Curating ‘Stroke Stories’ at Victoria Baths

Throughout 2015 I worked on a project with stroke survivors. This included workshops including creative writing, visual arts, photography and music. I ran the visual arts workshops and also curated exhibitions of the work produced throughout the project at Manchester Central Library and the Manchester Museum. (You can learn more about the background to the project and the first exhibitions I curated here.) This year, I was asked to curate an even larger exhibition of the work produced to be exhibited at the historic Manchester Victoria Baths. Below is my curatorial statement and pictures from the exhibition:

The exhibition was curated around the theme of ‘transformation’. A stroke is a profound and life changing event. It creates challenges, both practical and emotional, that need to be faced and processed by both the survivor and those close to them. A profound transformation has taken place and this is reflected in the artwork produced.

Responding to the site of Victoria Baths as a space that was traditionally used for health and wellbeing treatments, the theme of transformation was a natural fit. When it came to the presentation of the work I wanted to create a visual metaphor that visitors would physically interact with and understand even before seeing the artwork.

A curtain was an apt symbol for the space because in the Baths people would change from one state to another, from their daytime clothes to swimming costumes, to cleanse and relax. Participants’ portraits were printed large on gauze and hung around the baths. Behind each picture was a banner of their artwork to tell their individual stories of life before and after stroke. Visitors could view beyond the outward appearance of each person by lifting the curtain. From curtains at the hospital, to curtains at home, to the metaphorical curtains we use to hide elements of ourselves from others. Here we were ‘lifting the curtain’ on stroke.

From the 880 visitors to the exhibition over the weekend we received extremely positive feedback. The interactivity of the exhibition worked to create a physical pause and a longer engagement with each piece than if the work had been immediately accessible. For the participants themselves, it was a culmination of the project, their progress, and an opportunity to see their work professionally mounted in a building of cultural and historic significance. A moment to feel proud of their talents, journey, and accomplishments.

Dreams and Reflections 2015

DREAMERS

It has been another wonderful and creative year, one in which I’ve been fortunate enough to make some of my creative dreams a reality. Here’s a recap of my artistic year 2015 (which, incidentally, was also the International Year of Light):

First up I had my interview with BDP Lighting Designer, Chris Lowe published on The Double Negative. Chris worked on the lighting scheme for winning UK Pavilion at the Milan Expo.

My ‘Too Soon Sun Slips Into Night’ poem was projected onto a large grassy bank as part of Spectra Aberdeen in February.

March was a busy month as I found my beloved studio in the centre of Manchester, Grumpy Studios, was closing down. I was sad to leave the space as we’d created a fantastic community of artists. However, with every end, there must be a new beginning (excuse the cliche!) and I, together with some artists and writers from Grumpy Studios, were welcomed in to another diverse artistic studio community at ArtWork Atelier.

Shortly after the studio move, I exhibited in a joint exhibition with Richard Hughes (who was also selected as Tim Marlow’s NOISE Festival Curator Choice). The exhibition was called ‘A Slow Passion’ and installed as one of the last shows at Castlefield Gallery’s Federation House.

Ambiguous Borders in ‘A Slow Passion’ exhibition

 

Mirror detail

Throughout May I ran a set of creative art workshops for the Stroke Association as part of the Stroke, Science, Art project. This culminated in an exhibition of the project that I curated at Manchester Central Library and also ran a pop up exhibition/workshop at Manchester Museum in October.

Stroke Association Art Workshops

 

Together with fellow directors, Roger Bygott and John Lynch we piloted Manifest, a city-wide festival of visual art in July. We pulled off our pilot festival over three incredibly full days during the busy Manchester International Festival period. With press coverage in a-n and exhibitions at some of the most prestigious cultural venues in Manchester and Salford, plus the support of the artistic community behind us, I think we represented the scene in the cities well. More about the weekend here.

Manifest Logo

 

A performance collaboration with Rafael Perez in July at the ‘It’s Ok, you don’t have to like it’ exhibition at TRACK Manchester. Rafael wasn’t able to make the exhibition so Manifest co-director and interdisciplinary artist, Roger Bygott, stepped in to perform the shadow chase/connection with me, bringing his extensive knowledge of physical performance art and dance, adding to the collaboration. A lot of my work has a performative/interactive aspect, either within its creation (I use dance to evolve ideas) or with the visitor when a work is exhibited. This was the first time I was actively involved as a visible performer and although uneasy at first, I enjoyed the interaction with another person and seeing the film and pictures of it afterwards.

Roger Bygott and I performing the shadow chase

 

In September I accepted another new collaboration, “The Copenhagen Interpretation” this time with photographer, Christian Dyson. I did the lighting design for a fashion shoot and even got to try out a few test shots of my own! There’s also a great behind the scenes video of the project. A really enjoyable day and great team of people making it happen.

