Carol Sorhaindo | The New Block Commission

The Golden Crown, 2023

The Golden Crown is a new commission from artist Carol Sorhaindo that explores memory, reflection, time, and fragmentation.  During her residency at Wysing Arts Centre in 2022, Sorhanido researched natural dyes, and botanical histories in Cambridgeshire, in particular Cambridge Botanical Gardens and Wimpole Hall, a stately home close to Wysing, where she explored plants with economic and colonial connections.During this time she encountered the pineapple motif, which features in the centre of The Golden Crown. Pineapples in the 18th Century symbolised colonial power, high status and wealth, and were often displayed and grown on estates like Wimpole Hall.

In 2020, Wimpole Hall was named in a major report by the National Trust on its properties’ connections to the transatlantic slave trade. Amongst the Hall’s many links to colonialism, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke (1690–1764), who purchased the property in 1740, issued legislation that removed the right to freedom of runaway enslaved people who arrived in Great Britain and Ireland. This gave slavers the legal right to enforce their return to the plantations.

Sorhaindo has meticulously overlaid her work with tangled fibres extracted from pineapple plants. The process of extracting these fibres served as a meditative channel for reflecting on histories, unravelling narratives of joy, pain, migration, trauma, resistance and healing. These fibres serve as a filter through which the world is viewed, representing veins, boundaries and networks, with each section holding its own fragmented history and narrative.  

Carol Sorhaindo is an artist who draws inspiration from nature, landscapes, and plants with economic, health, and ethnobotanical interest, found where she lives on the island of Dominica. Having lived in the United Kingdom and Dominica, Carol’s own migration story, entangled with transatlantic histories and the trading of plants and people, inform her art.  

Carol Sorhaindo’s Wysing residency was part of The World Reimagined Project, a ground-breaking, national art education project to transform how we understand the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impact on all. 

The New Block Commission is a new set of commissioning from Wysing Arts Centre. Supported by the Art Fund Reimagine Project, the New Block Commission moves away from indoor, exhibition-based projects to a site-based approach that makes our work more visible. 

Uma Breakdown​
Earth A.D.
24 September to 11 December
Open Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm (and by appointment*)

I sing softly to myself, unconcerned with either my uncertainty of the lyrics, or my ability to hold the tune. The paddle dips into the water on one side of the canoe and then the other, a rhythm that I sing to, mostly. Above, if I were to look up, the sky is oppressive. It has more in common with visual artefacts in video reproduction or from eyes under stress than something with genuine depth. I dreamt once of a huge eye following me. The eye was so large that I could barely make out its curve. To the untrained, it may have appeared just as a black sky, but I was all too aware that it was a huge pupil, with the iris beginning just at the horizon if only the mountains did not obscure this. That dream stayed with me, and then I pushed it down with my work, and now, now it surfaces in my memory once again, and so I try not to look at this sky above my rhythmic paddling in case I summon that dream to come to be the next night, when I must lie in the bottom of my canoe, the sky feeling as if it begins only inches from my face. ~ Earth A.D. Archive text.

We are thrilled to invite you to Earth A.D., the first solo exhibition from artist Uma Breakdown. This new body of work draws on the artist’s research into the structures and historical context of Gothic narratives, and their creative relationships to time, space, identity and social relations.

The project consists of video games, objects, and an installation. An immersive installation in the gallery made from muslin, concrete rebar, bioresin and lino prints presents coffin-like structures, a hanging coracle alongside a holographic projection and new drawings from the artist. The immersive Earth A.D. game will be playable online on WysingBroadcasts.Art, while a lo-fi "demake" game is playable in the gallery.

Commissioned in partnership with FACT, Liverpool and QUAD, Derby, Earth A.D. will launch as an installation in Wysing’s gallery in September and a game on WysingBroadcasts.Art later in the autumn, before evolving and touring to FACT in Summer 2023 and QUAD in Summer 2024.

Earth A.D. explores the Gothic genre’s relation to deep time, real and imagined versions of England, industrial capitalism, guilt, shame, queerness, and the Gothic’s entangled relationships with the evolution of science fiction, horror and the computer.

That’s one description. Another is that it’s a science fiction story about trans* solidarity and care across time and space, which is repeatedly told, distorted, translated, lost, and reinvented.

Yet another is that it's a room full of coffin technology and holograms, and a video game about the dreams of a sleeping cyborg girl.

Earth A.D. is commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, FACT and QUAD with public funding from Arts Council England.

Fabrication and Technical Production: Loukas Morley, Lyndsay Officer, Chloe Page, Lottie Poulet, Jack Wilson
Wysing Exhibition curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield

Covid Safety

We kindly ask guests to test before travelling to Wysing and not to attend if you test positive or display symptoms.

Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors, unless you are exempt.

Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site.

Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.

Access Information

We want as many people as possible to be able to access and enjoy this exhibition.  

The exhibition includes: 

• Six short looping videos on screens, projections and holographic fans. 
• Six coffin sculptures with smaller sculptures and drawings. 
• A perspex screen with drawings and notes. 
• A simple text-based video game, playable on a controller. The game has a repetitive lof-fi electronic soundtrack 

Adjustments include: 

• An audio description of the exhibition, recorded by the artist Uma Breakdown is available on headphones. You can find this in the corridor on the way into the gallery.  
•  The gallery is wheelchair accessible. A hand-drawn map by the artist Uma Breakdown shows a wheelchair accessible route through the gallery. 
•  There is no seating in the gallery, but folding stools are available in reception. 
•  The bathroom nearest the carpark is accessible.  
•  A calm decompression space is available onsite in the building opposite reception.  

By default, the gallery is dark.  

Please ask at Reception if you would like help with any of the following: 

 • Adjustment to the lighting  
• Guidance into the gallery  

If you have any questions or feedback about the accessibility of the exhibition, please ask at Reception and we will be happy to help. 
 

Biographies

Uma Breakdown

Hi I’m Uma, an artist interested in animals, horror, queer feminist literature, and games design. Everything I make is about some combination of love, grief, hallucination, and an excess of joy. In 2020 I finished a PhD​ about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture feminine, and disaster. With Sammy Paloma I make video games about the divine and occult providence of transfemme existence. I live in Gateshead, UK.

Recent projects include “The Speculative Dismemberment of Agent Leon Kennedy” for Market Gallery (Glasgow, 2022), “Take The Moonlight by The Tail” for Arebyte Gallery (London, 2021), and “Wastework” for TEXTUR (Berlin, 2021).

Imminent things include group shows “Practicing Futures While Grieving in Eight Movements” at Klosterruine (Berlin, 2022) and “Hinterlands” at Baltic (Gateshead, 2022).

21 February - 31 March 2022
Online
We are pleased to announce an online exhibition of work by British Council Net//Work Residency artists Laura Andreato, Abdul Halik Azeez, Wajeeha Batool and Wendy Teo.

Click here to see the exhibition on our Wysing Broadcasts site.

The exhibition will draw on the development of the artists’ digital research during the residency. From games to interactive audio and film, the exhibition will present these very different practices through the connections and reciprocity formed between the artists. 

Net//Work was a four-week residency that ran from 25 October - 19 November 2021 developed in partnership with British Council offering artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. 

The online residency honed points of connection between four very exciting practices. The sessions in the residency provided critical support in the form of mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and reading groups. These sessions were used to test ideas, tease out solutions and suggest new possible directions for these artists' projects. 

Wysing worked with artists Laura Andreato, Abdul Halik Azeez, Wajeeha Batool and Wendy Teo, with Anna Bunting-Branch as Artist Advisor.

Digital Arts Studios hosted Abshar Platisza, André Schütz, Wisrah Villefort, and Kesara Ratnavibushana. Artists took part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.

British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios

Laura Andreato is a visual artist and art educator, set and costume designer. Laura graduated in Visual Arts at São Paulo University, holds a master's degree in Visual Poetics and is currently pursuing her doctorate.

Laura has exhibited in sole and collective shows in museums and galleries both within Brazil and globally. Prominent exhibitions include Pensamiento Salvaje, part of Bienal Sur (Buenos Aires, 2017); Le Royale (La Maudite, Paris, 2014), Deslize (Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, 2014) and Paradiso, Museu de Arte de São Paulo -MASP (São Paulo, 2012).

Laura has also participated in the Pivô Pesquisa Program 2019, 13th artistic residency at Red Bull Station 2017 and in 2018 she nominated for the Pipa Award. In 2014 she was in residence at Cité des Arts, selected by the Institut Français.

Abdul Halik Azeez is a new media artist based in Colombo Sri Lanka with a background in journalism and critical discourse analysis. His work reflects on technologies of power as mediated through contemporary culture, lived experiences and media.

Transformations within Sri Lanka’s post-war urban landscape is a central archive from which Azeez draws, working across a range of mediums such as photography, video, digital interventions, writing, installation and publication.

In 2019 he co-founded The Packet, an independent community of artists which works with publication, digital interventions and site specific installations. He has held solo exhibitions at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo (2014 & 2021) and exhibited widely both locally and internationally including at the Ishara Foundation, Dubai (2019 & 2021), the Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2016, 2019 & 2020), The Art Foundation, Athens (2017), Edinburgh Festival Fringe (2017), the Karachi Biennale (2019) and Colomboscope (2015, 2016, 2017 & 2019). 

Wajeeha Batool is an artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. Wajeeha earned her Bachelors and Masters degrees in Visual Arts at the Beacon House National University (BNU) where she was subsequently a teacher.

Wajeeha investigates the relationship between fantasy and reality, drawing on her experience to layer and create systematic chaos in her work. Her use of both organic forms and pixelated shapes serve as reference to living organisms as well as the world of technology. These patterns work together in harmony, often superimposed upon the other, to create a reverie of unpredictable movement and transparent effects.

Wajeeha’s artwork has been shown in exhibitions in Alhamrah Art Gallery, Lahore, Karachi Art Summit, Sanat Initiative Art Gallery Karachi: Reading Between the Lines, Taseer Gallery, Lahore: Domestic Bliss and Antidote Gallery Dubai. She also won a second place award for Arts Contest from Shaukat Khanum Hospital, Title: Smoking Kills. 

Wendy Teo is a Malaysian based artist, UK ARB/RIBA Chartered Architect, Curator, Researcher and Tutor. Wendy believes an innovative, cutting-edge approach to design and making has capacity to revitalise craftsmanship of the region; stating social-culture dialogue as the driving force behind her design pursuit.

In her award winning design practice Wendy Teo Atelier, she designed a range of nature and culture inspired interactive sculptures, furniture, architectural installation and publication. With Borneo Laboratory, Wendy currently focuses on developing a series of projects that are inspired by the crafts language and materials found from abundant landscape and cultural scape of Borneo.

Wendy Teo’s projects were endorsed by a number of international awards such as Holcim Sustainable Next Generation Award (First Prize), Archiprix, and Threadneedle Prize. Her recent furniture design was selected as a finalist in ‘Asia Design Award’ 2018. Wendy has shown in prominent exhibitions such as 2013/14 Archilab ‘Naturalising Architecture’ exhibition curated by Pompidou Center director Frédéric Migayrou and FRAC Orlean Director Marie-Ange Brayer.

2 March to 14 May 
Open Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 5pm (and by appointment*)
Online exhibition open until 31 May

*To make an appointment to visit the exhibition outside our standard opening hours, please email info@wysingartscentre.org.

Click on the image above to view install photos of the exhibition, taken by Wilf Speller.

To watch the full work online with open-captions and an audio-described option, please visit our Broadcasts site here.

We are delighted to invite you to our first exhibition of 2022, A Tender Ascent, from choreographer and performer Maëva Berthelot and musician, vocalist and DJ Coby Sey. Developed, filmed and presented in Wysing’s gallery, A Tender Ascent is an immersive audio-visual installation bringing together filmed performance and 6.1 surround sound. The exhibition is completed with new sculptures, developed with artist Alexandre Bavard.  A new live performance will re-activate the gallery space on Saturday 16 April. 

A Tender Ascent is a study of collaboration as ebb and flow. Sey and Berthelot feel out the way that embodied experiences
of sound and movement might connect or disconnect, producing new sensations in the process. They explore how frequency
might translate into movement,
gesture into resonance, image into vibration. 
The soundtrack that guides their experiment moves from
calming synth washes to jagged 150bpm 
rhythms, and finally to minor key piano,
as two figures in hazmat suits explore instruments, a stage set, and each other. Referencing the strangeness of science fiction and the everyday moments of isolation caused by the pandemic, the work sees Berthelot and Sey moving in and out of synch with the soundtrack, the natural world, and each other, as their roles become fluid and hierarchies dissolve. 

A Tender Ascent represents the culmination of work begun during Wysing’s
‘Broadcasting’ themed year in 2020, when Berthelot and Sey were in-residence at Wysing as part of the programme
for Wysing Polyphonic: The Ungoverned (curated by A---Z). 

A Tender Ascent is supported by Arts Council England and Fluxus Art Projects. Wysing Arts Centre would like to wish a special thank you to A---Z (Anne Duffau). 

Sculptures: Alexandre Bavard
Sound: Lottie Poulet 
Editing: Geoffrey Taylor 
Technical Production: Jack Wilson, Liam Cahill and Wilf Speller 
Exhibition curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield 
A Tender Ascent was commissioned for Wysing Polyphonic: The Ungoverned by A---Z (Anne Duffau).

Covid Safety   

Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt). Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site. Social distancing is in place and capacity to the exhibition spaces will be monitored. Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.  

Access Information   

We want as many people as possible to be able to access and enjoy this exhibition. 

• The exhibition includes a film with surround sound and sculptures of human shapes. 
• The film has open captions. 
• An audio description of the film is available on headphones. You can find these in the corridor on the way into the gallery. 
• Elements of the soundtrack can be experienced physically through vibrating benches in the exhibition. 
• The gallery is wheelchair accessible. 
• There is seating in the gallery. 
• The bathroom nearest the carpark is accessible. 
• A calm decompression space is available onsite in the building opposite reception. 
• A sensory map of Wysing and the exhibition is available at Reception. 
  
  By default, the gallery is dark and the sound is fairly loud. Please ask at Reception if you would like help with any of the following: 
• Adjustment to the lighting 
• Adjustment to the volume  
• Guidance into the gallery 

If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Deputy Director, at ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help. 

Biographies

Maëva Berthelot is a choreographer, performer and teacher whose mode of working unfolds along the threshold between experimental, performative and collaborative approaches. After graduating in 2003 from the Paris Superior Conservatoire of Music and Dance, she has collaborated with artists and companies such as Emanuel Gat, Ohad Naharin, Clod Ensemble, Sharon Eyal, Rambert and spent six years as a senior member with Hofesh Shechter Company, contributing creatively as an original cast member in numerous pieces and as a teacher. Her work intends to instil a dialogue between material and immaterial realms, drawing attention to the tension between visible/invisible, conscious/unconscious and rehearsed/improvised. Whilst her research is rooted in a movement practice which is an ongoing inquiry into the themes of consciousness, transformation, healing, death and rebirth, her interest lies in creating cathartic spaces in which the emotional and sensational states related to loss, grief and change can be explored, processed and assimilated into conscious experience.

Coby Sey is a vocalist, musician and DJ, who, after years spent buzzing around the DIY artist circuitry of South East London, has developed a distinctive presence as a performer and producer offering a shifting, disorienting vision of club music. 

