Output details

'Time Space Effort', a large-scale installation in a 2 part exhibition at the Herbert Read Gallery incorporating architectural modular elements, video, prints, performance and sculptural elements.

‘Time Space Effort’, commissioned by the Herbert Read Gallery and funded by the Arts Council, investigated questions central to my research: How can the viewer respond to artwork where creativity is no longer apparently present in the outcome but remains caught in the working process? How do the practicalities of art production relate to the virtual or imagined? What is the viewer’s role in the completion of the artwork?

For this exhibition I focused on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, engaging in a dialogue with curator Matthew de Pulford and collaborating artists Aernout Mik, Jamie Shovlin and writer Sally O’Reilly. Questioning the status of the exhibition as a Solo or Group show in a University gallery, works were developed that critiqued the notion of the artwork as privileged over other objects and materials on campus.

I initiated the 2-part exhibition with ‘Time Space Effort’, a large-scale installation, including modular architectural interventions, sets of hand-made objects, texts and constructions reminiscent of presentation platforms. Working with ‘IVIV’ dancers and a choreographer I devised performances that focused on making rather than the thing made; translation and interpretation rather than the actual. I studied minute and barely discernible actions and movements of production such as the glass-blower’s turning of the blowpipe, and the carpenter’s handling of the chisel, once everyday actions, now they appear exotic and meaningful, akin to muscle memory for dancers and performers.

As part of this research I referenced the ‘experience economy’ and the roles of simulation and authenticity in ‘edutainment’. Finally the work that began as a solo exhibition with all of the status that implies, in ‘part 2’ became problematized, serving simultaneously as installation and scenery for other artists’ work and performers’ interventions.