For the Arts Festival my group chose to work under the title of contra-diction after having explored various options for themes such as absence/presence or material//immaterial. We felt that working under a theme would allow the exhibition to have a good sense of cohesion while simultaneously allowing everyone to produce individual work that fitted with their pre-existing practices. Our group outcomes were a website and a pdf/book, and we also created an Instagram to promote the festival.
Personally I used the festival as an opportunity to curate my own work, exploring what themes I could pull out and how I could use this to reflect my group’s chosen theme of contradiction. As can be seen both on the website and in my own previous post I created two collections: lost at sea and found at sea. Each collection explored similar ideas of lively nonhuman material but from slightly different approaches, as highlighted by the titles of each collection. These titles were also helpful in clearly linking the collections to the overall group theme.
I presented each collection in quite an archaeological manner as it has been commented to me several times before that my work has an archaeological quality to it. I found this to be a really successful visual mode to display the work, bringing something almost tactile to the digital exhibition and imbuing each piece with a renewed importance in doing so. One thing that I would change in future would be the use of the labels to explain the piece; lost at sea in particular comprises pieces which have an important process/story behind them and I’m not sure enough emphasis was on the minimal detail in their labels to convey this. For found at sea the approach worked a little better as the pieces functioned more on an aesthetic level so the labels weren’t as vital in understanding them.
Although the accompanying text did not help with the lack of explanation for lost at sea, I do still feel it was another hugely important part of the exhibition. For a while I have been skirting round the edges of exploring text/language in my work but this has been one of the first times I have felt the text successfully articulates and compliments the work just as I intended. I’m still not sure whether I would go so far as to understand it as fully part of the work itself but it is definitely making good progress in that direction.
The piece I submitted for the book was On this beach lies a fake rock. The rock in lost at sea was from this piece and as such I was trying to establish a dynamic between the two parts of the exhibition, with one work leading on from another. I liked the slight sense of interaction this brought with it – the idea that should someone want to investigate the story behind the rock further then it was there to be found, allowing the piece to function on different levels and encourage a sense of discovery and intrigue.
This sense of interaction is something that I have found to be lacking while engaging in exhibitions over the pandemic. Although to some extent this is inevitable, on reflection our group could have encouraged this more, as some of the other group across the festival did. Perhaps we could have collaborated more intentionally between members of the group, all working to create one piece of work (as the group Dreamtopia did), or even members of the public (as Afortable Vacation did).
The one area of the exhibition that was more of a collaborative piece was the group’s artist statement. Collectively we started looking at some of the main themes emerging in our work and then played around with writing relatively cyclical, nonsense-y sentences around these ideas. We also took this a step further and began inputting these to online AI generators to create a somewhat self-mocking, tongue-in-cheek statement (in places even verging on a manifesto) that almost did the opposite of clearly outlining what the group was about:
contra-diction provides an alternate way of thinking that utilises visual references to explore concepts like – but which are rooted in – our shared reality (the ontological condition of the Universe). the material immateriality of materiality in the age of the immaterial is not just a matter of space. it is of life. it is of the Universe. in the Universe, materiality of existence is immaterial. but, in the contra-dictionary, it is not. could trees, plants and atoms be more?
Although this was a very playful exercise, it was nice to create something a little more collaboratively, and again to start to introduce text a little more seriously into the way I think about making work. I have just signed up to be part of Newlyn Art Gallery’s ‘Collaborators’ programme so I hope to take what I have learnt from this collaboration forward and build on it further here.
Another role I had in the exhibition was in the curatorial team as part of the hub group. Being in the hub group meant that I was able to help with the organisation side of the event, passing necessary information between my group and the team, sending relevant links and updates to the events, production, marketing and documentation teams. Although curatorially there perhaps wasn’t as much to do for the Arts Festival (as each group essentially curated themselves and then everything linked on the main hub website), I will be on the curatorial team for the Miniatures exhibition so I hope to gain an insight to a more physical curation process there.
As part of my role on the curation team I helped introduce the festival in the opening ceremony, providing an overview of the events and groups taking part. This was somewhat of a daunting role as there was a fair amount of information to concisely cover, and also a fair amount of people attending the opening. However, my experience at hosting the podcast and also having lead a series of skill sharing lectures this study block proved useful and as such I felt confident to introduce the festival.
Anna Harris 