A long-time collaborator with Mica Levi, Tirzah, Babyfather, Klein and Kwes, Coby’s recorded work– as best evidenced on the Whities 010: Transport for Lewisham 10′′ – spans the realms of live instrumentation, sample-based productions and experimental music, melding recognisable motifs of hip hop, drone, jazz, grime and more into a dubbed-out anaesthesia. Live, these dreamlike compositions are imbued with a heavy, uneasy dancefloor energy, often abetted by live vocals as well as saxophone interjections c/o regular cohorts Ben Vince and Calderwood. 

Coby’s open-door approach to sharing and making music stretches to his work with London collective Curl, who release records and host events with a collaborative, improvisatory approach, as well as a regular slot on NTS which offers a portal into his appealingly murky musical world.

Alexandre Bavard studied at the École Boulle and the Lyon School of Fine Arts. With a background in graffiti, Bavard worked with painting  and drawing, before gradually expanding into performance, sculpture and installation. Imagining himself as an explorer and collector, he works with readymade materials and preexisting sites.

From 2 July

Caroline Wendling presents Hypoteinousa, a Test Space commission for Wysing Arts Centre. Click here to experience the work online.

Taking its title from the Greek word meaning ‘stretching under’, 
Hypoteinousa is a sound walk through 
Wysing’s rural landscape. In dialogue with the nineteenth-century science fiction novel Journey to the
Centre of the Earth (Jules Verne), Hypoteinousa draws Wysing's topography: a landscape shaped by its wildlife, ancient geologies, and the
many voices of Wysing’s artists and
their interventions at the site.  

Visitors to Wysing may listen to the
work as they explore the physical site. 
Hypoteinousa is available to stream 
from podcast apps and on our Wysing
Broadcasts website.

Please ask for headphones and/or 
a media player at reception if required.   

Access Information 

Text and large-text versions of the work are available at our reception area on site, and can be downloaded in PDF format from our Wysing Broadcasts site.  

Artist Biography

Caroline Wendling is an Associate Artist and studio holder at Wysing Arts Centre.

Caroline Wendling was born in France and moved to Britain after completing her art studies at ESAD, Strasbourg and Edinburgh College of Art. Caroline’s work explores ideas of place and belonging through layered projects that draw on history and explore local myths, inviting re-imaging of sites. Daily rural walks from home to studio, at Wysing Arts Centre, feed her multidisciplinary practice.

She creates artworks that are fragile and transient in the form of sensory walks/performances and events, blurring notions of audiences and performers. She also makes drawings, prints, objects and, more recently, moving images. She often works with collaborators, specialists in their fields such as children, chefs, musicians, foresters, and perfumers. 

Commissioners include Kettle’s Yard, 2019, Whitechapel Gallery, 2019, Wysing Arts Centre, 2019. In 2020, she was the recipient of a 40 days residency at Nene Park, Peterborough. Community projects include Peterborough Present 2018-2020, Bedford Creative Arts 2019-2021 and Deveron Projects 2014-2021. In 2016 she received the Commendation for Art in Public Spaces for White Wood from the Saltire Society, Edinburgh.  

Supported by the Cultural Recovery Fund and Arts Council England

18 October to 5 December
Open daily, 12–5pm

An echo imprinted is a new solo exhibition from artist Robert Foster-Jones as part of the Test Space programme. The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Brown.

Explore an online iteration of the exhibition by clicking here.

Bringing together work in ceramics and sound, with results
from experiments in photogrammetry software, An echo imprinted reflects on the cave as a point of origin, both culturally and spiritually.  

The installation draws upon Foster-Jones’ recent experiences of becoming a father himself and the loss of his own father, to contemplate how we remember, commemorate, and how fleeting memories 
can leave an indelible mark, or become abstracted in time.  

A performance at Wysing’s outdoor grounds marked the opening of An echo imprinted on 16 October.  

The exhibition runs in tandem with and then, a harrowing, bringing together work by Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha.

An echo imprinted is supported by Arts Council England.

Robert Foster-Jones (b. 1989, Wegberg, Germany) is an artist based in Cambridgeshire and has been a studio artist at Wysing Arts Centre since 2017. His work explores the role of the artist as a conduit for revealing hidden forms of knowledge.

Foster-Jones is interested in different religious practices and spiritual beliefs, using influences from his research to create work in sculpture, installation, text and performance.

Foster-Jones has exhibited nationally and internationally, including recent exhibitions and projects:

Interesting Times in Venice, London Metropolitan University, London (2020), Steward Research Fellowship, awarded by The British Council and Wysing Arts Centre, Venice Biennale (2019), Home Residency, New York, USA (2019), Enshrine, The Crypt Gallery, London (2018), Solve et Coagula, Test Space: Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Supermarket Art Fair, Svarta Huset, Stockholm, Sweden (2016), Horizon, Roaming Room, London (2016) and Monument, FRAC Basse-Normandie, Caen, France (2014).

Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt). Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site. Social distancing is in place and capacity to the exhibition spaces will be monitored. Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.

Access Information  

The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.

Work in the exhibition and then, a harrowing by Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha in Amphis is also available to view on a monitor in reception, as Amphis is not wheelchair accessible.

Accessible parking and toilets are available.

If you have other access requirements
that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s 
Head of Operations, at:  
ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org 
and we will be happy to help. 

See the work created by the 10 artists who have been part of AMPlify 2020/21, our alternative learning programme for artists aged 18 to 25 years to test new approaches and ideas.

1 April — 17 June 2021

AMPlify is an alternative learning programme for artists aged 18 to 25 years to test new approaches and ideas through workshops and talks, whilst also having time to develop their own work. In 2020/21 AMPlify took place entirely online, to explore how digital tools and games can be used to create and develop future visions of the world. The artists participated in workshops and mentoring, with the option to work towards a Gold Arts Award.

The work spans a range of topics and perspectives around identities and experiments in media across animation, video, sound and interactive work. 

The works are available to view on our Broadcast site by clicking here.

The 10 artists who took part in AMPlify this year were Lauren Clifford-Keane, Kelly Emelle, Jules Fennell, Poppy Jones-Little, Lucie MacGregor, Rosemary Moss, Alexis Parinas, Johanna Saunderson, O. S. Warren and Frances Whorrall-Campbell. The work spans a range of topics and perspectives around identities and experiments in media across animation, video, sound and interactive work. You can find all the participating artist biographies here.

The participating artists were supported by contributing and mentoring artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Anna Bunting-Branch and Robin Buckley (rkss) and mentoring artists Laura Fox and Harold Offeh. You can find all the guest artist biographies here.

Click here to visit the exhibition on our Wysing Broadcasts site

We are pleased to launch an online exhibition of work by British Council Net//Work Residency artists
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley,
Uma Breakdown, and Leyya Mona Tawil, presented on our Wysing 
Broadcasts site 4 May - 7 June. 

The exhibition will draw on the development of the artists’ digital research during the residency. From games to interactive audio and film, the exhibition will present these very different practices through the connections and reciprocity formed between the artists. 

Net//Work was a four-week residency that ran from 18 January - 14 February 2021 developed in partnership with British Council offering artists a period of reflection, research, practice, skills exchange and professional networking opportunities focused on digital artistic practices and technologies. 

The online residency honed points of connection between four very exciting practices. The sessions in the residency provided critical support in the form of mentoring, group conversations, problem solving surgeries, guest talks and reading groups. These sessions were used to test ideas, tease out solutions and suggest new possible directions for these artists' projects. 

Wysing worked with artists
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Uma Breakdown, Nikissi Serumaga and 
Leyya Mona Tawil with support from
David Blandy.

Digital Arts Studios joined with Golden Thread Gallery and Momentum Berlin to host Rita Adib, Mohamed Abdel Gawad, Tim Shaw and Maya Chowdhry. Artists took part in a programme of activities including peer-to-peer exchange, mentoring, group critiques and presentations.

British Council in partnership with Wysing Arts Centre and Digital Arts Studios

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley 
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley works predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to record the “History of Trans people both living and past,” their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future: “Throughout history, Black queer and Trans people have been erased from the archives. Because of this it is necessary not only to archive our existence, but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to share our experiences.” Danielle’s work has been shown in Science Gallery, Barbican, Tate, Les Urbains as well as being part of the BBZ Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. An online component of their work can often be found here. 

Uma Breakdown
Uma Breakdown is an artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and queer games. Last year they finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster and play. Also in 2020 they presented a plant horror RPG (with Una Hamilton Helle, Eltons Kūns, and Erik Martinson) at Kim?, Riga; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque. In 2021 they have undertaken residencies at Akademie Schloss Solitude and Wysing Arts, and are currently researching criminality as love/writing in the work of Genet and Cixous.  

Leyya Mona Tawil 
Leyya Mona Tawil [Lime Rickey International] is an artist working through dance, sound and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her 24-year record of performance/installation scores that have been presented in cities throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil was the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow for her NOMADIC SIGNALS program; and a 2018 Saari Residence Fellow (Finland). Tawil’s solo work - Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith - was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. Tawil has received commissioning support from Abrons Arts Center (NYC), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), Pieter Performance Space (Los Angeles), Gibney DiP (NYC) and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (Oakland). She is the director of Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental live art and music from the SWANA diaspora. 

18 October to 5 December 
Open daily, 12–5pm

and then, a harrowing brings together work by three of Wysing’s 2020 residents, Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha.

A harrow breaks up the surface of the earth or the skin, an agitation of soil that has been left dormant too long where the harrow can excavate whatever ghosts, traditions, memories, viruses, melodies and gestures have been buried. The gallery reverts to barn; the barn disintegrates back to soil.

Installed across Wysing’s grounds, gallery and Amphis building, the exhibition includes recent film, sculptural, and video work by Gent and Stupart and sound work by Anucha and Gent.

Navigating wildly between the Arctic Circle, a river in South Birmingham, the length of the Thames, East Anglia, and Greenland, a new installation from Gent and Stupart reflects on Wysing Arts Centre’s location in rural England.  

A new sonic collage by Anucha and Gent fills the main exhibition space at Wysing. Built from field recordings and live performances conducted in and near the grounds at Wysing with new recordings of various folk songs woven into the wider tapestry.  

and then, a harrowing makes visible how narrative is produced by, and produces landscape, weaving new, intimate, unguarded, and often violent stories and spaces for land in crisis.  

and then, a harrowing is supported by Arts Council England and curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield. Wysing Arts Centre and the artists would like to thank William Bevan, Tom Dillon and James Holcombe for their support in realising and then, a harrowing.

Covid Safety

Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt). Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site. Social distancing is in place and capacity to the exhibition spaces will be monitored. Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.

Access Information  

The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.

The work in Amphis is also available to view on a monitor in reception, as Amphis is not wheelchair accessible.

An audio description for the exhibition is available via headphones. A decompression room will also be available during the launch, and is signposted. Large-print handouts and maps are available from Reception. 

Accessible parking and toilets are available.

If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Head of Operations, at  
ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.

Biographies 

Kelechi Anucha is a PhD candidate in the English Literature department at Exeter University and an experimental vocalist. Kelechi’s PhD focuses on contemporary end-of-life literature and visual cultures, paying particular attention to representations of impeded, disrupted and alternate temporalities and how they reshape broader understandings of care. She is part of all-female electronic drone choir NYX and performed the role of the Orca Whale in All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long, a musical retelling of the 1990s video game Ecco the Dolphin by Linda Stupart and Carl Gent that premiered at the ICA summer 2019.

Carl Gent is an artist from Bexhill-on-sea, UK.

Their recent work has sought to rehistoricise and refictionalise the life of Cynethryth, eighth-century Queen of Mercia. This has involved live publishing, the building of community carnival floats, forced-feeding with pigeon-shaped cakes and the construction of wishing-well cesspits.

Carl’s collaboration with singer and researcher Kelechi Anucha looking at the passage of English folk music into church song is currently on show as a series of sculptural and sonic interventions at The Museum of English Rural Life, Reading for The Commons: Reenchanting the World.

In 2019 they collaborated with artist Linda Stupart in producing All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long, a feature-length musical that was commissioned by the ICA as a part of the live programme for I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker. The play populated the narrative structure of the 1990s video game Ecco the Dolphin with a host of other protagonists including Naomi Klein's reportage of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Margaret Cavendish's 1666 proto-scifi novel The Blazing World, Westlife's cover of "Seasons in the Sun", and Kathy Acker herself.

They have upcoming solo exhibitions at Jupiter Woods, London and Flatland Projects, Bexhill-on-sea and are publishing their first book, Felon Herb expanding on their manufacture of absinthe at KELDER PROJECTS in 2017. They were one of the recipients of Artangel's inaugural Thinking Time grant, have new writing published in Happy Hypocrite #12: Without Reduction; and At Practice #1 and have recently exhibited and performed at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; ICA, London; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-sea and for Transmissions, episode 2.

Dr Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. They completed their PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016, with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. They are currently a permanent lecturer at Birmingham City University, and have previously worked at University of Reading, London College of Communication, and Camberwell Arts College. They have also run arts education projects at Tate, South London Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, and Camden Arts Centre. Linda is interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies (of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer, and affect theory as well as embodied and object-based critical institutional encounters. Their current work consists predominately of writing, performance, film, and sculpture, and engages with queer theory, science fiction, environmental crises, magic, language, desire, and revenge. They have recently exhibited at Lisson Gallery, Raven Row, Tate, IMT, Matt’s Gallery, and The Showroom in London; as well as Transmission in Glasgow, DISTRICT in Berlin, Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna, and Syndicate in Cologne. 

They recently produced All Us Girls Have been Dead for so Long with Carl Gent for the ICA London; a play about climate change, queer sex, and Ecco the Dolphin. They will be in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in late Summer 2021. 

12 July to 22 August
Open daily, 12–5pm

Sound artist and DJ Ain Bailey presents a series of new works for Version, the first onsite exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre of 2021.

Booking to visit the exhibition is recommended but not compulsory. To book a free slot, visit our Eventbrite page here.

Please note the exhibition will be closed to visitors on Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 18 August due to bookings for school visits.

Click the image above to view install photos of the exhibition.

Sound artist and DJ Ain Bailey presents a series of new works for Version, the first onsite exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre of 2021. Installed in three parts across Wysing’s site, the title pays tribute to the ‘version’ of a vocal reggae track. Throughout the exhibition, Bailey brings together sound and sculpture as means to expand on ideas and techniques of ‘sonic biography’, a generative methodology of sound exploration that the artist has finessed over the years. Presented with the opportunity to occupy several spaces across the site, Bailey has produced a series of works that reflect on the artist’s Jamaican heritage, albeit from the position of someone who has not yet visited the island. 

A rendition of “Linstead Market”, a traditional Jamaican folk song, sung by artist and composer Elaine Mitchener plays intermittently throughout reception upon arriving, a nod to songs held in memory and childhood. Moving through to the main gallery, an installation, including a sound composition capturing the cooking of a traditional Jamaican dish, ackee and saltfish, is accompanied by sculptures, exploring the interconnected roles of sound and food in forming biography. For the third and final part of the exhibition, Bailey has transformed Folke
Kobberling and Martin Kaltwasser’s
Amphis sculpture in the Wysing grounds into an homage to dub, the music genre which originated on the island.  

The three sound pieces will be accompanied by a translation, written by artist and writer Taylor Le Melle. Presented alongside the sound works as a textual ‘version’ of the compositions, these act as an experiment in sound translation, whereby sonic components are shared in alternative ways. This element is developed in partnership with exhibition curator Hannah Wallis, as part of an exploration of how sound works can be made more accessible for D/deaf audiences.  

Ain Bailey’s exhibition is generously supported by Arts Council England, DASH and The Future Curators' Programme, The Henry Moore Foundation and The Elephant Trust.

With special thanks to Martha Todd from Studio1Ceramics.

Events 
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of online and onsite events, to be announced shortly. 

