in the public realm as: a website; oral history library and outsider collection. Holding prints, drawings, transcriptions, sound, film and oral recordings as well as documentary photographs by Adam O’Meara and a new text in response to the work by social anthropologist Tim Ingold, the archive will explore ideas of use and function, site specificity, contemporary collecting and the changing face of British farming. The project is also supported by The National Trust.
"Farming is in a constant state of flux, currently experiencing mass change brought on by environmental and economic instabilities. It is within this contemporary arena of rapid change that the homemade functioning tools I study belong; these examples of ingenuity and fit for purpose technologies, along with the lifestyle of their makers and their farms are vanishing. I have a unique insight to this world; I work on my family’s farm but I am also an artist, meaning I am both observer and insider and it is this close involvement with the farming industry that underpins my thinking, my practice and this proposal. This informed critical perspective will enable me to explore these sites, to reveal not only current farming practice and their unique technologies but to enrich debate, thinking and the encouragement of audiences to engage in contemporary art practice sourced from alternative yet relevant places.
The two farms in Derbyshire are both within the Peak District. The first is run by Frank Bellfield and his family the second a semi retired Ken Wilson and his wife. There are of course similarities but also differences; for example one breeds sheep the other beef, but both make and build - fit for purpose – tools and technologies. Unusual yet everyday these items are driven by function, their stories and reasons for being are fascinating and revealing. So by studying and recording these ingenious items and then by releasing the artwork into the public realm the audience is encouraged to consider not only ideas around contemporary collecting, archiving and site responsive art but also man's connection to the land and a make do and mend mentality."
Matthew Smith - Matthew's practice seeks to question how we think about nature, exploring how our ideas of landscape and the rural are mediated through the lens of mass culture. His work has appropriated images from advertising, maps, postcards, tourist brochures and food packaging. These images, however cartoon like or unreal they may appear, inform how we experience the world; the representations become a part of how we experience the reality. The project that he proposed for re:place will use the postcard - a memento of a particular place - to depict the generic environment of the motorway.
He will create a set of postcards of the signage from the M1 motorway. The signs for each of the junctions of the motorway will be photographed on black and white film and these images will then be hand coloured with inks and made into postcards. These hand coloured images reference the Victorian postcard from a period at the inception of mass-tourism and the hyper real appearance of the hand coloured images reflects the unreality of the motorway environment.
The project will be sited at Tibshelf services. where he will display a number of the postcards depicting a consecutive section of the motorway using wall-mounted dispensers, with the public being free to take away the postcards. The work will be a record of a journey through the country in the manner of those taken by Daniel Defoe or William Cobbett; the M1 runs up through the heart of the country and there is a sense in which it is a device for viewing the landscape of England.
Matthew thinks that in a country with such a connection to the idea of landscape and natural beauty it is easy to forget that by far the most common way of viewing the country is through the window of a car on the daily commute from home to work and back. The aesthetic potential of the view from the motorway is overlooked in favour of more worthy subjects - the wild landscapes of national parks or the bucolic rolling hills of the rural landscape - but the view from the hard shoulder seems to him to be a more authentic one. The verge and scrub at the edge of the motorway offers a rich environment for nature, providing important migratory corridors as well as respite from the monocultural agricultural land that often surrounds it.
"I am interested in the environment of the motorway as a space in opposition to any sense of place. In his book ‘Non-places – Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’, the anthropologist Marc Auge puts forward the idea of the non-place. He develops this as an opposition to anthropological place. “If a place”, he writes “can be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity, then a space which can not be described as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place”. These non-places are characterised by their lack of specific identity and loss of identity experienced by the person passing through them, they are anywhere, everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.
I see the motorway as one such non-place, an environment in which all visual stimuli is paired down to the bare minimum, the grey of the concrete, the white of the road markings as they zip by underneath you, the green of the grass verge and the droning pitch of tyres on tarmac.
The driver's relationship to place while travelling through the non-place of the motorway is completely detached, the journey does literally become about getting from A to B or in this instance from junction 1 to junction 38. Instead of the journey being a series of distinct places passed through places are reduced to junction numbers or abbreviated (P’brough), the signs mediate the experience of place.
The service station is an extension of the non-place of the motorway environment it is a generic utilitarian environment where you can expect to see the same chains of shops and eateries in an environment devoid of particularity. This will be the perfect site in which to display and distribute the postcards. The viewer of the work will be able to take away a postcard with them, thereby widely dispersing these images around the country as each person takes away a strange memento of their own journey."
re:place bursaries 2009
>> The Centre of Attention | Bruce Rimell | Ivan Smith
The Centre of Attention - The Centre of Attention will work on a project linking the shell of Sutton Scarsdale Hall (which overlooks the M1 facing Bolsover Castle) and the interiors (the rooms were removed in 1919 and are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). Being in the planning stages of a separate show in Philadelphia, they will use their trip there, complemented with a site visit at Sutton Scarsdale to develop this work which will be shown on location in the Hall in July 2009.
Founded 1999, the Centre of Attention is Pierre Coinde and Gary O'Dwyer. Its experimental approach stems from an ongoing enquiry into the phenomenon of art production, presentation, consumption and heritage-ization. The Centre has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including the Venice Biennale (2005) Kunsthaus Graz (2006) Plymouth Arts Centre, Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Winterthur (2007) Le Plateau, Mejan Labs and Cafe Gallery Projects (2009). In addition to Sutton Scarsdale, it is currently producing a feature film which will premiere at the new Abandon Normal Devices festival at FACT in Liverpool in September 2009.
Bruce Rimell - Around one hundred Perspex (acrylic polycarbonate) art objects, which draw their inspiration from the inscribed art and archaeology of the Palaeolithic caves at Creswell Crags, will be deposited in various locations around Derbyshire and their locations published on a website, with the aim of causing those who would wish to see them to hunt around Derbyshire for them. The modern viewer of the work thus begins to play a role similar to the ancient inhabitants of Creswell Crags: the hunter-gatherer. Derbyshire becomes not a wilderness, but an ancestral home for the participants.
Sandarbh UK 2009 - Belper based artist Ivan Smith is putting together an international artist residency project from 1 - 18 May 2009. Over the past six years over 250 artists have come together at the Sandarbh workshop in India and have created many works with the participation of local people, which has created a genuine interest and curiousness about art, and how society and art can come together. He now plans to set up a reciprocal residency in Derbyshire. As part of the residency there will be a high profile exhibition and open forum of the actual works produced during the residency and documentation in case of site and time specific works, within the town, enabling the local residents and wider audiences the opportunity to engage with the work.
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