Team Spirit: The Art of Collaborative Practice

I will be chairing this event at The New Art Gallery Walsall on Thursday 20th March, 2008

The Artists’ Studio at The New Art Gallery Walsall has played host to a number of artists who work in partnership including Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, current artists in residence Juneau Projects and forthcoming occupants Simon and Tom Bloor.
This support for collaborative relationships mirrors the rise in group-based and collective art practices which have become a familiar part of the artistic landscape over the last decade. However, despite moving into the mainstream, the process of artistic collaboration continues to raise a number of fundamental questions surrounding authorship, authenticity and audience relationships. And whilst artists continue to work with each other, they’re increasingly engaging the skills, knowledge and mind-sets of other creative practitioners such as architects, writers and film makers. This seminar opens up the opportunity to discuss various models of collaborative working and the social, political and creative reasons for doing so. Chaired by writer and lecturer Emma Cocker, a series of discussions will be ignited by presentations from collaborative duo Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie, artists’ collective The Hut Project, occasional collaborators S Mark Gubb and Gordon Dalton, and artist Lothar Götz who has recently collaborated with Caruso St. John architects.

It Couldn't Be Made Up

It Couldn't Be Made Up brings together a series of five back-to-back group exhibitions that play on the multiple meanings and contradictory possibilities of the title, which can be read as a declaration of disbelief as well as one of failure. It Couldn't Be Made Up tries to reflect upon the competing drives that underpin artistic practice: the desire to make something happen and the risk that such plans might fall or fail. The title functions as an expression of both astonishment and disappointment; of regret and promise. It might suggest that something is 'beyond belief' or fantastical; or reflect the eruption of make-believe into the space of the everyday. Alternatively it articulates the regret felt at not being able to construct, set-up or make something happen - when something is seen as impossible or doomed to fail.

At Play
Monday 25th February from 6pm - Thursday 28th February
Echoing the fantastical and imagined world of childhood play, the gallery is presented as an immersive space transformed and interrupted by the presence of large makeshift structures; architectural propositions; sound works and light installations. Including work by Katharine Wojcik (curator), Matthew Hayes, Charlie Hood, Emma Kemp, Kate Lawrence

Apeiron
Monday 3rd March from 6pm - Tuesday 4th March
Emerging in the space between science fiction and science fact, artists in this exhibition draw upon the visualisation and explanation of various scientific phenomena in order to create works which blur the line between science and the imagination, the hypothetical and the real. Including work by Andrew Brookfield (curator), Rachel Eite (curator), Ashley Gallant and Richard Sides

Collapse
Thursday 6th March from 6pm - Friday 7th March
The exhibition reflects on how failure might offer a moment of disappointment but also the possibility of unexpected or humorous results; how the breakdown of one kind of logic might allow for the emergence of another. Useless and dysfunctional objects sit alongside works which explore the breakdown of language; mistranslations and glitches in communication. Including work by Jenna Finch (curator), Simon Franklin (curator), Tom Duggan, Toby Everitt, Craig Fisher, Bommsoon Lee, Tracey McMaster, Megan Tait and Naomi Terry

I Can't Believe it's Not Butter
Tuesday 11th March 6.00pm - Thursday 13th March
The exhibition brings together work where first impressions are often deceptive and things not always what they seem. The reassuringly familiar becomes disrupted or disturbed by the suggestion of other possibilities that lurk beneath the register of the initial glance; or by revelations and discoveries which slowly unravel the logic of the original reading. Includes work by Jennifer Webber (curator), Naomi Terry (curator), Laura Clarke (curator), Holly Farrington (curator), Lotti Closs (curator), Sarah Duffy, Emma Firkin, Dan Ford, Rachel Murray, Charlotte Osborn, Jon Palmer, Bethany Phelps, Rhiannon Worgan, Derek Sprawson and Ben Wheele