The Copenhagen Interpretation – my bts picture

 

I had ‘A Solid Wish Scatters’ featured in the Saatchi Art and Music Magazine.

 

And in November I exhibited my biggest outdoor work at the UK’s largest light festival, Lumiere Durham. DREAMERS was exhibited on one of my favourite sites of the festival to over 200,000 visitors and I’m so pleased to say that it was really well-received with the sound of joy and laughter as people played in the work. I’ve admired Lumiere Durham for many years, so to be given the opportunity to be included and to see so many people enjoy the work highlights exactly why I make the type of work I do.

Visitors enjoying casting their shadows

 

To round the year off nicely, I exhibited two pieces at Enlighten Manchester Festival of Light and Sound Art. I consider that I had one of the best exhibition spaces in the city as I developed poetry to trim the popular and prominent benches that surround Manchester Central Library. I also exhibited “Lost and Found” inside the library. A fantastic end to the year as I saw visitors enjoying both pieces. The project was made possible by public funding from Arts Council England. See more pictures here.

The Stories Under Our Feet photo by John Lynch

Lost and Found – photo by John Lynch

This year my work has been placed within the public realm more so than ever before, and I have also learnt and tried many new things to develop different strands to my practice. Creating work for the public is an exciting prospect, but nerve-wracking process. I don’t know whether people will engage with the work until it is exhibited, and by that point, it’s impossible to make any changes. I feel a mixture of relief and a huge amount of joy at seeing people engaging so positively with each work this year. With every project I have not been alone in ensuring the work gets to where it is exhibited; I work with the festivals’ teams, manufacturers and sponsors who all play a part, so I’m grateful to have worked with so many talented and enthusiastic people. 

 

Me with one of my poems – photo by John Lynch

The Stories Under Our Feet

Rain – photo by John Lynch

‘The Stories Under Our Feet‘ are ephemeral light and text artworks trimming the edges of the benches that surround Manchester Central Library. I developed a series of short observational poems drawing on changing weather and seasons to create moments of contemplation for people walking by or sitting on the benches. The piece was developed for the Enlighten Manchester Festival of Light and Sound Art 2015 and was funded using public funding through Arts Council England.

I was pleased with the positive public response to the work. So many people stopped to slowly make their way around the benches to read the poems, smiling once they’d completed the set and commenting on how nice it was to see engaging artwork in the public domain.

Sunshift – photo by John Lynch

I changed the piece each night to shuffle the poems and show a variety. The light and shadow cast changed each night also, sometimes easy to read, other times a little more difficult and erring more towards the aesthetic of the feathery light and shadow effect. I like people to engage with my work and I also like to slow them down from their daily lives if only for a few moments. For some, they only noticed the attractive lighting effect, whereas others spent time reading the poems more carefully. Going off the feedback at the time, it seems something positive was gained from both types of encounter.

You can see more pictures of the work on my website here.

 

Lost and Found (couple) – Photo by John Lynch

I also created another piece “Lost and Found“: understated light and reflection pieces activated by the viewer. Passers by interrupt the reflection to become either ‘lost’ ,‘found’ or sometimes both to highlight the search for sense of self and connection between people.

One visitor told me that she lost her little boy in the library on the visit and found him at my piece – he’d positioned himself so that he had ‘lost’ projected onto him. She said once she’d found him, she took a picture of him with the word ‘found’ on him instead. Great to know my artwork helped to reunite the two, but also that it was easily understood and interacted with!

 

Lost and Found – Photo by John Lynch

 

Many thanks to John Lynch for the photos, and to Enlighten Manchester/Curated Place and Arts Council England for their support in realising these pieces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enlighten Manchester Festival of Light and Sound Art 2015

I will be exhibiting two new commissions at this year’s Enlighten Manchester Festival of Light and Sound Art 2015.

Last year’s festival was held in Piccadilly Gardens and I was fortunate to have the famous Tadao Ando concrete wall as my site to respond to. The work ‘A Solid Wish Scatters’ was named as a public favourite in Mondo*Arc Magazine.

Last year’s piece – A Solid Wish Scatters. Photo credit J.Lynch.

This year, the festival has changed site to Manchester Central Library and the Bridgewater Hall and is mainly indoors. However, I have been given another prominent outdoor site to respond to: the Manchester Central Library benches that surround the building. ‘The Stories Under Our Feet‘ are ephemeral light and text artworks trimming the edges of the benches. Short observational poems drawing on changing weather and seasons to create moments of contemplation for people walking by or sitting on the benches.

I have also created an indoor work, ‘Lost and Found‘: understated light and reflection pieces activated by the viewer. Passers by interrupt the reflection to become either ‘lost’ ,‘found’ or sometimes both to highlight the search for sense of self and connection between people.

