Developments

The residency with Clare Thornton is coming to a conclusion, and the multiples project is reaching its final stages of design. Venues for a lauch still TBC.

We have also decided to extend Clare's stay with us, with a provisional view to working in and around Bristol.

For our second residency, NHS ZEST (based at Derriford Hospital) and Horticultural Healing here at Groundwork Devon and Cornwall have selected Francesca Steele. She will be working at HH with the intention of producing work that can both explore and promote issues surrounding sustained brain injury and mental health, with a view to installing work at the new dental school in Devonport and staging an exhibition at the end of the residency. Francesca's practice in in live art (often taking the form of one-to-one performance) and video.

To view previous work, go to francesca-steele.blogspot.com or www.francescasteele.co.uk
To read more about Horticultural Healing, visit: http://www.groundwork-devonandcornwall.org.uk/HorticulturalHealing

With future residencies, the plan is to collaborate with suitable partners, identify specific artists for strategic roles and to also to once more stage an open call. This last will take place in the Autumn.

Finally, the search for a short-term venue continues.

Some news - some personal, all strategic!

We have decided to move to Plymouth. I have been getting more and more fed up with living in the sticks in Week (just outside Dartington, which is itself just outside Totnes, which is just outside social reality). Some of it is fantastic - Lily's school, seeing rabbits and pheasants in the morning etc. but it's too remote for us. We are city kids at heart. If all goes to plan we shall be moving into the Mannamead/Lipson area in about 4 weeks time! We've found what seems to be a good school (pretty good Ofsted report etc) in Lipson Vale Primary, so fingers crossed on that one. It'll be cheaper and more convenient than where we are at the mo.
Now, if moving isn't strategic enough, what's going on with other projects? Clare, Dave and I are concentrating on progressing the soap project - the final event will be called, of course, Soapbox. We want to have a product, packaged, and an event planned for end-April, including of course a venue.
The collaborative residency will be finalised at the NHS end this week, so I should be able to state who that's going to be next week...
And I need to seriously think about the next residency - how to find an artist, what they should be here for, how I find what they need to be here for...
Kath Wynne and I are going to do a tour of Plymouth today to try and find a replacement for our lost Outlet, wish us luck!

One step forward...two back. As usual.

Well, today I received a load of boxes that we are probably going to use on the soap project with Clare. Then I found out the space Dave Johns and I had been trying to get hold of had gone the way of commerce. Often the way, given the choice, even councils who state cultural regeneration as being important don't really particularly follow through.

So, start over - it was going a bit too well to be honest.
I'm now following up possibilities in Royal William Yard and town. Or possibly we'll buy a mobile library. Or an ice-cream van.
Anyway, I feel another quote coming on:

'it is equally fatal to the spirit to have a system and not to have a system. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.' F. Schlegel

A, possibly rather obscure, quote, but one that makes sense in pursuit of the real.

'The confinement of the scientific object is equal to the confinement of the mad and the dead. And just as all of society is irredemiably contaminated by this mirror of madness that it has held up to itself, science can't help but die contaminated by the death of this object in its inverse mirror. It is science that masters the objects, but it is the objects that invest it with depth, according to an unconscious reversion, which only gives a dead and circular response to a dead and circular interrogation.' Simulacra and Simulation, J. Baudrillard

Clare has shamed me into creating a new post. Her comprehensive yet compelling blog narrative, charting her navigation through Groundwork's murky waters as its first artist-in-residence, leaves me little to add except 'that's right, that's what we're doing and yes I was there that day'.
So, I guess I need to be the pizza dough to Clare's many toppings.
Do I step back to the past and recount the journey so far? Or travel off into the future of possible outcomes? Maybe neither, shall I linger here a while in the present and pick over some musings on what contemporary art can do for Groundwork? Ignoring that word 'do' for a second, I feel my role as Strategic Arts Coordinator (no, really) has a couple of important elements. One thing that is paramount is engaging with high quality contemporary art and artists, and making sure that is always a focus of why we are doing this at all. Beyond that, I feel that on occassion I will want to focus on a particular project at Groundwork and develop a project/programme around that. Other times, it may be a focus on one of our thematic interests (community, business, youth, land, employment, education), beyond any particular project taking place. One may be to promote/support an initiative, one to explore and raise wider issues for discussion.
So, what's in the pipeline? Clare and I are currently working with a social enterprise in Paignton to hopefully produce a limited edition artwork. We have plans for how this will be launched, but we're keeping mum til we know what's what.
Hopefully, a new joint residency between Groundwork and ZEST (an NHS run initiative) will be finalised soon. Again, more when the selection etc. has been finalised.
Thirdly, along with Dave Johns, I hope to open an artist-led space in Plymouth. To be called Outlet.
Outlet:
is a project space
is artist-led
is just the beginning
is socially-engaged
will provide a platform for dissemination
will host events, residencies and exhibitions
will punch above its weight
will have more questions than answers
knows that size doesn't matter and that small is beautiful

Once again, none of this is finalised so we will just have to wait and see.
I've just started to read (again - I always get sidetracked) Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. So, what does it mean to be a socially-engaged when ther's no 'real' left to be engaged with?
Well, for a start, we won't be kicking off with a series of Brazilian residencies at Outlet. Beyond that, we'll have to wait and see...

once more with feeling

It's been a while and things have changed significantly. I'm no longer pursuing a PhD - it all went terribly wrong. It seems the department, and my supervisor specifically, wanted to integrate art into social science as long as it didn't involve me having any type of personal life. Even if that life involves going to support my wife's performance at NRLA. We had a big falling out and I left. I could rant about it, but I've moved on now. Just for the record though, my treatment was just appalling and I'm amazad it was allowed to go on.
Since April last year I have been the Strategic Arts Coordinator for Groundwork South West. So, happy days and back to what I do I won't say best but pretty well.
Every job of this kind is different and this is a peach. Strategic's the right word, it's up to me (mainly) how we move an arts programme forward - the possibilities are endless.
So far, we've an artist in residence called Clare Thornton and she's started a blog:
http://groundworkresidency.blogspot.com
so you can go there and see what she thinks of it all.
Groundwork is charity who's tag line is: Changing Places, Changing Lives. So I've not fallen far from my aspirations with the Performative Social Science PhD, this time it's about using good high-quality contemporary art in socially engaged practice. Not as eas as it sounds, not all art sits comfortably in the social realm, sticking to modernist gallery approaches instead. And why not - there's plenty of room for everyone.
I'm going to try and keep this up and will start to filter in reading, thoughts, updates etc. but for now I think it's good to have resurrected my blog.

getting the hang of formatting

I've added a few links. They're at the bottom of the page in case you miss them...