Covid Safety 
Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt). Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site. Social distancing is in place and capacity to the exhibition spaces will be monitored. Cleaning wipes are available in each exhibition space to sanitise audio description headphones. Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray. 

Access Information 
Sound works in the exhibition are available in experimental textual forms. 

The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.  

The work in Amphis is also available to view in the Open Studio, as Amphis is not wheelchair accessible.

Accessible parking and toilets are available.

If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Head of Operations, at 
ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.

Ain Bailey
Ain Bailey is a sound artist and DJ whose compositions encompass field recordings and found sounds and are inspired by ideas and reflections on silence and absence, architectural urban spaces, and feminist activism. Her electroacoustic compositions are created for a variety of forms, including multichannel and mixed media installations, moving image soundtracks, live performance and dance. 

In 2019 Bailey exhibited as part of The Range at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; RE: Respite at Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow; and presented her first solo exhibition, And We’ll Always be a Disco in the Glow of Love at Cubitt, London. Bailey has collaborated with numerous artists including; Sonya Boyce with Oh Adelaide! which toured to Iniva, London, Tate Britain, CCA, Glasgow, Whitechapel Gallery London and The Kitchen, New York between 2010-2015; as well as Jimmy Robert, Jasleen Kaur and most recently Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski with Remember to Exhale for Studio Voltaire, 2019.  

Between 2017-2019, The Pitch Sisters was presented as part of Sounds Like Her, a touring exhibition curated by Christine Eyene and commissioned by New Art Exchange, Nottingham and a Serpentine commission working with MRI clients who are LGBT+ asylum seekers and refugees remains ongoing. 

In 2020 Bailey was commissioned by Radiophrenia Festival and in 2021 will be presenting new works with Rewire Festival and Tectonics Festival.  

Taylor Le Melle
Taylor Le Melle writes, organizes, and produces objects; most recently as editor and publisher of science-fantasy novel Orion J. Facey’s “The Virosexuals” (PSS). Born in 1988, Le Melle currently lives and works in London and Rotterdam. 

Elaine Mitchener
Born and raised in East London of Jamaican heritage, Elaine Mitchener is a contemporary vocalist, movement artist and composer. She has performed and collaborated with numerous leading artists in the worlds of contemporary new music, experimental jazz / free improvisation and visual arts. She is founder of collective electroacoustic trio The Rolling and her sound works are held in a curated collection by George E Lewis at Darmstadt Festival.  

Recent projects and commissions include On Being Human as Praxis (SWR Donaueschinger Musiktage); co-curator (with George Lewis) for the London Sinfonietta’s Yet Unheard; specially commissioned video works for Holland Festival, Ruhrtriennale and London Contemporary Music Festival/ Whitechapel Gallery; AMAZING GRACE (reworked) for Marina Abramovic’s SkyArts takeover; and curated two special programmes for BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show. 

In 2021/22 Elaine is one of 50 selected artists whose work will feature in the British Art Show 9 touring exhibition and is a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist. 

Hannah Wallis
Hannah Wallis is an artist and curator based in the Midlands. Concerned with how visual and performative knowledge production can inform and be informed by collectivisation, collaboration and long-term research cycles, Hannah has worked under the moniker of Dyad Creative since 2014 and is currently working as curator-in-residence at Wysing Art Centre alongside her role as Assistant Curator at Nottingham Contemporary. Committed to embedding accessibility practices within the arts and supporting the working rights of artists and art-workers, Hannah has worked with National Gallery, London, Aural Diversity, DASH and East Street Arts among others.

DASH and Wysing Arts Centre are working together as part of a three-year programme of curatorial commissions providing individual residencies for three artists/curators who identify as Deaf and Disabled people with three major arts organisations around the UK.

DASH has been working with galleries and arts centres in England and Wales since 2009 creating opportunities for Deaf and Disabled artists to exhibit and curate. These opportunities have significantly advanced the careers of more than 15 Deaf and Disabled artists, and have influenced and changed the thinking of a number of key people in these galleries. However, DASH asserts that further deep-rooted cultural changes must be made within the visual arts sector in order for it to become a more inclusive and accessible artform.

One way of effecting this change is by placing Deaf and Disabled people in positions of influence within the visual arts, to drive change from within. The long-term aim of the programme is to support the development of Deaf and Disabled Curators, so they can become the directors/curators/programmers of the future.

To find out more about DASH and future programmes of work visit their website here.

During February 2020 Creative Circuit Huntingdon invited artists aged 11–18 across Cambridgeshire to respond to the theme of Difficult Truths through an open-call.

Work will be displayed in 2020 on the Difficult Truths exhibition website. To view the website, click here.

The exhibition developed through members of Creative Circuit Huntingdon initiating the idea of developing an exhibition of young people’s work at Wysing.

The group have worked with Wysing studio artist Damaris Athene to develop the theme and call out for the exhibition, resulting in wide-ranging discussions across thought processes, different perspectives and dystopias.The theme of Difficult Truths was chosen by the group to reflect issues young people face including concerns around climate change, mental health, bullying, fake news and the challenges of identity in the age of social media. Creative Circuit Huntingdon want to open out conversations around difficult subjects that are often not discussed, and hope that sharing these ideas through art work can inspire others to talk more.

Artists age 11 – 18 are invited to continue to submit work to the exhibition digitally. For more information and to submit work, please click here.

About Creative Circuit Huntingdon

Creative Circuit Huntingdon are a group of young people in Huntingdon who meet regularly to work on peer-led collaborative projects.

Previous projects have included making zines, creating an animations, interviewing artists, planning events and organising exhibitions. Creative Circuit is about experimenting with different ways of experiencing and making art, facilitated by practicing artists with Wysing Arts Centre. As part of the curating project, young people have had the opportunity to work towards a Bronze Arts Award.

What young people have said about Creative Circuit Huntingdon:

‘It [has] made me get out of my comfort zone & try new things’

‘I saw that art can be a lot of things, it’s just how you see it’

 ‘[I’ve learnt] that I don't need to be anxious trying new things’

Access

If you have any questions about accessing the online exhibition, submitting work or any other queries please email education@wysingartscentre.org.

14 July to 16 August

Wysing Open Studios 2020 brings together Wysing’s studio and associate artists to share their practices. This year we host Open Studios online to provide a platform for the artists to share how their studio practices have changed during 2020 so far and the recent months of lockdown.

Bringing together 15 artists over 5 weeks plus the young artists working with Circuit Cambridge, Wysing Open Studios 2020 will showcase online works, panel discussions, live performances and more.   

Visit Wysing Open Studios 2020 in the 'Explore' section of our new broadcasting website here, for experimental videos, ongoing research and retrospective showcases from Wysing studio and associate artists, and the 'Discover' section here, for information about panel discussions and artist-led events to join and watch.  

For more information about these events, visit our Events page here.

The artists taking part in Wysing Open Studios 2020 are; Damaris Athene, Aliaskar Torkaliaskari, Philip Cornett, Emanuela Cusin, Lawrence Epps, Robert Foster, Bettina Furnée, Naomi Harwin, Penny Klein, Mae, Emma Smith, Soheila Sokhanvari, Lucy Steggals and Caroline Wendling.

More information about each artist's practice can be found here.

Access

Please get in touch with us to let us know if there is something you need to be able to participate. For example: transcriptions, subtitles or audio descriptions. Email Ceri Littlechild, Wysing's Head of Operations on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.

2 March to 18 March (please note early closure due to Coronavirus)

Click the image above to see more installation photos.

Encounter is a new solo exhibition from artist Naomi Harwin, and Wysing Arts Centre's first presentation as part of a new programme strand, Test Space, which provides a public platform for Wysing’s studio artists to test out new ideas and directions.

As the first Test Space artist, Harwin will continue her recent investigations into materiality and form to create an ambitious, immersive installation in a new small exhibiting space in our main studio building.

Repurposing collaging techniques for a 3D environment, Encounter will see abstracted photographs, drawings, sculptures, video and lighting making up multi-layered perspectives reminiscent of theatrical stage design. 

Drawing on an interest in the mutability of objects and materials, Harwin employs techniques of drawing, photography, print and sculpture to translate and re-translate a source object into something entirely new. For this exhibition she will present a series of objects with ambiguous sources, referencing machine-made and corporeal forms in a deceptive interplay of line and form, surface and object. 

Biography 

Naomi Harwin (b. 1992, Winchester, UK) is an artist based in Cambridge and has been a studio artist at Wysing Art Centre since 2015.  Her sculptures, drawings and installations move through a self generative process of translating information and images extracted from the investigation of an object. Harwin’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, recent exhibitions and features include: To be an object is to possess a boundary, 1961 Projects, In Personam, Singapore (2019), Like-minded, Minimal Zine issue 01 (2019),  Non-working hours, 1961 Projects, Singapore (2018), We:You,Me,
Firstsite, Colchester, UK (2017), AD HOC + TRADE Swap Editions, Art Licks,SET and Castor Projects, London, UK (2017), in between things, Nunns Yard, Norwich, UK (2016) and ‘O’, Airspace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, UK (2015). 

Access

In response to government guidelines, Wysing's site closed temporarily on 18 March until further notice.

If you have questions about access needs, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.

Interview with Helen Cammock

 

2 March to 18 March (please note early closure due to Coronavirus)

(Click the image to the left to see more stills and photos.)

"You'll have to learn to resist the fascination of Idlewhatever-you-call-it. When I tell you to come in at a certain time I mean that time and not half an hour later. And you needn't stop to discourse with sympathetic listeners on your way, either."
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 1908

Turner-Prize-winning artist Helen Cammock presents a new film and text work commissioned as part of Wysing Arts Centre’s 30th birthday programme, in 2019.  

During the Autumn and Winter of 2019/20, Cammock has been in-residence at Wysing responding to the organisation’s archive. Inspired by histories, photographs and artworks uncovered in the archive, Cammock’s new work acts as a reflection on the politics of idleness and what it means creatively, emotionally and culturally to be idle at a time when the questions are being asked more widely about the physical and emotional cost of hyper-productivity, required by Neoliberalism. 

The exhibition’s centre-piece is a new short film, They Call It Idlewild,
occupying Wysing’s gallery. The film
begins as an evocative account of the artist’s explorations in Wysing’s
archive; intuitively opening boxes and searching through photos as she uncovers forgotten names, histories and artworks. Reflecting on these findings, Cammock’s poetic voiceover begins to see the organisation in new terms, as a place where artists are free to engage with idleness, and to take things at their own speed. She sees this as the foundation of a thirty- year history of creativity at Wysing; a constant in a time of sweeping societal and political change.  

Cammock explores the processes of idleness through visual and poetic intertextuality drawing on writers such as Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, James Joyce and Jonathan Crary to consider what it means to be idle. At one point during the film, Cammock begins to sing Johnny Mercer’s depression-era song “Lazy Bones”, drawing an explicit link between several historical periods and reminding us of the pervasiveness of racial stereotypes around laziness and the hypocrisies of the slave, business and land-owning classes. They Call It Idlewild asks: who gets to be lazy.  

Helen Cammock's residency and exhibition are supported by Arts Council England and Art Fund. 

Biography  

Cammock was the joint winner of the Turner Prize 2019 and her exhibition The Long Note, has been presented at Turner Contemporary, Margate as part of Turner Prize, 2019. She was winner of the 7th Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Her subsequent exhibition,
Che Si Può Fare (What Can Be Done) premiered at Whitechapel Gallery, London from June – September 2019 and is currently on view at Collezione Maramotti, Italy until 8th March 2020.  

Her new film Concrete Feather and Porcelain Tacks, has been commissioned with Film and Video Umbrella, London; Touchstones Museum, Rochdale, and The Photographers Gallery, London and will be exhibited in solo exhibitions at The Photographers Gallery and Rochdale Museum in July and October 2020 respectively. This summer, Serpentine Gallery, London will present Cammock’s project Radio Ballads, a radio programme and series of live performance events. 

The Long Note premiered at VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland; and showed at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2019. Other solo exhibitions include The Sound of Words, Reading Museum, UK (2019) and
Shouting In Whispers, Cubitt, London (2017). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at; Somerset House, Hollybush Gardens, London and FirstSite, Colchester and she has staged performances at The Showroom, Whitechapel Gallery and the ICA in London. 

Cammock was born in Staffordshire, UK in 1970 and lives and works in Brighton and London. She is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.

Press

To read Maria Walsh's review in Art Monthly, click here.

To read Erica Scourti's review in MAP, click here.

To read David Trigg's interview with Helen Cammock in Studio International, click here.

Access

In response to government guidelines, Wysing's site closed temporarily on 18 March until further notice.

If you have questions about access needs, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.

Boundary + Gesture
7 October to 8 December

Open every day, 12-5pm

Click the image above to see more installation photos.
Image: Dominique White, 'a haunting, a wake of sorts', 2019. Photo: Wilf Speller

We are delighted to present our new gallery exhibition Boundary + Gesture, curated by Taylor Le Melle. The exhibition features works by Aslan Ġoisum, Derica Shields, a major new commission by Dominique White, and publications from PSS.

As part of our 30th birthday programme, Le Melle developed the exhibition during their Art Fund supported residency at Wysing earlier in 2019 during which they convened a series of public events that explored notions of property and monetisation.

Boundary + Gesture presents works that situate explorations of gesture and property within landscapes of ‘the rural’. Developed as exhibition-as-research, this experimental exhibition format brings art works in conversation with archival material and texts.

A new commission by UK artist Dominique White encompasses the entirety of Wysing’s gallery and responds to research on Black subjectivity, shipwreck and the Sargasso Sea, navigating a dialogue between the body and material. Repurposing sails, combining fabrics with kaolin clay and galvanised steel, 'a haunting, a wake of sorts' channel the aquatic landscape as a site of possibilities, and a way of "escaping the body and destroying what was held captive".

Aslan Ġoisum’s video works 'Volga' (2015) and 'Scythian Journey' (2019) are presented in separate screening rooms, and consider the idea of testimony as well as proprietary law in relation to intimate and state histories of forced migration. 

In Wysing’s reception, a polyvocal work by writer and researcher Derica Shields uses archival material surrounding 18th century court cases to create speculative histories. Reconfiguring museum display through sound, Shields presents three fraying, divergent oral fictions that examine property law as debated and lived during what is called Britain’s era of abolition.

PSS, Le Melle’s publishing project with editor/researcher Rowan Powell presents three new pamphlets that further expand on ideas within the exhibition. Rowan Powell presents a new text that links the history of land enclosures in Britain with a story recorded by French surgeon Ambroise Pare in his 1573 text On Monsters and Marvels. A joint new text by Le Melle and artist Aslan Ġoisum frames his works in the context of global colonial histories. Using Le Melle’s preferred methodology of foraging existing content, the final text will excerpt writer, curator and artist, Imani Robinson’s essay and ongoing film project “Black Testimony” to accompany Dominique White’s new commission.

Biographies

Taylor Le Melle is a curator and writer. Recent writing has been featured in publications including: Sad Sack by Sophia al-Maria (Book Works); Che si può fare, Helen Cammock's exhibition catalogue (Whitechapel Gallery); Gender, Space (Macmillian) ed. Aimee Meredith Cox; as well as in periodicals such as Art Monthly and Flash Art. Taylor is a member of not/nowhere, an artist workers’ cooperative. Taylor was writer-in-residence at Jerwood Visual Arts in 2018 and curator-in-residence at Wysing Arts Centre in Spring 2019.