Also on show will be pictures produced in the special creative writing and light art public workshops I ran at the library during October.

The festival runs in the late afternoon/evenings of Thursday 10th – Saturday 12th December and free tickets can be booked online.

 

 

 

Reflections and shadows 2014

Light Holds Me Here exhibition (photo credit S.Iles)

This year I made what only existed in my mind into a reality. There’s not much more an artist can ask for, really! Here’s a recap of my artistic year gone by.

In January my degree piece ‘Leap and the Net Will Appear’ was still on show as part of the Nesta Art Showcase, selected from a national call out to be exhibited in central London at the Nesta gallery space.

Leap and the Net Will Appear

In February I continued to be part of the DIY Art School, a year-long project by art school graduates wishing to continue the momentum of creative learning in the year after graduation. For this we had weekly meetings and scheduled artist talks, workshops and crits.

March saw the success of DIY Art School continue as I was asked to represent the group by giving a speech at the opening of Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces, Federation House. I was pretty honoured to be speaking along side the likes of Maria Balshaw, Director of the Whitworth Gallery and Manchester Art Gallery.

Jumping ahead to May and I was selected as one of the UK representative artists for the ‘Art of Youth’ Youth in Action European Commission project in Montenegro. The programme brought together participants from across Europe to learn about different contemporary art practices, European Citizenship, and to create collaborative pieces of artwork to be exhibited in the open air amphitheatre in Old Bar, Montenegro. As well as being creatively stimulating and getting to exhibit in such an unusual space, I also made many friends that I’m still in contact with today.

Unity sunlight

I was over the moon to get Arts Council England funding in June for ‘Light Holds Me Here‘ a period of research and development of my practice to help to fuse my two creative backgrounds of light art and writing. This project helped to shape the rest of the year as I was working towards a solo exhibition and to show work in the Faroe Islands later in the year. I also started working with Curated Place, who supported my application and my progress throughout the year.

 

 

In July I also began a new research project, Manifest, with fellow artists, John Lynch and Roger Bygott. This also received Arts Council England funding and allowed us to look into the feasibility and planning of a festival that supported North West based artists and would run alongside the Manchester International Festival in 2015.

September was a red-letter kind of a month for me. I was honoured to have been selected as Tim Marlow’s Curator Choice for Fine Art for NOISE Festival 2014. I went to the press launch at the House of Commons and found out that my winning entry ‘Sun Scroll‘ was to be exhibited at the Manchester Buy Art Fair, then at the Tetley in Leeds and also a picture of it was placed on a plinth and exhibited on London’s South Bank for nearly 3 months!

I was also awarded ‘Outstanding’ for my ‘Sun Bowl’ and ‘Excellent’ for ‘Leap and the Net Will Appear’ for NOISE Festival by the CEO Denise Proctor.

Sun Scroll picture on plinth on the South Bank, London

 

Alongside this, I exhibited my final work for ‘Light Holds Me Here‘ developed over the summer in a solo exhibition of the same name at Castlefield Gallery’s New Art Spaces. An absolute dream of an experience and I was really pleased with the great feedback from visitors.

Light Holds Me Here self portrait in the installation

 

In October I developed and delivered a series of expressive drawing and working with words workshops with stroke survivors for the Stroke Association. This was a new experience for me and I was pleased that the participants enjoyed it too and created some amazing artwork in the process.

Stroke Association Workshop

Curated Place took me to Copenhagen and then the Faroe Islands in November. In the Faroes I exhibited a poem installation, ‘Ambiguous Borders‘ together with a poem written in response to mine by Faroese poet, Oddfridur Marni Rasmussen, at the light art and literature festival, Bóka Dagar. I also had the generous support of fellow light artist, Ulf Pederson, as he enabled me to project more of my poetry onto the buildings of the Faroese National Broadcasting house.

‘Ambiguous Borders’ exhibited in the Faroe Islands

December was another busy month as I was chosen as one of Red Bull Studios’ ‘Red Bull Collectives 2014‘. For this I got to collaborate with award-winning photographer, Layla Sailor, to creative an exhibition ‘Fragment|Reflect’ at the Red Bull Studios on Tooley Street, central London.

‘You Hide in Spaces’ at Fragment|Reflect, Red Bull Studios

To end the month and year, I was awarded another Arts Council England Grants for the Arts grant to create new piece of work, ‘A Solid Wish Scatters‘ for the Enlighten Manchester festival of Light Art. I exhibited one of my largest pieces of work yet in the centre of Manchester in Piccadilly Gardens.

I couldn’t have wished for a more positive end to the year and I thank all my colleagues, sponsors and supporters who all helped to make it actually happen.

