Residencies

Group Occupation

Group Occupation
An Endless Supply, Adam Smythe & Flore Nove-Josserand
Alex Bailey, Georgie Park & Matt Westbrook
Helen Brown, Joanne Masding & Samuel Rodgers
The New Art Gallery Walsall
6 March – 2 June 2012

Extra Special People (ESP) and The New Art Gallery Walsall (TNAGW) teamed up to offer Group Occupation, a series of short, practical residencies for nine ESP members. Working in the Artists’ Studio at TNAGW, artists occupied the space in groups of three for one-month at a time during March, April and May 2012. Group Occupation provided artists with support, time and space within a mutually supportive group context in which to develop new work. Artists were grouped together according to their practice, interests and approach to the residency, encouraging a useful dialogue and possibilities for working together to develop.

Residency One
6 March – 7 April 2012
An Endless Supply, Adam Smythe & Flore Nove-Josserand

Flore Nove-Josserand used a set of paintings she’d made as a starting point to explore the use of aesthetic relationships as the structural principles in a domestic setting. She wanted to create scenes reminiscent of daily life, but where a formal drama could be played out between art objects, furniture, clothes, food, people. In particular, she was interested in bringing in an element of time to an otherwise static formal composition. Flore left the residency with the foundations of a photography project, ideas about objects in motion, a lot of energy and the intuition that plants, which are somehow both live and inanimate, might be a good clue.

Flore Nove-Josserand, residency documentation

An Endless Supply and Adam Smythe used the residency as a research period to collectively develop their interests as part of their publication project Counter Situation.

As part of the project, this group also had studio visits with IMT Gallery director and curator Mark Jackson.

Residency Two
10 April – 5 May 2012
Alex Bailey, Georgie Park & Matt Westbrook

Alex Bailey ‘The first time I went to walsall I took the bus from Birmingham. The bus from Birmingham to Walsall stopped 44 regulated times. On the penultimate stop I was greeted by a large banner that read ‘£1.25 a pint’. I suspect that this banner’s main purpose is to welcome people into Walsall, after a bus journey that stops 44 times. At the £1.25 a pint pub you can get two pints for £2.50 and that means for a tenner you can get 8 pints. In Birmingham you are likely to get 3 pints for a tenner. It was in the £1.25 a pint place where I read a plaque on the wall introducing people to Sister Dora. Sister Dora is a historical figure from Walsall. She was described on the plaque as the Florence Nightingale of Walsall. A fact that I also remember from the plaque was the statue that is erected in the centre of Walsall is the only statue of a woman in the country, who isn’t a saint or a monarch. I left the £1.25 a pint place some time later and as I walked through Walsall I fell over a statute of a hippo. I knew at this point I had to write a proposal to ESP.’

The research Alex made while at NAGW into Sister Dora’s life was compiled into the publication entitled ‘Searching for Her’. A partly fictitious time line of Sister Dora’s life is accompanied with 6 glossy photographs and ‘Cathedral’ by Raymond Carver. Three copies were made, one is held by the Art library at the Gallery, one held at the Public Library/Museum which holds information regarding Walsall’s historical figures and the other remains with the artist.

Alex Bailey, Searching for Her

Georgie Park approached the residency with an interest in finding relationships between sounds and visuals. She has recently been producing low-fi videos that single out moments from everyday situations: an electrical heater “dancing” to a Kate Bush song in her bedroom, a brash drunken conversation on how to conduct a video experiment or singing along to youtube clips. Much of this content is produced with a concern for how an environment relates to its respective soundscape, with a particular interest in situations where popular music is broadcast or played in reproduction.

She has used the period to set up a variety of video experiments, including: testing the difference in sound of the 3 colours RGB, making John Constable’s “landscape with clouds” cloudier, producing sounds by repeat re-recording of video footage and learning to perform a cover of the Sundays’ 1990 hit “Heres Where the Story Ends” (with green screen paint on her lips).

Georgie Park, residency documentation

Matt Westbrook worked from scans of early twentieth century tool and trade catalogues to create an ongoing series of collages that allude to objects, landscapes and architectural details. Devoid of their original context, the collages retain a reminiscence of the era, yet hint at time-scales beyond their initial creation.

During his time at Walsall, Matt visited the local history archives, specialist collectors and bric-a-brac stalls on the weekly market to collect new source material.

Each collage is titled after the original catalogue the source imagery came from, forming a collection of ‘Additions…’ Many of the catalogues Matt found during his residency originated from the area, such as the Tipton based Cashmore’s trade catalogue, opening up the potential for connections to be made with the area.

Matt is interested in using collage as a process to engage with specific archive material and has amassed a large collection of trade ephemera and engineering catalogues. Creating these works is part of a larger project to build a collection of places, objects and texts that encourages reflection on our industrial heritage.

Matt Westbrook, Cashmore Landscape

Matt Westbrook, Caxton Geodesic Dome

Matt Westbrook, Caxton Race Course

As part of the project, this group also had studio visits with Focal Point Gallery director and curator Andrew Hunt.

Residency Three
8 May – 2 June 2012
Helen Brown, Joanne Masding & Samuel Rodgers

Helen Brown used the Garman Ryan collection to further explore the presentation and interpretation of artworks. After much experimentation one outcome was a video that focused on Epstein’s Rock Drill, made up of a series of photos of Rock Drill in various locations taken by members of the public and uploaded to flickr. Texts that overlay the photos are comments, made by flickr users, about the photos on the flickr site. The audio consists of the track the Chemical Brothers wrote in response to Rock Drill for ‘Tate Tracks’ slowed down to half speed mixed with an audio essay that Anthony Gormley made about Rock Drill for Radio 3.

Helen Brown

Joanne Masding used the Garman Ryan Collection at The New Art Gallery Walsall as a starting point for developing new work during the residency. Through spending time with the objects on display, and making videos of them in the gallery, Masding considered the original and current function of these objects, the act of viewing them within the framework of the gallery, and the display structures used to both offer up and shield the works inside. Another sculpture in the collection led to her making a copy of a Haida clan tunic that was worn during the open studio event.

Joanne Masding, Egyptian Birds

Joanne Masding, Still from Egyptian Birds (Bronze Falcon)

Joanne Masding, Mountain Goat Crest Clan Tunic

Samuel Rodgers has recently found himself working on the computer with found images, video and sound, creating small assemblages, or taking this material out of its original context and simply presenting it as such. Until recently this had been a kind of peripheral activity alongside his practice as musician and sound artist, but finding himself persistently drawn to this way of working he decided to further pursue this during the residency – to explore ways of exhibiting work online, and to consider possible directions for this work off the computer and within an art context.

Samuel Rodgers

As part of the project, this group also had studio visits with artist Jenny Hogarth.