Aslan Ġoisum (Chechnya, 1991, lives in Grozny and Amsterdam) employs various artistic media – mainly the moving image, sculptural installation and paper-based techniques – that articulate the collective and individual upheaval marking the North Caucasus history. This inevitably entails analysis of the colonial legacy of the Russian Empire, in all its guises. Recent exhibitions include: Blood and Soil: Dark Arts for Dark Times, Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, LT, 2019); All That You See Here, Forget, Emalin (London, UK, 2018); How To Live Together, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, AT, 2017) and People of No Consequence, Museum of Contemporary Art (Antwerp, BE, 2016).

Rowan Powell is a writer, editor and PhD Candidate at University of California, Santa Cruz. Alongside Taylor Le Melle, Powell co-runs PSS, a publisher of printed material which has recently launched Daniella Valz Gen’s poetry chapbook Subversive Economies, Rehana Zaman’s Tongues and Victoria Sin’s Dream Babes 2.0.

Imani Robinson is a London-based writer, live art practitioner, plant lover and prison abolitionist. They are one half of Languid Hands, a curatorial project initiated with their Very Close Collaborator, Rabz Lansiquot. In 2019 Languid Hands presented two projects: Towards a Black Testimony at Jerwood, U.K. and Stroom, NL.; and away, completely: denigrate at Narrative Projects, U.K. Imani was a member of sorryyoufeeluncomfortable (SYFU) Collective 2015-18 and completed an MA in Forensic Architecture at the Centre for Research Architecture in 2019. Recent personal projects include: Ditto & Ditto Take a Trip to Port Authority, a moving image work made with Halima Haruna; WELCOME NOTE IN A WELCOME SPEECH, a collaborative performance with artist Libita Clayton; and The Black Drift, an ongoing series of workshops and performances exploring Black geographies and the psychic afterlives of transatlantic slavery. You can find some less academic and equally abstract writing by Imani in Dream Babes 2.0.

Dominique White (b. 1993, UK) weaves together the theories of Black Radical Thought with the nautical myths of Black Diaspora into a term she defines as the Shipwrecked; a reflexive verb and state of being. Her sculptures demonstrate how Black life could extend beyond its own subjective limits and act as beacons or vessels of an ignored civilisation defined as the Stateless; a realm in which the past, present and future have converged into a Black Future. White's research reaches back to the sound of Detroit's techno scene, where she continues to reference narratives (situated in space and underwater) depicted by Aux 88 (Tom Tom and Keith Tucker), DJ Stingray (Sherard Ingram) and Drexciya (Gerald Donald and James Stinson). Recent exhibitions and presentations include Abandon(ed) Vessel at Kevinspace [solo] (Vienna, 2019), a solo booth presented by VEDA at Art-O-Rama (Marseille, 2019), Fugitive of the State(less) [solo] at VEDA (Florence, 2019), Flood-tide, Love Unlimited (Glasgow, 2018); The Share of Opulence; Doubled; Fractional, Sophie Tappeiner (Vienna, 2018); °c, Clearview.ltd (London, 2018); The Conch (April), South London Gallery (London, 2018); Signs | Beacons, Caustic Coastal (Manchester, 2018). White was an artist-in-residence at Curva Blu (IT) June to July 2019.

Derica Shields is a writer and cultural worker from London. As part of a Triple Canopy commission, she is completing a multi-format oral history project centering on Black people's accounts of the UK welfare state. Bad Practice, her book project commissioned by Hannah Black is forthcoming from Book Works.

Access
If you have questions about access needs please Wysing's Head of Operations,
Ceri Littlechild on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org

All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding
7 July to 25 August

Open every day, 12–5pm

Click on the image for a full set of installation photos.

Wysing Arts Centre is delighted to announce an ambitious new exhibition to celebrate its 30th anniversary. Staged across Wysing’s 11-acre rural site, All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding considers art as magic, artists as magicians, and the studio as a magical site.*

The exhibition features new commissions from artists Jill McKnight, Tessa Norton, Pallavi Paul, Imran Perretta and Morgan Quaintance alongside works from Jonathan Baldock, Anna Bunting-Branch, Olivier Castel, Melika Ngombe Kolongo, Shana Moulton, Harold Offeh, Heather Phillipson, Elizabeth Price, Laure Prouvost, Phil Root and Tai Shani.

Gone's for once the old magician 
With his countenance forbidding;  
I'm now master, I'm tactician, 
All his ghosts must do my bidding.  
Know his incantation, 
Spells and gestures too;  
By my mind's creation 
Wonders shall I do.  

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, 1779, translation by Paul Dyrsen, 1878.    

The exhibition begins as an idealistic retelling of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, the tale in which an apprentice uses the master’s magic to cause chaos in the unattended studio, before being caught and punished. In a deliberate act of misreading, All His Ghosts... leaves the tale unfinished, re-interpreting the story as one of liberation. With the ‘forbidding’ master sorcerer gone, and the story’s moralising ending removed, the apprentice is free to experiment, to create and to fail without judgement.  

Frozen at a moment of pure creative potential, when the apprentice finds them self in command of the master sorcerer’s ‘incantations...spells and gestures’, the focus of the story shifts. Now that experimentation, creativity and failure are permitted, the exhibition asks who gets to enjoy these freedoms? In other words, if no one is obliged to be the apprentice, who gets to be the sorcerer?

Works from Jonathan Baldock, Olivier Castel, Phil Root and Shana Moulton in Wysing’s reception area set the scene. A forbidding master keeps watch over an overburdened apprentice, a frustrated dreamer, and a character anxiously searching for physical, mental and
spiritual fulfilment. Overhead,
Melika Ngombe Kolongo’s sonic sculpture acts as a first successful attempt at spell-casting and leads the way into the gallery where new ways of thinking are possible.

Inside, works from Anna Bunting-Branch, Jill McKnight, Tessa Norton, Harold Offeh, Laure Prouvost and Tai Shani perform a series of magical acts—transfiguration, enchantments, summoning and time travel—while asking who gets to hold and to use such magic. Taking the ‘his’ of the exhibition’s title as an explicit invitation for feminist and queer challenges, they present narratives of suppressed creativity and accounts of knowledge exchanged at society’s margins.

While the original “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” story ends by offering a paternalistic view on how magical powers should be controlled, our re-telling expands outside of Wysing’s gallery and across the site to offer a less rigid outline of what is at stake in wielding, bearing and transmitting these powers responsibly. Shana Moulton,
Imran Perretta, Pallavi Paul and
Morgan Quaintance remind us of the risks if this magic is reclaimed from artists and misused, whether by advertising, the military, big pharma or government policy, while Heather Phillipson, Elizabeth Price and Tai Shani present different ways in which art can become a consciousness changing force, with the possibility to create a sanctuary or to act as an invocation against what Phillipson calls ‘the infinite patriarchal circle jerk.’

*“I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.” Alan Moore in The Mindscape of Alan Moore, 2003. Discussions with Morgan Quaintance on this topic have been very useful in informing this exhibition.

Phil Root's Ten of Wands, 2011, is based on a figure of the same name from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot cards, which show a person weighed down by their load but approaching their goal. Painted at Wysing, while on a year-long residency, the painting is here cast as the apprentice sorcerer, overburdened by repetitive and mundane tasks and longing for creative fulfilment.

Jonathan Baldock's installation Pa Ubu, 2015, is a large-scale puppet inspired by Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, 1886 and the Jean-Christophe Averty film adaptation (1965). Based on the titular character, a despotic yet infantile ruler, Baldock's creation looks out over the first room of the exhibition, absurd and intimidating in equal measure. 

For this exhibition Olivier Castel has revisited a series of works originally proposed during his residency at Wysing in 2014. Conceived as interventions to the site, their ambition, scale and cost has prevented them from ever being realised. Presented as raw unused ideas on modest postcards, they are installed alongside other by-products of artistic production.

In Shana Moulton’s video
MindPlace ThoughtStream, 2014, Moulton’s anxious alter-ego Cynthia places an order for a MindPlace Thoughtstream Biofeedback System, a real-life product and precursor to today’s health apps and devices. Once plugged into the ‘personal relaxation system’, Cynthia embarks on a journey towards wellness that takes in whispering ASMR statues, psychedelic Activia adverts and TED talks.

Melika Ngombe Kolongo’s sound installation 
Resonance (forced vibrations), 2018, proposes rhythm, echo and melody as a medium for information exchange and a tool for alternative forms of thinking. Drawing on the use of sound in ritual and soundwaves in Bantu-Kongo
cosmology, the work thinks about the
possibilities of sound as a way to experience the world outside of language. 

Laure Prouvost’s Grandma’s Dream, 2013, was created as a companion piece to Wantee, 2016, Prouvost’s Turner-prize winning film about her eccentric conceptual artist grandfather. Composed of fanciful and fantastic imagery of a world where planes serve tea from the sky, where rooms are carpeted on every surface and where conceptual art takes care of dinner, Prouvost’s work places her grandmother’s imagination at centre stage. Suffused with as much sorrow as playfulness, Grandma’s Dream asks why only some of us get to play the artist. 

Harold Offeh presents Down at The Twilight Zone, 2019, an installation drawing together Offeh’s research into queer urban histories in Toronto, particularly in The ArQuives, Canada's LGBTQ+ archives. Installed as a trompe l’oeil 
print, Offeh selects a series of interviews conducted in the 1980s by John Grube and Lionel Collier with Canadian gay men born in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Spanning a turbulent century for queer rights, Offeh proposes
intergenerational listening as a political project. 

A series of hand-painted posters from
Anna Bunting-Branch's W.I.T.C.H, 2016, project revisit an acronym that circulated among American socialist-feminist groups in the late 1960s. Aligning themselves with the figure of the witch ‘the original guerillas’**, the groups employed theatrical techniques and sought to situate the women’s liberation movement in a broader struggle of leftwing causes. Drawing on a range of sources including images and rhetoric from advertisements for ‘second wave’ feminist organising and protest posters, archival documents and motifs from science fiction texts, Bunting-Branch's paintings interweave fact and fiction to proliferate new contemporary meanings and possibilities for ‘W.I.T.C.H.’.

**W.I.T.C.H. Manifesto, 1968  

The Fields Here Are Full of Ghosts, 2019, is a new experimental text from Tessa Norton, commissioned by Wysing and produced over a flexible multi-part residency in 2018. On becoming a parent in 2016, Norton felt as though she had experienced an irreparable rupture to time, but one that she was not keen to fix; attending the residencies with her family was a way to harness this strange energy. Norton’s publication talks about joy, grief, ghosts, pop music, potential, and the elasticity of time.

Tai Shani presents two works across the exhibition. Showings, 2018, in Wysing’s
gallery, are a series of ambiguous models that Shani proposes as ‘spell books…
maquettes for never closing, hedonistic nightclubs… archeological sites…airports for extra terrestrials… [and] portals for ghosts to come into this world’. Among the miniature sculptures is a model of Julian of Norwich: a medieval mystic, who experienced a series of visions, or ‘shewings’, is the earliest known woman to write a book in the English language and who ended her life in permanent seclusion as an anchoress.

An episode from Shani’s Turner-prize-nominated DC Semiramis series,Paradise,
2017, is installed in Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser’s Amphis, 2008, structure. Featuring a performance from a blood-spattered Maya Lubinsky and a score from artist Maxwell Sterling, Shani’s
Promethean myth introduces us to Paradise, a figure formed by AI who mine human genomic data for trauma narratives. Stranded on a rock and eternally tormented, Paradise takes aim at her creators and those who ‘organised this violence’.

Warning: Paradise contains mature scenes.

A new sculptural and sound installation from Jill McKnight investigates inherited ancestral wisdom, the elasticity of time and the archetypal roles that contemporary life pressures us into assuming. The centerpiece of the work is a new radio play, recorded in Wysing’s Polyphonic Recording Studio and consisting of four characters: The Artist, The Writer, The Administrator and The Mother. The first three of these are represented in large scale-sculptures in hessian, plaster and steel. For these works, McKnight was able to work with steel that had been bequeathed to Yorkshire Sculpture Park from sculptor Anthony Caro, who had in turn inherited it from the American sculptor David Smith.

Acts, incitements, etcetera, 2019, is a new video installation from Pallavi Paul drawing on her 2017 residency at Wysing and research into the Bletchley Park archive and the 1923 Official Secrets Act. Composed of archival photographs, documents detailing the repercussions of spying operations and interviews with the women who worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s central code-breaking site during World War II, Paul’s work asks what it means to hold a secret. Reflecting on the labour of code-breaking and its legacy beyond wartime as memories are suppressed, the work explores how people, as much as language itself, can become repositories for information. Acts, incitements, etcetera is installed on the boundary of Wysing’s site in an unused temporary structure.

The War on Terror, 2019, is a new sound installation by Imran Perretta
commissioned for this exhibition and installed in the live room of Wysing’s Polyphonic Recording Studio. The commission takes the form of a ‘perpetual’ sound work, reconfiguring and reforming itself in real-time. It makes use of a sound effect known as the Shepard tone which gives the illusion of an infinitely ascending or descending tone and that is often used in war and action films to create tension. The work’s title references the asymmetric response to the September 11th attacks by the US and UK governments, whose rhetorical sleight of hand in declaring a 'war' enabled a strategy of violence and occupation that has drawn many parts of the world into a state of perpetual conflict.

Elizabeth Price’s HD video installation, 
THE TENT, 2012, takes a single book as
its subject, source and starting point for its images and sound. Published by the Arts Council, Systems surveys the work of artists associated with the 1970s British Systems Group: reductive, predominantly abstract art generated using system theories. It features drawings, documentation and essays by each of the artists. Price’s work pores over these documents, focusing particularly on James Moyes’ Vibration Tent, 1972, an environment intended for the intense, reductive experience of extreme white light and white noise. The work derives a fictional narrative from the book as images become space and pages become physical structures. THE TENT proposes an ambiguous relationship with this previous generation of artists, showing the potential to find an ideological sanctuary in their theories and propositions, but also reminding us that it can be ‘taken down again’. Artists associated with the Systems group: Richard Allen, John Ernest, Malcolm Hughes, Colin Jones, Michael Kidner, Peter Lowe, James Moyes, David Saunders, Geoffrey Smedley, Jean Spencer, Jeffrey Steel and Gillian Wise Ciobotaru.

Heather Phillipson’ WHAT’S THE DAMAGE, 2017, is a proposition and provocation, answering back to ongoing crises under white patriarchy, relaying and augmenting feelings and gestures of chronic unease, protest and dissent. Phillipson’ summons and riposte is given vital form through representations of livid and enriched menstrual debris, rising up against leadership circle-jerks, over-groomed toupees, environmental catastrophes, weeping vortexes, seared orang utans, animal-fat banknotes, and advancing supermoons, pizzas and drones.

Missing Time, 2019, A new single-channel film work from Morgan Quaintance, commissioned for this exhibition occupies the Open Studio. The work draws on experiments and research from Quaintance’s 2017 residency at Wysing and responds to the themes of the exhibition.

All His Ghosts Must Do My Bidding is curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield and supported by Arts Council England. Exhibition open: 7 July to 25 August, 12–5pm daily

Biographies

For artist biographies, please click here.

Access

If you have questions about access needs, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org.

An opera and exhibition by artist-musicians, Ravioli Me Away
9 February to 14 April.
For more exhibition photos, click the image above.

To launch our 30th anniversary, we are delighted to present The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis, a bold and ambitious immersive live work and exhibition by Ravioli Me Away (Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald). The work will launch our 2019 programme through which we will be celebrating Wysing’s 30th anniversary.

The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis transforms Wysing’s gallery in its entirety into a multimedia exhibition that includes new sculptural works and costumes alongside a three-screen video installation. Gallery visitors are able to engage with the objects and costumes which relate to the characters and themes of the opera.