Snowball
Monday 17th March - Thursday 20th March. Closing event 6pm
Snowball explores the notion of the sketch or proposal as an imaginative zone unrestricted by the limitations of time and resources. Beginning with a series of speculative drawings and plans from seven selected artists, seven further artists will be invited to work as mediators and translators, moving between these disparate practices, making connections and creating new ideas in response. In turn, these will then be responded to in the gallery by the original group of artists, where the process of 'drawing together' or 'failing to see the link' is presented as an ongoing and live event. Includes work by Bommsoon Lee, Ottis Sturmey, Emma Tanner, Stephen Turner, Claire Merriman, Jess Stevenson, Fonny Fung Yin Shum

Interventions and Performances
Throughout the programme there will also be a number of interventions and performances where mistaken identities, secret exchanges and absurd encounters occur in the gallery space and erupt into the public realm. Includes work by Dominique Humphrey, Bill Nguyen and Alia Pathan.

It Couldn't be Made Up is a collaboration between Surface Gallery & Nottingham Trent University.

Interrogations : 'Creative Interdisciplinarity'

Interrogations presents a Postgraduate Workshop organised by De Montfort University Faculty of Art and Design and Loughborough University School of Art and Design (supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council).
Speakers Emma Cocker, Nottingham Trent University; Professor Gen Doy, De Montfort University Faculty of Art and Design; Dr. Jane Tormey, Loughborough University School of Art and Design

ABSTRACT: Wandering: Straying from the disciplinary path
In this presentation I am proposing to draw on my interest in the practice of wandering as a means through which to explore selected ideas in relation to interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary approaches to research. It is not intended as a coherent ‘map’ of this area of practice, rather something more like a meander through the terrain: a selective and partial dérive or itinerary in which certain ideas and propositions will be investigated; others bypassed, traversed or condemned (for the moment) to ‘inertia or disappearance’. Referring to other theorists and writers, the practice of wandering and the geographical, spatial or navigational readings it conjures, will allow me to touch upon the potentiality or possibility, but also the problematic of interdisciplinarity. I hope that the motif or metaphor of wandering might bring to mind a diverse range of issues against which to think about interdisciplinarity including perhaps ideas around defamiliarisation and distance; disorientation and uncertainty; curiosity; translation and tourism; trespass and piracy; borders, boundaries and threshold zones; rights of access, belonging and homelessness; reclamation and regeneration; territory and power; invasion and control; even the migration, colonialisation or the diaspora of ideas and practices. Performed according to an ephemeral, unfolding logic; wandering is a model of enquiry whose findings emerge through constant (r)evolution, where observations remain in transitional flux or interminable disarray. It is a framework for encountering and understanding the world and our place within it that retains rather than eradicates the potential for uncertainty and disorientation; that emphasises rather than disables the interplay between facts and fictions, reality and the imagination, theories and anecdotes. The motif of wandering might thus enable reflection on the potential role of the positional and subjective, or the partial and provisional within research practice, re-inscribing them a value within the process of meaning making and the construction of knowledge.

CONTEXT: This is the first event of the 2 year Postgraduate Training project which follows on from the 'In Theory' project last year organised by LUSAD and De Montfort. Its title this time is 'Creative Interdisciplinarity in Art and Design Research'. It will introduce general issues that students would all potentially find useful in terms of concepts, methods, approaches and research strategies relating to the notion of the interdisciplinary. The aim is to interest students in interdisciplinary research - to see interdisciplinarity as a way to enhance and encourage creativity.

Issues to be discussed might include:
• Why interdisciplinarity?
• In what ways is interdisciplinarity useful and stimulating for practitioners and other research students?
• The relationship of theory to practice in interdisciplinary research. Opportunities and pitfalls.
• How to locate and digest suitable interdisciplinary theories and concepts without being overwhelmed, or just resorting to "pick and mix strategy".
• "Translating" from one discipline to another. Should you be "true" to your source or is it better to modify the material you take from other disciplines?
• The problem of illustrating (in your practice) ideas from other disciplines, and how to avoid this.
* Isn’t everything interdisciplinary?

This is the first event of the 2 year Postgraduate Training project which follows on from the 'In Theory' project last year organised by LUSAD and De Montfort. For more information see http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~acdih/interrogations.htm