A Solid Wish Scatters. Photo credit J.Lynch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light Holds Me Here – processes

Twist your viewpoint – Elisa Artesero

Well I’ve been working away on my solo exhibition ‘Light Holds Me Here’ and things are starting to come together. I don’t want to go too much into detail about exactly what I’m creating as I’d like it to be a surprise. I am, however, working on a huge scale, one which I’ve never worked on before and in order to develop the work I’ve gone through a few new processes.

I can, and do, think in terms of space – how to move around it and what effect I’d really like to create in an installation. I’ve worked with small scale models of my installation to develop the ideas and lighting effects I’m wanting to create. I imagine it’s a bit like how architects work when they build their scale models.  Now I’m having the pieces manufactured at scale and so the full effect of the work within the actual space will not be apparent until I get there and install it – so it’s a nervous but also exciting time!

The space! 4th floor, Castlefield Gallery New Art Spaces

In the lead up I’ve had a studio critique day with various curators from places such as Manchester Art Gallery, Curated Place and the e-Luminate Festival Cambridge. This worked well to introduce my work and to coherently express what it is that I’m trying to do, and to get valuable feedback from professionals within the field. The response was really positive so it’s good to feel I have support from the people I respect in the industry. As a result, the Director of e-Luminate was able to secure a lighting sponsorship with Pulsar on my behalf, so I’ll be using top quality lights for the installation – brilliant news for a light artist!

 

 

This exhibition is a result of a period of research and development, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The funding has given me time to concentrate on developing my practice, to find out about and work with new materials, learn new skills and show work on a much larger scale than previously possible. Next up will be the light and text festival in the Faroe Islands with Curated Place, but one thing at a time!

 

 

 

Art in the North: A Sure Future

Castlefield Gallery at the Manchester Contemporary

I recently completed an internship with Castlefield Gallery. The gallery invited me to work with them at this year’s Manchester Contemporary, a large art fair which showcases numerous well-respected galleries. It was an opportunity too good to miss and I was delighted to be asked.

Castlefield Gallery is a vibrant cultural hub of Manchester, it has been going since the 1980s and prides itself on continuing to support emerging artists, as well as showcasing national and international artists. The gallery recently, and rather controversially, lost its Arts Council funding and was put in the difficult position of having to re-think its business model and way of working. The gallery faced the challenge and has come up with new plans, yet has maintained its cultural ethics and continues to support artists from the North West and beyond. It also raised an unprecedented £33,000 in an auction of artworks donated by artists it has supported, and bought by patrons of the arts who did not want to see such an important cultural centre in Manchester disappear. I think this demonstrates not only the robust nature of the organisation, but also the cultural sensibilities of the society in and around Manchester, one which recognises its assets and fights to save them.

This leads me onto the internship experience. I learned much about about representing the gallery at the Manchester Contemporary (all of which was very useful to me), but instead of listing this here, I will merely offer an observation about the function of the galleries and cultural organisations that were represented. Each and every gallery I encountered, whether they were new or more established, were supportive to each other. They were open and interested in discussing their artists and the general cultural concerns facing arts’ organisations today. This was also supported by an interesting programme of talks by the galleries and organisations, well attended by those visiting the Contemporary.

Jumping forward a couple of months, I attended a panel discussion about the future of the arts in the North. This was held at the Whitworth Art Gallery and was in aid of the complete bound edition of Issue 3 of Corridor8, an extremely insightful journal currently focused on art in the North. Presentations were given by the Workplace Gallery in Gateshead, Project Space Leeds, Ian Rawlinson (artist and academic based in Manchester) and Maria Balshaw, the Director of the Whitworth and Manchester City Art Gallery.

Each of the presentations gave a view of the North as a thriving place for artistic development and the positive plans for now and well into the future. One thing which was addressed was the comparison to the art institutions in the South of England, and the differences and challenges faced by those in the North. What quite clearly came through was that not only is the North flourishing with the artistic talent it produces, but it is also fully connected with the ‘art world’ as a whole. This can be highlighted by the commercial success of the Workplace Gallery, and the critical acclaim reached on a world stage by the Manchester International Festival. Despite these achievements, Maria Balshaw made an interesting point about the flexible nature of working here, that it is possible to take huge risks which might not be conceivable elsewhere; and that the North should not focus on growing bigger, but only more interesting.

As this panel discussion went on in front of a packed audience, there were numerous other art openings and events around the city. These included Castlefield Gallery’s “Tatoo City” and the residency at the newly formed Lionel Dobie Project, a place which supports  emerging curators; along with many other events too extensive to list fully. It was not possible for me to get to all of these, but to be able to have the choice on a cold Thursday evening in late November, shows that there is a lot going on, and it certainly isn’t showing signs of slowing.

For more articles about events, exhibitions, talks etc. please browse the rest of my blog.