The surrealist, multi-media opera takes the audience on an audio enhanced journey as The Protagonist (the soul of humanity) searches for a body that can give it meaning. The Protagonist expresses the paradoxical sentiment that everyone is the main character in their own life. The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is a colourful, comi-tragic take on individual and collective aspiration, explored and expressed through a genre-diverse score and the ever-present voice of The Narrator, a soprano singer situated amidst the audience.

Ravioli Me Away have been in-residence at Wysing across the past year developing the work, alongside a large number of collaborators, in the Wysing Polyphonic recording studio and through public workshops. To accompany the exhibition and opera, a limited-edition vinyl record of the soundtrack, with an accompanying songbook, has been released on the Wysing Polyphonic record label.

A second performance of the opera will take place at Wysing on 30 March 2019, 6-8pm (sold out). The exhibition will be open 10 February to 14 April, 12–5pm daily

Access
If you have questions about access needs for the performance or the exhibition, please email Wysing’s Head of Operations, Ceri Littlechild, on ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org

Ravioli Me Away
Un-defined by genre, Ravioli Me Away’s high energy, dangerously ambitious and delusional jazzy-post-pop-punk-hip-funk sound with stylistically erratic motifs span all-known past, present and future human cultures and sub-cultures. This is social realism soaked through with a heady dose of fantasy, idiosyncratic poetics, keyboard flurries and vocal vicissitudes described as “vintage drag-queen Bananarama

Youtube footage played with twice the sass and in double time with an incredulous broadband connection reflected in the eyes of a much overworked and downright exhausted Julie Burchill on acid”.

Ravioli Me Away are Sian Dorrer, Rosie Ridgway and Alice Theobald. Since forming in January 2013, they have performed extensively at various events, venues, festivals and galleries in the UK, France, Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic and Holland. In 2015 they supported The Fall at Brixton Electric and have also appeared on radio shows on 6 Music, Resonance FM and NTS Radio. In 2014 Ravioli Me Away released their first 12” LP The Inevitable Album on God Job Records and a Limited Edition tape of live recorded material produced by Ben Wallers of The County Teasers/The REBEL on Neen Records. In 2016, they released their second Album Living Is A Myth with Upset The Rhythm. They have performed twice in the Wysing Polyphonic music festival, in 2014 and 2015, and Alice Theobald was an artist-in-residence at Wysing in 2014.

Project Collaborators 

Tom Hirst is a musician based in London and currently the sole practitioner behind Design A Wave, his electronic synth-pop music project. 

Dean Rodney Jr. is the songwriter and vocalist for the band The Fish Police, who formed at Heart n Soul, a creative arts charity who provide opportunities and support the talents of people with learning disabilities and help share their art widely.  

Onyeka Igwe is an artist filmmaker and researcher using dance, voice, archive and text exploring physical body and geographical place as sites of cultural and political meaning. 

Eothen Stearn is a Feminist Queer artist interested in craft, memory, emotions and modalities of speech. They work with performance, sound, sculpture and costume. They are in the Rotterdam based band Difficult.

Siobhan Mooney is a Mezzo Soprano singer who has worked with Grange Park Opera, Pilmico Opera and staged collaborative shows with performance artists Dickie Beau and Lisa Lee. 

Dan Mitchell is an artist and performer living and working in London. He is a founding member of Poster Studio (1994 - 1997) and the publisher of Hard Mag. 

Ben Wallers is a musician and performer who has been releasing music under various guises since 1995 including ‘THE REBEL’, who have released 31 albums. 

Scott Bradbury is the enigmatic frontman of the London band post punk band Chips for the Poor. He is a trained actor and has performed in Alice Theobald’s video works since 2014. 

Victor Jakeman is a musician, performer and member of Claw Marks, Insecure Men, Whitby Bay and also collaborates with artists Pil and Galia Kollectiv on the performance art project WE. 

Adam Sinclair is a 3D animation artist and has made works for Ed Atkins and Tai Shani.

Jack Barraclough is a film director, editor and animator. Jack has made music videos in bands including Sacred Paws and Franz Ferdinand and directed The Goblin Town music video for Ravioli Me Away.

Aymie Backler is a Production Manager specialising in performance and durational art works. She has worked with Siobhan Davies, Katie Paterson and John Cale.

Charlotte Poulet is a sound technician, sound artist and performer who has worked with bands including Wire, Suicide, The Liars, Throbbing Gristle, The Pop Group and currently with industrial pioneers Test Department. 

Kathryn Gray is a musician from Leeds and makes music as Mia La Metta, Empress Maude and as a member of the bands Sherbert Tripod and Beards. She is also a member of the Lumen Audio Visual Collective.

Patrick Moran plays drums and sings for black metal band WHITBY BAY, he also publishes the metal fanzine Buried.

Robert Prouse is a digital A/V tinkerer and dilettante programmer. Bitten by a radioactive spider from Aldermaston’s Atomic Weapons Establishment as a child, he has been doing weird stuff ever since.

The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis performance will tour to The Box at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth (11 May), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (18 May) and Block Universe at the Albany, London (1 June). 

The View From Behind The Futuristic Rose Trellis is produced by Ravioli Me Away and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge. Touring and commissioned in partnership with BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead; The Box, Plymouth; Block Universe, London, with additional support from the Albany, London; Heart n Soul, London; Nottingham Contemporary and The Barbican Theatre, Plymouth. The project is supported with a Grant for the Arts using public funding by Arts Council England.

The vinyl record of The View From Behind the Futuristic Rose Trellis is available here.

Press

"Everywhere you look in the work, there is this extrapolation from the mundane to the extraordinary. The crazy paving floor is encrusted with crumpled images of a takeaway Costa cup, Monster energy drinks and Marlboro cigarette packets. Bin bags become our seats as this world swirls around us, we slip in and out of other people's dreams and desires and experience their daily grind. But we are not simply looking in, we are also looking out."
Niki Russell, Art Monthly, March 2019.

To read Niki Russell's review in Art Monthly, click here.

To read Tessa Norton's review in The Wire, click here.

7 October to 9 December, 12–5pm daily

Warm Worlds and Otherwise is artist Anna Bunting-Branch’s first major solo exhibition, staging an ambitious, experimental new work in Virtual Reality.  

The exhibition draws on Bunting-Branch's long-standing interest in the encounters between feminist practice and science fiction, to explore ideas of worldbuilding, embodied perception and technologies of representation.

The exhibition's centre-piece is META, a prototype for a new work in VR, jointly commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, The Mechatronic Library, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD.

In this iteration of META, digital arts studio Werkflow have transformed Bunting-Branch’s hand-painted characters, props and backdrops into an immersive virtual storyworld. As the viewer is transported between environments - from an unknown planet to a restaurant orbiting in space and beyond - we inhabit the bodies of different human and non-human characters in the narrative.

Entering the gallery, the viewer encounters a simple looping animation offering the words 'Well-come, World Travellor! Beyond the animation, an enclosed area of the gallery suggests one of the worlds from the VR work. Here, four specially designed viewing stations present META on a series of modified Oculus Go headsets, which have been extensively remodeled by Bunting-Branch. The exhibition is scored by a newly commissioned ambient sound work by artist Aliyah Hussain.

In Wysing's reception, a small reference library collates some of the material that informed the research for Warm Worlds and Otherwise, including classic and contemporary feminist science fiction such as Naomi Mitchison's Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) and Aliette de Bodard's 'Immersion' (2012) and the collection of short stories by James Tiptree Jr. (the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon), from which the exhibition takes its title.

Together with these examples of genre fiction, Bunting-Branch'sinterest in the reconfiguration of sensory perception is also influenced by theoretical works such as Luce Irigaray's Is the Subject of Science Sexed?(1985) and A Foray into the Worlds's of Animals and Humans (1934), in which bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll develops his concept of 'umwelten' - subjective bubble worlds unique to each and every organism.

From cutting-edge experiments in VR, to the once-revolutionary technology of the paperback book, Warm Worlds and Otherwise is interested in how technologies produce new knowledge. META's painterly aesthetic references the work of artist Maria Lassnig (1919-2014) and science illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717), particularly their representations of embodied sensations and bodily transformations, and shows Bunting-Branch's commitment to painting as an affective generative technology.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise is part of Worlds Among Us, a collaboration between Wysing Arts Centre, The Mechatronic Library, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD which launched in October 2017. The first Worlds Among Us retreat in 2017 featured contributions from Rebecca Allen, Katriona Beales, Anna Bunting-Branch, Ami Clarke, Sonya Dyer, Candice Jacobs, Wilf Speller, 555-5555, Werkflow and The Mechatronic
Library. Worlds Among Us aims to use new technologies to look again at the worlds we do not see. How can creating new worlds, virtual experiences and augmented perspectives help us see more of what already exists?

Warm Worlds and Otherwise and Worlds Among Us are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise is part of the Festival of Ideas.

Artist Biography

Anna Bunting-Branch (born 1987, Cambridge, UK) is an artist and researcher based in London. Recent publications and events include POEKHALI!, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2018); 'More generous and more suspicious' - Feminist SF as a worldbuilding practice, MAP Magazine (2018); 'figure, feels, fantom' Art Licks, Issue 22 (2018); Hauntopia/What If?, The Research Pavilion, Venice (2017); I AM SF, CCA, Derry~Londonderry (2017); The Labours of Barren House, Jerwood Space, London (2017); Witchy Methodologies, ICA, London (2017). Anna is currently undertaking a practice-related PhD at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, supported by the AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership. Her thesis, titled 'Things Could Be Thought Differently -- Reading feminist science fiction with Luce Irigaray', considers feminist SF as a methodology to approach the speculative question of sexual difference in both theory and practice. www.annabuntingbranch.com

Collaborator Biographies 

Aliyah Hussain’s practice approaches themes found within feminist science fiction literature, in particular the possibilities of co-sharing space in domestic or social settings. Using ceramic sculpture, handmade instruments and found objects to generate sound, her work is made using contact mics and effects pedals as well as synth and melodica. Hussain is interested in exploring the physicality of sound, using feeling and sensitivity to record movement and gesture. Her sound works take influence from the tradition of scoring music for film but is made to accompany text, specifically works of feminist science fiction and she makes experimental electronic music influenced by new age, ambient and Science Fiction.

Hussain is based at Islington Mill studios, Salford, UK. She has released two EPs of experimental electronic music - ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’ and ‘Sultana’s Dream' with Manchester-based cassette tape label Sacred Tapes. She has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally, most recently at the Slade research centre and Roaming Projects, London and Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, UK.

Werkflow is an experimental digital arts studio based in Somerset House, London. Werkflow focus on using game engine technology to create unique work spanning the fields of music, art, fashion and advertising, alongside producing our first full-length computer game, Sovereign. As well as creating their own studio led projects, their highly collaborative practice leads them to work and consult with highly acclaimed artists, designers and institutions, creating experimental computer-generated imagery.

Partner Biographies 

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is the UK's leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool. Offering a unique programme of exhibitions, film and participant-led art projects, FACT use the power of creative technology to inspire and enrich lives.  

QUAD is a Cinema, Gallery, Café Bar, Digital resource and Workshop that anyone can use. QUAD a creative hub based in Derby that connects people and businesses to art and film and creates opportunities for entertainment, education and participation. QUAD transforms lives through active participation in art and film.

The Mechatronic Library is a not-for-profit organisation founded by Afro-Trinbagonian Helen Starr. It is dedicated to fostering shared projects between artists, technologists and retailers; producing saleable products and experiences.  

16 June to 15 July, 12-5pm daily

Over the course of three weeks, clay products will be made in Wysing’s gallery, where they will also be stored and dried, creating a working space and exhibition that will illustrate some of the key ideas behind a project developed by Grizedale Arts and Wysing Arts Centre as part of a UK-Korea Residency Exchange. 

The ‘in common ownership’ designs for the products have been developed over the past year and combine ideas and skills drawn from an UK-Korea exchange co-ordinated by Grizedale Arts and Wysing Arts Centre. Master potter Gyung-kyun Shin, black bamboo master Seonhui Choe, and chef Gae-hwa Lim, developed initial designs with UK designer/maker Tom Philipson and Grizedale Arts. These designs will be further evolved into a ‘family’ of products at Wysing by Korean designer Jungyou Choi, potter, Hyunmin Shin, and curator Jina Lee, during a residency at Wysing in June and July. 

The designs will make up a family of products for domestic use. Nests of bowls and bento boxes, chop sticks and spoons and many other fusions have been developed to be made with the simplest of means and homemade tools.

Potter, Hyunmin Shin, will be in-residence at Wysing refining the products and preparing Wysing’s onsite Anagama kiln for a spectacular 48-hour firing in early July. Wysing’s wood-fired Anagama kiln was built in 1998 by Japanese potter Izumihara Masanobu to a traditional Bizen, tear-drop shaped, design.

Over the course of three weeks, products will be made in Wysing’s gallery, where they will also be stored and dried, creating a working space and exhibition that will illustrate some of the key ideas behind the project, drawing on the Arts and Crafts movement, the Korean Intangible National Asset register and many other design revolutions.

Further artists involved in the UK-Korea exchange programme will contribute to the thinking and inspiration behind the project, and the aesthetic presentation of their research over the past year. This includes UK artists Aaron Angell and Mark Essen who recently completed a residency in Korea, and the Fairland Collective.

The gallery will remain open every day from 16 June to 15 July and will include works in production, alongside research that has informed the object designs.

Making Everyday builds on a previous collaboration with Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, Joe Hartley and Sam Buckley. The UK-Korea residency exchange is funded by Arts Council Korea (ARKO) and Arts Council of England. With thanks to Ben Brierley and Lawrence Epps.

Exhibition open from 11 February to 15 April (closed 30 March, 1 & 2 April)
Open every day, 12–5pm
There will be a closing event for the exhbition on 14 April

Helen Cammock, Ilker Cinarel, Jesse Darling, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Juliet Jacques, Isaac Julien, Carolyn Lazard, Zinzi Minott, The Newsreel Collective, Harold Offeh, Raju Rage, S1 Portland (Women's Beat League), Syllabus III and Liv Wynter.

Read a review of the exhibition by Helena Haimes in MAP Magazine, click here.

more of an avalanche presents work produced, researched, shared or discussed at Wysing in 2017 when we developed our programme under the theme
Polyphonic (many voices). The exhibition considers what it takes for people in marginalised positions to speak out and the mechanisms that get used to stop them from doing so. Looking back at 2017, the exhibition includes the ephemeral "work" produced at Wysing alongside traditional material forms. Photos, posters,
mixes, furniture and a collection of writing reference the informal discussions, DJ sets, meals, workshops, experiments and events that shaped the year. 

The exhibition takes the term "snowflake" as a starting point, a term used pejoratively by the political right to code dissent as whining, vulnerability as over-sensitivity and the right to protest as a willingness to take offence. Across Wysing's gallery and a screening room, works take sensitivity and fragility as a starting point and look for strength in numbers and strength in networks. Intended as an insult, the metaphor of a "snowflake" provides its own key for survival and defence. Bound together and in great enough numbers, snowflakes become something hard, strong and with their own energy. 

A new installation and performance by Liv Wynter, Housefire (2018), considers the absurdity and fatigue of constantly having to speak out. Referring to Aesop's fable of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" as much as Marx's famous quote about history repeating itself "first as tragedy, then as farce", Wynter's monologue takes the position of a woman whose house burns down repeatedly. 

Character Building (2008) a video 
from Helen Cammock presents street scenes from the artist's life in London and overlays them with narrative accounts of racial abuse. The video is accompanied by two lino-cuts Untitled (Over Sensitive) and Untitled (De Sensitised),
(both 2015). 

Historical works by Isaac Julien and The Newsreel Collective refer to the origins of the term "snowflake" in insults like "the loony left" and "political correctness gone mad" and point to the long history of culture wars through the 70s, 80s and 90s. Both films by The Newsreel Collective, Divide and Rule Never! (1978) and True Romance Etc. (1982), were made with young Londoners who are invited to act, improvise scripts and to discuss issues around racism, gender and sexuality. 
A soundtrack of reggae, ska and post-punk refers to the role of music and movements like Rock Against Racism in efforts to mobilise against the far-right. 

Isaac Julien's That Rush! (1995) is a short visual essay exploring the phenomenon of the American "shock-jock" radio and TV presenter Rush Limbaugh. A voiceover from Patricia Williams analyses Limbaugh's strategies as he attempts to ridicule the concerns of the left and to represent white Americans as an "invisible nation". Rarely seen since the 90s, this early gallery
work from a pioneering artist seems eerily prescient in the age of a new populist, digitally enabled, right-wing media. 

Works in the first half of the gallery
from Wynter, Cammock, Julien and The Newsreel Collective suggest that the rise of the political right (and attempts to silence a "sensitive" voice) has historically been tied to an expression of toxic masculinity where toughness trumps sensitivity and where brutality can be character building. Photos from Ilker Cinarel and Harold Offeh
propose new possible formations of masculinity while Raju Rage, Syllabus III, Jesse Darling and S1 Portland/Women's Beat League look at strategies for finding strength, power and safety in collectivity. 

For Ilker Cinarel's Adopting A Father 
(2015–) project, the artist posted an advert in a local paper to find a father to adopt. Each person who responded was invited to the Engine Room Gallery in Penzance for a discussion about family and fatherhood and a portrait session. The project is presented through a series of 25 photographic portraits. 

Lounging (2018), a series of test images from Harold Offeh, continues his long interest in iconic album covers. For these images, the artist adopts a lounging pose from Teddy Pendergrass's 1981 album It's Time For Love, recontextualising Pendergrass's carefully-calibrated pose of sexual availability/longing in a series of scenes from the Cambridgeshire countryside. 

Jesse Darling's #neoliberal Agitprop Poster (2014) acts as a rallying cry for those marginalised by a political and economic system that seeks to punish anybody displaying signs of physical or mental illness. Along with Offeh, Darling is a lead artist on this year's Syllabus III programme, whose ten participating artists have designed and produced a zine of new writing and reading references that respond to the themes of the exhibition. The work was commissioned by Banner Repeater for the fundraiser print portfolio, 2014.

Under/Valued Energetic Economy (a term inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs) is a new installation from Raju Rage that maps out the tangled ecology between the artist's concerns such as "activism", "arts", "conversation" and "white-supremacist patriarchy". Presented on a trestle table top with objects and artifacts that references their interest in kitchen-table conversations and the knowledges that are produced by them, the work highlights informal strategies of organising and collectivity but takes care to point out that their informality is often a symptom of  being undervalued and excluded from mainstream conversations and spaces.

In June 2017, S1 Portland/Women's Beat League led a study week at Wysing that explored female and non-binary views in electronic music. For this exhibition, the collective present a genre-spanning series of mixes that can be listened to in the gallery or online. 

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi's video Contain
Contain (2017) reenacts Parangol' Helium (1979) a single-shot film experiment by Ivan Cardosa that
features artist Hélio Oiticica improvising with a parangolé, a handmade costume or sculpture. Gharavi's reenactment with Samar Haddad King (choreographer) and Ramzy Natsheh (performer) transposes the source from Brazil in a period of military dictatorship to contemporary Ramallah in occupied Palestine. Split across the gallery and the open studio, the work is interested in the reenactment and choreography of what was once spontaneous and improvisational. 

You Will Be Free (2017), a film by Juliet Jacques, was made in response to Cookie Mueller & Vittorio Scarpati's Putti’s Pudding, a series of drawings and texts made together as the two lovers were dying from AIDS-related illnesses in 1989. Jacques' film begins by meditating on death, the body and illness before reflecting on the AIDS crisis, activism and alternative lifestyles created when "drop outs and drifters" come together. The work was commissioned by Studio Voltaire.

In Get Well Soon (2015), Carolyn Lazard re-imagines a patient's travails with the US biomedical industrial complex as a text-based computer game as a gowned figure moves through an ambiguous landscape. Lazard has also contributed a text, "How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity", which details their experience with the autoimmune diseases Crohns disease and Ankylosing spondylitis. 

Zinzi Minott's Gun Fingers and Opaque Bullets (2017) was commissioned to open "Opaque Poetics", the eighth edition of Wysing's annual music festival, which was curated by DJ and producer Nkisi. A soundtrack (also from Nkisi) blends the evocative synths of classic jungle with the brittle percussion of contemporary club sounds and accompanies abstract imagery of the sea, telephone wires and a dancing figure. Presented with posters from the festival, the video suggests the emancipatory potential of music and dance and their role in fostering temporary communities of resistance. 

Warning: Some of the works in the exhibition contain explicit language.

Exhibition open every day 12-5pm until 3 December. Click on the image above to see more installation photos.

Join us for our final free exhibition tour at 2pm, Sunday 3 December.

Andromedan Sad Girl is the first major collaborative exhibition by artists Florence Peake and Tai Shani. Drawing on their research into structures of feminism, their immersive installation is an imagining of what a pre or post patriarchal site could be. Peake and Shani are interested in exploring the fluid mythologies and imagined futures of lost civilizations. The artists take an archaeological excavation as a point of departure to imagine and represent non-hierarchal, pre-historical or futuristic civilizations, imagined through ambitious new sculptural works and wall paintings.

The installation marks a conceptual collaboration between the two artists, with Tai Shani’s sculptures surrounded by Florence Peake’s paintings. Drawing on her performance practice, Peake has collaborated with dancer Eve Stainton to generate the new fresco paintings. By drawing around each other’s bodies on the horizontal surface, before painting on the panels vertically, the work suggests a plurality of abstract embodiment and vibrating temporality. Tai Shani’s work occupies the central gallery space and frames the gallery entrance with vibrant symbolic sculptures; technicolour, psychedelic interpretations of mystical objects and ritualistic architecture.

The installation, which has transformed Wysing’s gallery, privileges sensation. Entering the space, the visitor crosses a voluminous threshold towards an altar, flanked enigmatically by long hybrid arms, both human and animal. Sculptures are flocked to create soft and sensuous objects, and walls have been painted with a vivid and gestural application of coloured plaster and ceramics. Using multilayered elements, including sound, the whole installation takes the visitor to a highly theatrical space and invites them to rest inside this immersive environment. The sound, with vocals from Florence Peake and produced in collaboration with recent artist residency and composer Maxwell Sterling, suggests a pre-linguistic dimension where speech is not yet acquired, but open.

Florence Peake was an artist in residence at Wysing in 2016 and Tai Shani was in residence at Wysing in the summer of 2017. Andromedan Sad Girl is situated in Wysing’s wider artistic programme for 2017, Wysing Polyphonic.

Read a review of the exhibition in FAD, here.

Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. As a trained dancer Florence Peake’s background in choreography and painting stimulates a studio practice that is both diverse and immersive. Peake is often working performatively to incorporate drawing, painting and sculptural materials. Florence Peake’s work has been shown nationally and internationally; she is a recipient of the Jerwood Choreographic Research project, 2016. Her solo performance piece, Voicings, has toured to Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, 2017; the Serpentine Gallery, Mysterical day, 2016; Somerset House for Block Universe performance festival, 2016. Solo exhibitions include: WE perform I am in love with my body Bosse and Baum Gallery 2017, The Keeners Solo show at SPACE 2015; Hall of the swell, Gallery Lejeune, 2015; The BALTIC, Newcastle ensemble piece MAKE. Group exhibitions include: Walled Gardens in an Insane Eden, curated by Marcelle Joseph 2017, Hayward Gallery, a 3 month performance installation as part of Mirrorcity, 2015; National Portrait Gallery, performing group work Paper Portraits, 2015. She has done commissions from: Whitechapel Art Gallery; Yorkshire Sculpture Park; Modern Art, Oxford; Chapter Arts, Cardiff; Harris Museum, Preston; David Roberts Art Foundation, London. 

Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism. Shani's on-going project Dark Continent Productions that proposes an allegorical city of women is an experimental and expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies within which Christine builds an allegorical city for notable women drawn from a medieval conception of history, where fact, fiction and myth are blurred. This non-hierarchical approach also determines the construction of the characters and narrative of Dark Continent. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, recent exhibitions and commissions include, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); RADAR commission, Loughborough University, (2016), Serpentine Galleries (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012) and FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (2011); The Barbican, London (2011); ICA, London (2011) 

Commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre and supported using public funding by Arts Council England, with additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation and The Elephant Trust. 

21 May - 9 July
Open every day 12-5pm

Curated by Jesse Darling and supported through public funding from Arts Council England.

Click on the above image to see more installation photos.

Click to read Hannah Gregory's exhbition review in Art Monthly. PDF here

Sarah Boulton, Stanley Brouwn, Jesse Darling, Gordon Hall, Evan Ifekoya, Sulaïman Majali, Imran Perretta, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Özgür Kar, Claire Potter, Rosa Johan Uddoh, Hannah Weiner and Constantina Zavitsanos

Words are powerful: symbols, incantations. The Word is itself a stand-in for divinity; the unsayable equates to the sublime. To give a name to something is to claim it, and the legacies of modern imperial scientific fundamentalism have shown the violence of naming and categorising bodies.

Legibility – hailed by internet utopians, mass-marketeers and contemporary designers as a democratising prerogative – has come to function as a form of surveillance both at border controls and in digital capitalism. In discourses of gender and disability, legibility is the first condition [of state and systemic apparatus] for access and care, as well as forming the optics of a neoliberal visibility politics that cleaves to familiar societal categories and definitions around race, class and identity. 

Voracious bots plow through your testimony for windows through which to sell you a soul, compiling subjectivities into demographics like the old colonial anthropologists. 

“If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought,” wrote the postcolonial theorist Edouard Glissant, “we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.” And meanwhile in the para-internet storytelling culture in which narratives supercede facts on every possible level, the written word proliferates, radiates, both saturates and frustrates dialogue and community.  

Mene Mene Tekel Parsin brings together a number of works by international artists who employ words and language to illuminate and obfuscate, fully cogent of the propagandist deployment of slogans and the seductively tall tales of advertising copy.

In the exhibition, words become objects, sigils and talisman, sculptures that stand in for the body (or the world). Simultaneously legible and unintelligible, and often refusing to take a definitive position on meaning, works presented as legible might hide a deeper truth in plain sight or evade straightforward signification, playing with the outside and inside of text and subtext, such as Sulaïman Majali’s sweeping banner hero/antihero, (2012).

Words appear and disappear throughout the exhibition. In Imran Perretta’s when i (do) fall asleep, (2017) a poem is traced in light directly onto the gallery wall and in Sarah Boulton’s how amber will fall, (2017) words come into focus when caught by glancing light. In Evan Ifekoya’s Ebi Flow (flex), (2016) multiple voices are described in three hanging scrolls of narrative text and in Rosa Johan Uddoh’s, On Opacity, (2017) two voices discuss a resistance to be defined by assumption.

Resisting legibility is central to Stanley Brouwn’s work. Brouwn, who was born in 1935, has remained an elusive figure, rarely appearing in person and withholding permission for his works to be re-produced; in catalogues for group exhibitions his contribution is a blank page. Brouwn’s artists’ books describe daily actions such as walking, in precise terms, but do so without an evident authorial signature. In the work presented ell / ells - step / steps, (1998) Brouwn occludes his own body under the sign of an archaic term of measurement.

In her Code Poems, (1982) Hannah Weiner has taken the International Code of Signals “for the use of all nations”; a visual signal system for ships at sea, to enable her poems to be both interpreted and performed. 

Weiner (1928-1997) is associated with the Language poets, an avant-garde group who were active during the late 1960s and 1970s, and became known for developing a method of writing based around words that were clairvoyantly seen by her. 

Claire Potter’s fragments of script are remnants from a performance the artist made during the launch of Mene Mene Tekel Parsin. The eighteen small and torn fragments, arranged by Potter during the performance as though preparing for a tarot-reading, form a disjointed narrative that describe two incidents that speak of the relationship between two traumatic events.

The American artist, writer, and educator, Kameelah Janan Rasheed offers satirical sayings that comment on how the policing of suffering, anger and responses to the trauma of racialised violence are utilised as tools to maintain social order under oppressive systems in How to Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette), (2014-) which is presented publicly on billboard structures outdoors. 

Constantina Zavitsanos’ Girl, there’s a better life (2017) includes a video projection of two letters - an application essay and a suicide note - which cross over and occlude one another, alongside a soundtrack on which two songs similarly commingle. From these crossed or lost signals, new sounds, colours, and meanings are produced. Ensuring that their work can be accessed on multiple sensory levels, an accompanying wall panel captions the sound and images, without explaining either.

Özgür Kar’s, Declassified in Part, (2017) addresses the recent political reality of Turkey through a moving and powerful depiction of official, classified documents juxtaposed alongside found footage, sourced from the internet, of violence and solidarity.

Jesse Darling’s graphic posters spell out messages in Bliss symbols, identified through the work’s titles. Blissymbolics is a communication system originally developed as a utopian project by Charles K. Bliss (1897-1985) as a Jewish refugee in Shanghai during WWII. Inspired by Chinese pictographics, Bliss hoped that his 'semantographs' would help to facilitate democratic international communication through a non-spoken language. 

Blissymbolics found their first application in assisting children with physical disabilities to communicate. Today Blissymbolics is used mainly in Special Needs education and is currently composed of 5,000 graphic symbols, though as a generative language it continues to grow. Shirley McNaughton, who first popularised the use of Blissymbolics in disability communications, was advisor on Darling's project.  

Gordon Hall’s U, (2017) presents a series of hand-scaled objects arranged on a U-shaped plinth to form an open-ended object sentence. These small carved, cast, sanded, and sewn sculptures compose a meditation on the intimacies of shared spoken and material languages, oriented around our hands as that which hold and also tell.

Screening Event: 22 June, 6-8pm

A screening event accompanies the exhibition and will take place at Somerset House Studios, London on 22 June, 6-8pm. The programme includes works by Sonia Boyce, Hamishi Farah, Carolyn Lazard, Miloš Trakilović and Anna Zett.

Open every day, 12-5pm, until 26 March

Our first exhibition of 2017 is All Channels Open, which brings together the ten artists who were in-residence at Wysing during 2016: Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Beatrice Dillon, Henna-Riikka Halonen, Evan Ifekoya, Wojciech Kosma, Lawrence Lek, Laura O’Neill, Florence Peake and Gary Zhexi Zhang.

Join us for our next curator tour of the exhibition at 3pm, Wednesday 22 March

Press
Robert Barry in The Quietus
Jaime Marie Davis in This is Tomorrow

All Channels Open (teaser) from Wysing Arts Centre on Vimeo.

The exhibition launches Wysing’s programme for 2017, Wysing Polyphonic, through which we will be exploring ‘many voices’ in all aspects of our programming including exhibitions, events, study weeks and study days and artist residencies. Across the year we will work with a range of artists to explore a diversity of contexts and positions to help better understand the role of art, artists, and arts organisations such as Wysing, at this moment of global political change. All Channels Open therefore acts as a statement of intent as well as bringing together differing artist practices and positions.

All Channels Open takes its cue from radio and DJ mixes and in the exhibition audio works are sequenced into a durational programme that plays in Wysing’s gallery, which is itself programmed to change in lighting and ambience as accompanying visual elements succeed one another.

The exhibition employs a synchronised arrangement of projectors, monitors, objects and surround sound to explore many of the themes that emerged across the artists’ residencies, from the use of media such as radios and computer games to convey knowledge, to the search for new interfaces and the role of the artist as a conduit or channel for otherwise inaccessible information.

Continuing a collaboration begun at Wysing, Untitled, a new work from Beatrice Dillon, Florence Peake and Anne Tetzlaff uses state-of-the-art wearable audio technology to find new connections between sound and the body. Fragmented, lyrical and often humorous video documentation depicts a ritualistic experiment, filmed at Wysing in early 2017. Dillon generates shaped sound textures as Peake becomes the nexus of body, technology and sonic process. Filmed by, and conceived in collaboration with, Anne Tetzlaff. 

In All Sincerity Said The Chicken To The Egg, a new video from Laura O’Neill opens with a reference to Wysing’s site and a burial ritual that O’Neill performed in the forest in January 2017, burying resin sculptures of chicken heads and a drone. In O’Neill’s richly detailed CGI dystopia, spring has controversially been cancelled to make up a deficit in the budget. As the video weaves a surreal narrative of social and economic collapse, the media alternately blame migrants for ‘stealing’ spring and proposes Scotland as the sole hope of saving it.

Finding Fanon 3: First Movement, a sound piece and sculpture from David Blandy and Larry Achiampong draws on their work for the third installment of their Finding Fanon video series; a trilogy inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon in which the artists negotiate ideas around race and the post-colonial, and the effect on their own collaborative relationship. This new expression of the work foregrounds the artists’ interest in sound and expands on the soundtrack for the work that they developed while at Wysing. 

The Kernel Process, a new video installation from Gary Zhexi Zhang was developed from the artist’s interest in sensory interfaces. Surreal imagery and the artist’s own diffident voiceover meander through subjects related to skin and surfaces: dreams of subterranean architecture, lizards, latex and Georges Bataille’s infamous description of lingchi torture. 

Placeholder is a new video work from Henna-Riikka Halonen that imagines the moment when Artificial Intelligence comes of age. Multiple tabs, and proliferating windows give Placeholder a desktop’s point-of-view as it explores developments in biogenetics, 3D printing of skin and organs, and new research into historical models of AI, such as Eliza and the Turing test. In Halonen’s kaleidoscopic new work, created entirely from found footage, open source and animated imagery, a lack of empathy from other human beings has made us turn for comfort to the voice of the machine. 

Evan Ifekoya presents Scenario One: The Ice Box from their radio play This Catalog of Poses, in a new articulation as a sound-based installation with sculptural elements. This work forms part of Ifekoya’s wider project A Score, A Groove, A Phantom, exploring archives of blackness, sociality and inheritance as they diffract through queer nightlife and trauma in the present moment. An ever-evolving work that has so far been presented on Resonance FM, Serpentine Gallery and Transmission, Glasgow, This Catalog of Poses is reconfigured for this exhibition to take advantage of the large open space of Wysing’s gallery, recalling its use in music events such as the Wysing music festival and Two Steps to the Left... which Ifekoya co-curated in the summer of 2016. 

New analogue synthesizer productions from Lawrence Lek accompany an architectural model of London’s Fabric nightclub embedded with small screens. Continuing the research Lek conducted while at Wysing into sinofuturism—particularly around the Chinese production of competitively priced electronics and counterfeit goods—he casts his model of Fabric as a pirated Chinese copy, FABRICK. Lek’s musical production follows recent projects such as The Nøtel, an audio-visual collaboration with Kode9. 

An enactment of Wojciech Kosma’s performance Wait punctuates the exhibition once a day, disrupting the precarious synchronisation of media in the gallery. The work, consisting of a video projector displaying a blue screen moving in the rhythm of a person’s breathing, will be performed by Wysing staff and studio artists. 

All Channels Open is curated by John Bloomfield and supported with funding from Arts Council England. Wysing Arts Centre would also like to thank Focal Point Gallery for their support.

The exhibition is open every day, 12–5pm and continues until 26 March.

Ophiux
Open daily: 25 Sept - 20 Nov

Ophiux is a solo exhibition of new work by Joey Holder comprising an ambitious immersive installation and film that has emerged from her residency at Wysing in 2015.

Click on the image above to see more photos of the exhibition.

Press
Tim Dixon in Art Monthly
Chris Fite-Wassilak in Frieze
Jamie Sutcliffe in Rhizome
Augie March in AQNB

Ophiux gives a glimpse into a near future that whilst fictional, is not far from reality and is founded on current scientific research. The work imagines a future in which synthetic biology has been fully realized and applied to both advance human evolution and increase life expectancy, and where human biology has been computer programmed. The installation will include a film work and a ‘futuristic medical room’.

To conceive the exhibition, Holder has worked in close collaboration with scientists she met during her residency at Wysing in 2015 - Dr Marco Galardini, a Computational Biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, and Dr Katrin Linse, Senior Biodiversity Biologist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge.

Ophiux visualizes how current digital developments are used to extract data from DNA. The exhibition proposes that in the future the human population, and millions of other organisms, will have been genetically sequenced in order to extract data, with the aim of furthering life. Holder’s work reflects on the reality of today’s healthcare, in which our bodies are increasingly mapped and digitized. 

The installation will include larger than life-sized models of biological imaging machines as well as genetic sequencing equipment. It will simulate not only the collection of data from our own bodies but also the sampling of data from other organisms by a speculative pharmaceutical company: ‘Ophiux’

In conjunction with the exhibition, Holder will deliver a Study Day that will take place on Saturday 29 October, 2-6pm at Murray Edwards College, New Hall, University of Cambridge, as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, details are available here.

Ophiux is located across two sites at Wysing Arts Centre, with the main installation in the gallery and the film presented in the open studio. The film has been co-commissioned by Deptford X where it will premiere at their festival in September 2016, followed by a tour to other arts and science venues across the UK to be announced at a later date.

The exhibition is made possible with a generous grant from the Arts Council England.

14 February to 10 April. Open daily 12-5pm

The Practice of Theories is a group exhibition of work by artists with a connection to Wysing who seek to make visible the intangible, or share knowledge or complex theories through their work and working methods. With Andrea Büttner, Ami Clarke, Andy Holden, David Osbaldeston, Yuri Pattison, Heather Phillipson, Takeshi Shiomitsu, Erica Scourti, Cally Spooner and David Toop.

Click on the image above for a slideshow of installation views.

Read Beth Bramich's review for Thisistomorrow, here.

Andrea Büttner’s contribution to the exhibition is a print that itself is an extract of a larger body of work, comprising photographs, diagrams and drawings, that together aim to represent images or figures of speech employed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in his theory of aesthetics, Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790). The images have been sourced from books in Kant’s personal library, alongside images found online, and attempt to unfold the philosopher’s argument in the manner of ‘a new layer of footnotes.’

Ami Clarke brings together several works that inform her ongoing script Error-Correction: an introduction to future diagrams, that include video animation, collage, and prints; both serial and appropriated. The title to the ongoing work stems from the ideas of the German physician and physicist Herman von Helmholtz, who's research into mathematics of the eye brought him to the conclusion that they were exceptionally prone to error, an approximation at best, that 'operate(s) within the protocols of instruments(i)' - an 'error-correction' of sorts. These ideas led to probability theory and the abstract language of mathematical analysis in celestial mechanics and situated theory as the engine to extend enquiry into domains beyond the human sensorium and beyond visual representation.

Occupying the centre of the gallery is Andy Holden’s work The Dan Cox Library for the Unfinished Concept of Thingly Time (2011); a space containing books owned by Dan Cox, a close friend and collaborator of Holden's who passed away in 2011. The books are placed in relation to fragments from Holden's sculptural projects and together aim to explain the theory of ‘thingly time’; a theory that the pair had begun to develop. In the spirit of their friendship and collaboration, the library is a space for dialogue, between ideas and words, things and art-objects. To expand the theory of thingly time, Holden is hosting a live reading and performance event within the library, on 20 February, with invited artists and poets Steve Roggenbuck, Heather Phillipson and Erica Scourti.

David Osbaldeston has created five new drawings entitled Incomplete Scenarios for an Unwritten Present (2016) in response to the theme of Wysing Poly. The drawings propose fantastical storage systems for works that have the potential to be produced in the future, with the form of each system modelled on five of the seven structures found in crystalline forms. The drawings, which have an anachronistic drawing style of intense notational writing with speech-bubbled text and pseudo-scientific diagrams of theories, present parallels between the past, present and future.

Yuri Pattison’s new work, overflow study (2016) explores the increasing levels of information flow, consumption and financial change in relation to time. The new installation attempts to look at representative objects of rapid economic growth and inflation. A video depicts The Durst Debt Clock, originally erected in 1989 by Seymour Durst of The Durst Organisation, a prominent family-owned property development and real estate Company in New York. The clock shows the numerical debt value occurring in present and future time. Alongside the video, Pattison has made an unfolded screen structure reminiscent of skyline buildings as well as internal office dividers. The structure acts as a support for the presentation of numerous images the artist obtained of the Durst Organisation's building interiors; from strangely familiar snapshots to the unseen service areas of their properties.

Heather Phillipson’s audio work splashy phasings (2013) is broadcast throughout the gallery space every 20 minutes. Originally commissioned for Channel 4’s Random Acts series, splashy phasings is a plunge into a deluged universe: information, news items and emotions overflow. Part-poem, part-song, splashy phasings compounds the language of reportage, advertising, overhead conversation and interior monologue into a digressive musical interlude.

Takeshi Shiomitsu’s work Landscape Array #3 (2016) is a painting from a new series constructed from an arrangement of stressed & painted plywood and aluminium panels. His work stems from an ongoing concern into the ways that power and ideology affect our intuitive interactions with the world. The paintings are produced by a process of recursive construction and de-construction, built in layers of material and meaning over time. In the Landscape Array series, multiple components are arranged with spaces between them but suggest an overall singular frame.

Erica Scourti has created a number of new works for the exhibition. For Residuals (2016) Scourti cleaned the screens and monitors in daily use by Wysing staff, capturing the dust on microfibre cloths that she has then traced through embroidery. In Secondary Sources (2016) Scourti has expanded on an existing work, Wish List (2015), which she performed at Wysing during her residency in 2015. In this more personal version, she has shared readings from her sketch and notebooks from 2003-2015 on YouTube, generating automatic subtitles, which have been partially rewritten. In another form of translation, Scourti’s reading of the texts has been made visible by strobe lighting software that responds to her voice.

As her contribution to the exhibition, Cally Spooner has devised a Study Week for eight participants selected through an Open Call. Spooner will lead an immersive experience over the four days, addressing new forms of management (of self and others), the internalisation of institutions, and the concept of the 'exhibitionary complex’. The Study Week is structured with reading groups, film screenings and group practicalities, punctuated with invited speakers and walkers. Full details here.

David Toop’s archive of nearly 200 audio tapes, dating from 1973 to 1995, forms a ‘sonic diary’ of the artist’s musical interests and relationships across a twenty-year period. The archive, shown together publicly for the first time, encompasses rare material sourced from the BBC’s vinyl archives, field recordings, interviews with fellow musicians, rehearsal tapes of Toop’s own work, and a myriad of sound and musical references. Handwritten annotations on the tape sleeves imply a hasty, sketchy gathering of material as thought process, while later recordings seem more ordered and carefully grouped; with their typed covers. Three listening stations next to the archive offer an insight into the diversity of material gathered by Toop. 

The Practice of Theories launches Wysing’s over-arching programme for 2016, Wysing Poly, which will provide an environment where diverse practices and theory come together to support the development of new work, with a focus on the practical application of ideas.

27 September to 8 November
Open daily, 12noon-5pm

A group exhibition exploring the phenomenon of the uncanny valley with Julia Crabtree and William Evans, Benedict Drew, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Holly Herndon, Joey Holder, Sophie Jung, Lawrence Lek, Rachel Maclean and Katja Novitskova.

Click on the image above for a slide show of installations images.

An afternoon of presentations and performances accompanies this exhbition. Details, here.

The Uncanny Valley is a phrase that was coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori as a way to describe an emotional response that can be measured when encountering objects that are hyper-real; where there is a moment of uncertainty about what is being viewed that gives way to a feeling of discomfort or disorientation. This group exhibition aims to explore the phenomenon, alongside contributing to the discourse around screen based and digital works, by exploring the aesthetics of the uncanny. 

Joey Holder has created a new work that provides an immediate introduction to the exhibition; visitors are required to literally step onto a terrain that has been created by Holder and which covers one third of the gallery floor. The work, Feldspar (Hadal Zone), 2015, references both the deep ocean - the Hadal Zone is the delineation for the deepest trenches in the ocean and is named after the realm of Hades, the underworld in Greek mythology – and the earth’s surface, of which the greatest mineral composition is feldspar.

Rachel Maclean’s music for the Glasgow based band Errors, which she made whilst in-residence at Wysing early in 2015, takes us into the mind of an apparently alien species who stumbles upon a world of lost humans. The song and video question both what is real and whose position in the video is authentic, perhaps neither is. 

In Lawrence Lek’s, Shiva’s Grotto, 2015, which again has been made especially for this exhibition, the terrain of Wysing itself has been mapped by Lek and transformed using video simulation. A narrated video takes the viewer on a journey around a future Wysing; one that has become a museum to one of the first works built on the site, Ben Wilson’s Tree Keep, 1992. The video is shown alongside an interactive version of the simulation.

In Critters, 2015, a work developed by Julia Crabtree and William Evans during their residency at Wysing late last year, an object struggles to animate itself within a landscape that couldn’t be further from the green pastures of rural Cambridgeshire. Taking its form from historic radio telescopes located at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Astronomy, the object has been relocated onto the surface of an unknown planet, one that the object’s antecedents may have at one time tried to contact.

In Benedict Drew’s The Onesie Cycle, 2013, an image of a fleshy latex mask vibrates as the camera pans and focuses over its surface in exploration. A narration offers a biography of the mask as it explores its own motivation. Increasingly abstract and with an intense soundtrack, the work’s intention it appears, is to will the listless mask into life.

An object that appears animated through its own momentum is Katja Novitskova’s, Swoon Motion, 2015. Again made in response to the theme of the uncanny valley, the work appears to suggest a possible new life form, one with occasionally recognisably human elements, assembled to an unknown pattern.

Another form of mask is Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s Cite Werkflow Ltd, 2015 for which she imprinted her own image into wet clay. The object has been glazed with fleshy tones that belie its brittle materiality.

In Sophie Jung’s two videos, www.hydontitellyousomethi.ng, 2013 and www.aittherewassomethingelseiwasgonnas.ay, 2014 a face-painted narrator speaks directly to camera. The ponderous narratives link disparate, often surreal, subject matter that reflect on overlooked details of everyday life. And in Jung’s two sculptures, Notis Otis, 2013, and Mirror Stage, 2013, narrative and objects are in a Kafkaesque and unsettling dialogue, with a bit of added ASMR .

Holly Herndon’s music video Home, 2014, generates a sense observing and being observed. Herndon’s omnipotent presence animates the gallery space every 15 minutes and layers of sampled sound and text generate a sense of unease; an allusion to an unknown, presumably digital, presence watching her every move and increasingly undermining her ability to know herself. 

The Uncanny Valley, which is curated by Wysing’s Director, Donna Lynas, has emerged from ongoing discussions and events at Wysing which have explored what the future might hold for society, for the individual and for art. It is the first in a new strand of exhibition programming that reflect on subjects being explored and discussed at the centre. 

The exhibition is supported with funding from Arts Council England, the Henry Moore Foundation and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Image: Lawrence Lek, Shiva's Dreaming, 2014

Open daily, 12noon-5pm, until 5 July.
Exhibition closing event 4 July, 2-5pm.

The Fifth Artist features new work by Olivier Castel, Jesse Darling, Crabtree & Evans and Alice Theobald who were in-residence together at Wysing in the autumn of 2014, working within the theme of The Future.

Click on the image to see more installation shots of the exhibition.

Click here for further information about the exhibition closing event.

In Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International (1993), the word hauntology first appeared. The title of the book references Marx and Friedrich Engels' statement at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that a "specter (is) haunting Europe.” Specters of Marx is a damning criticism of the liberal left’s failure to generate the conditions for an equitable and fair society; and so the specter of ideology continues to haunt, whilst the economic and social conditions of many continue to worsen.

A set of artists’ residencies that were themed The Future, could not fail to be haunted by the current state of world politics. Although not directly addressed by the artists, an unidentified presence lurked at the edges of this tightly knit group; strangers until situated together in rural Cambridgeshire for six weeks. Let’s call this presence The Fifth Artist.

Throughout their period in-residence the artists lived together in Wysing’s farmhouse during the dark months and shortened days of November and December 2014. During this intense period, away from the city and its routine of toil and commerce, they worked independently in studios, coming together for evening meals and occasional trips out. 

A ghost story, recounted early in their residency, created a part-believed, part-ridiculed ripple throughout conversations, continuing even into post-residency as the story’s mythology continued to evolve.

The slippage between fiction and reality becomes intensified during times like this; an unusual situation to be located within, sharing a home and thoughts with a group strangers brought together by a person, or persons, also unknown to them. This heightened intensity became part of the residency day-to-day; moving across the unlit site, in and out of artificial light and intense darkness, from studio to house, occasional visits to the city and back again. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the phantom of The Fifth Artist emerged as a symbol of an unknown presence, and also perhaps a liminal space; a threshold.

The Fifth Artist is the title of this exhibition but the act of naming, giving it material form, also makes it a contributor to the exhibition. The Fifth Artist is the unknown and the unknowable, the shadows without, the oppressiveness of an uncertain future and also perhaps an enquiry into the condition of being human.

Olivier Castel's work is situated at both the periphery and the centre of the gallery. A hinged luminous door, hollow at its centre, exists as both an object and a void that the visitor steps through. Alternatively by turning the door's handle and pushing it open, the visitor holds the exhibition in the palm of their hand, sweeping the enclosed lights throughout the space. Whilst the work allows access to the space, and illumination for it, it also dazzles as the visitor leaves, high-lighting the exhibition’s ephemeral and artificial reality.

Julia Crabtree and William Evans have begun developing the framework for a pseudo-sci–fi film based around a misunderstanding of the function of the C.A.T.S. (Cosmic Anisotropy Telescope); part of the University of Cambridge's Mullard Radio Telescope Observatory. Considering the C.A.T.S. as a means of communication, as opposed to observation, the architecture of the site becomes a stage. The artists have focused on object and image making; exploring the relationship between theatre and sculpture and the performative potential of materials.

Jesse Darling presents new sculptures made from welded steel; the European technology of war that facilitated colonialism and created the foundations for the built environment. These new pieces examine the archetypes and mythologies of modernity through a queer and animist lens.

Today left for the sake of coming back tomorrow (or) impossible loves; a sculptural video installation by Alice Theobald is made up of dramatic verses and a composed soundtrack, shown alongside a wall-based text work. Described by Theobald as existing in ‘non-time’, the works use nuanced wordplay and are absurdist in content. Speaking of love, loss, uncertainty, optimism and dejection, there is a sense of faux sentimentality that permeates the scene and which strikes a balance between irony, desolation, cliché and empathy all imparted with tragicomic pathos. The song Being Bored is arranged and performed by Phoebe Blatton and Alice Theobald.

The Fifth Artist is supported by Arts Council England and Henry Moore Foundation.

14 September - 2 November

This exhibition is in our grade II listed farmhouse. Access to the exhibition is via steps to the ground floor and a small narrow stair case to the first floor rooms.

The Influence of Furniture on Love with An Endless Supply, Ruth Beale, Juliette Blightman, Ben Brierley, Céline Condorelli, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Luca Frei, Gil Leung, Seb Patane, Florian Roithmayr, Phil Root, Laure Prouvost, Cally Spooner, The Grantchester Pottery, Philomene Pirecki , Elizabeth Price, Mark Aerial Waller, Neal White and Lisa Wilkens.

The Influence of Furniture on Love is an exhibition in Wysing Arts Centre’s 17th century farmhouse. The title of the exhibition is taken from an unpublished essay by economist John Maynard Keynes entitled “Can we consume our surplus or the influence of furniture on love”, a handwritten copy of which is held in the archives of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. In the essay, Keynes discusses whether it is possible for the rooms within which we live to “suggest to us thoughts and feelings and occupations?”

Wysing’s Grade II Listed farmhouse, which was built in the early 17th century reputedly from timbers of ships salvaged from the sinking of the Spanish Armada in 1588, has hosted many hundreds of artists since the organisation was founded twenty five years ago.The farmhouse is where artists live, sleep and eat, and where together they discuss the works that they are developing during residencies and retreats.

Wysing has invited artist Giles Round, working with Wysing Curator Lotte Juul Petersen, to transform the farmhouse into a public space, installing works by a selection of artists who have stayed there over the years and in response to its rooms. A number of the works will remain in the house as a lasting contribution to the site, for future artists to enjoy. All the artists in the exhibition have been in-residence at Wysing over the centre’s 25 year history.

To bring the intimacy of the farmhouse into the public realm, a series of dinners, hosted by artists in the exhibition, will make public some of the ideas and discussion that usually takes place in the privacy of the farmhouse. Taking place in Wysing’s gallery, the dinners will be devised by the artists and will include events, performances and screenings. Further information in Events, here.

Giles Round has had a close association with Wysing since he was first in-residence at the centre in early 2011. That same year, Round established the decorative arts company The Grantchester Pottery at Wysing, with fellow residency artist Phil Root, and subsequently both The Grantchester Pottery and Round have contributed to a large number of exhibitions and events at Wysing.

Click on the image above to see a slide show of installation views.

“Can we consume our surplus or the influence of furniture on love” (1909), by John Maynard Keynes is copyright of The Provot and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge.

An Endless Supply, Harry Blackett and Robin Kirkham, were in residence in 2011 during which time they carried out research on the typeface Curwen Sans. They have worked on numerous publications at Wysing, including The Starry Rubric Set and /pe(Ə)r/) by Patrick Coyle written as a result of his year as writer-in-residence at Wysing in 2012.

Ruth Beale was in residence in 2011 and used her time to produce a series of new works, including Journeys in Taste, which was performed by other artists-in-residence on Giles Round's Festival Matrix stage, made for Wysing’;s music festival in 2012. In 2013 she co-curated Words to be Spoken Aloud, a weekend festival at Turner Contemporary, Margate, supported by Wysing.

Juliette Blightman was in residence in 2007 when Wysing re-located to central Cambridge for six months and invited five international artists' collectives to be in-residence in a programme that celebrated the marginal. Working with artist Sebastian Craig as i-cabin, they organised  in-conversation with Richard Birkett, at that time Curator at Whitechapel Project Space.
 

Ben Brierley, a tutor at Loughborough University School of Arts has for many years been involved with Wysing’s Anagama (wood burning) Kiln, which was built Japanese ceramist Izumihara Masanobu in 1997. In 2000 Ben Brierley and Paul McAllister rebuilt the kiln and have since maintained it and organise firing events.

Céline Condorelli was in residence in 2009 and used her time to research ideas around the subject of Commons. Condorelli created a ‘common room’ and heated Wysing’s gallery with a fully functioning wood-burning stove. Part of this work was later included in Curtain Show, curated by Celine Condorelli and Gavin Wade, at Eastside Projects, Birmingham in 2010.

Jessie Flood-Paddock was in residence in 2012 and used her time to create a body of new work that was later shown in the exhibition, The World Is Almost Six Thousand Years Old, curated by Tom Morton. She was subsequently included in Wysing’s exhibitions Relatively Absolute, 2013 and Hey, I’m Mr Poetic, 2014.

Luca Frei was in residence in 2009 and made a new work for the exhibition Generosity is the New Political. Developing a series of ceramic sculptures with supervising support from previous Wysing studio artist and ceramicist Bob Race, Frei made his first ceramic works in Wysing’s ceramics studio. 

Gil Leung has been associated to Wysing since 2011 through her curatorial role at LUX Artist Moving Image. She programmed two events at Wysing in 2011 and 2012, the second in collaboration with artist Ed Atkins and Wysing Curator Gareth Bell-Jones. As an artist, her works have been shown at Rowing, London among others.

Seb Patane was in residence in 2013, and collaborated with Gustav Metzger on a new sound piece, in which Patane invited Metzger to recite a passage from The Political Theatre (1929) by experimental German theatre director Erwin Piscator. Since his residency, Patane has further developed this work further for a solo show in Gallery Fonti, Naples, 2014.

Florian Roithmayr was in residence in 2013 and used his time making a series of new sculptural works. He also worked with a locally based car wrapping company to transform Wysing's mundane Renault Kangoo into a mobile artwork. The process was filmed and edited into a video which was later shown at the Treignac Project, France, 2013.

Laure Prouvost was in residence in 2011 and used her time to develop the new work The Lot in collaboration with Francesco Pedraglio. Since her residency Laure Prouvost was awarded The Max Mara Prize for Women in 2011 and the Turner Prize, 2013.

Philomene Pirecki was in residence in 2012 when she created a new body of photographic work that later shown in her solo exhibition Image Persistence at Supplement, London in 2013. Since her residency she was also shortlisted for the Max Mara Prize for Women 2013-2015.

The Grantchester Pottery was formed at Wysing in 2011 by artists Giles Round and Phil Root and is a conceptual pottery and design team inspired by early modernist decorative artist’s studios like Roger Fry’s Omega Group. The Grantchester Pottery has transformed the ceramics studio at Wysing into an art work in its own right. They had a solo exhibition at the ICA, London in 2013.

Elizabeth Price was in residence in 2012 when she worked on her film The Woolworth’s Choir of 1979 ahead of her Turner Prize exhibition. She also began the major new film SUNLIGHT which premiered in a solo exhibition at Focal Point gallery’s new space in Southend-On-Sea in 2013. Alongside the Turner Prize 2012 she received a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2012.

Phil Root occupied Wysing’s live/work studio in 2010-11, using his time to develop a series of new paintings and ceramic works. At Wysing he co-founded The Grantchester Pottery and also developed the two person show Phil Filby and Rob Root with artist Rob Filby for Wysing’s gallery space. During the Escalator Retreat Homework he formed further the music collaboration 666 6, with E Park.

Cally Spooner was in residence in 2011 when she developed the work Piece For a Pending Performance. Since her residency she has created major new performance works at  LOOP Moving Image Festival, Barcelona, KW, Berlin and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She returned to Wysing in 2013 to develop the ambitious performance And You Were Wonderful On Stage which was performed it at Performa 13, New York and at Tate Britain, London, 2014.

Mark Aerial Waller was in residence in 2009 and developed the work The Cassiopeia Plan and programmed events with artists’ collectives France Fiction and Brown Mountain College. Since his residency his works have been presented at Tate Britain, 2014, the 11th Baltic Triennial of International Art, CAC Vilnius, Lithuania, 2012, and recently had a solo exhibition, SO-LA, at Cell Projects, London, 2012.

Neal White was in residence in 1999 as part of a residency with the Human Genome Mapping Project, in the MRC Resource Centre at Sanger Centre, Cambridgeshire. In 2010 he returned to Wysing, invited as a speaker during the retreat Ways and Means. Recently he has exhibited his works at Portikus, Frankfurt in the two person exhibition GOD IS GREAT (10-19) JOHN LATHAM | NEAL WHITE, 2014.

Lisa Wilkens has worked from a studio at Wysing since 2012. In 2011, her work was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries with exhibitions at Site Gallery Sheffield and the ICA, London. Her work is represented in numerous private collections and has recently been acquired by Saatchi Gallery.

Gallery open, 20-21 August 12-5pm

Closing event, 21 August 6-8pm with performance and screenings

Yoga workshop, 18 August, 11am-12.15pm (free but booking essential)
 

This exhibition marks the completion of a six week summer school at Wysing, during July and August, in which the fifteen artists have spent time developing and exploring their art practices in a variety of ways, including individual research, workshops and discussions,as well as studio-based making. Join us for a presentation of the new work created at Wysing by the artists: Isobel Adderley, Charlotte Barlow, Alexander Barrett, Gabriella Beckhurst, Ally Clark, Letty Clarke, Stefano Cozzi, Maisie Dolan, Vivian Ezugha, Andy Gomez, Beth Kettel, James Parkinson, Faye Spencer, Tommy Ting and Jade Wilford.

The exhibition will occupy Wysing’s gallery, with additional works installed around the site. Works include sound and video installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, site-specific and installation work.

An event, on 21 August from 6-8pm, will draw the summer school to a conclusion and will include film screenings, durational performance and readings by the Scholars, to supplement the exhibited works. The exhibition will also be open. Please do join us.

room to manoeuvre, discourse in exercise

Scholar Gabriella Beckhurst offers a free yoga class entitled room to manoeuvre, discourse in exercise on 18 August, 11am-12.15pm. The workshop is limited to 12 places and is free but booking is essential. To reserve a place click here.

Iyengar Yoga is a form of Hatha Yoga that emphasises detail, precision and alignment in the execution of the postures and breath control. The Iyengar method is a carefully graded system adapted for individual needs. Props, such as blocks and belts may be used to improve understanding of the postures. The class will consider how yoga practice might function as a discourse in exercise, serving to work ideology through the body. Fully qualified Iyengar Yoga teacher Arabella Wright will lead the class. Beginners are welcome and all equipment will be provided.

13 April - 1 June
Preview: Saturday 12 April 6-8pm.

Open every day, 12-5pm. We will be closed over the following dates for Easter: 18 & 21 April, and 5 May.

Click on the image above for a slide show of installation views.

“Hey, I'm Mr. Poetic,

A worker in aesthetics,
I work to make the mundane mysterious,
I work to make the unimportant serious”

The Poetics (Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler)

Aaron Angell, Ed Atkins, Jonathan Baldock, Edwin Burdis, Jordan Baseman, Nicolas Deshayes, Michael Dean, Emma Hart, Jess Flood-Paddock, Andy Holden, David Kefford, Kate Owens, Juneau Projects, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Laure Prouvost, Florian Roithmayr, Giles Round, Soheila Sokhanvari, Jamie Shovlin, Ash Summers, Caroline Wendling, Ben Wilson and Jesse Wine.

Hey, I’m Mr Poetic features the work of 23 artists who have worked at Wysing in different ways over the last 25 years presenting work in all shapes, forms, materials and mediums and addressing multifarious ideas. The exhibition is a playful take on what artists do and make and what histories and stories can be told institutionally and artistically. Via art works, objects, images and experiences are rethought, reordered and recreated, to make the ordinary extraordinary, or the mundane revelatory. 

The exhibition includes a range of work across all media, including new sculptures by Michael Dean, Nicolas Deshayes and Jessie Wine, displayed alongside existing recent sculptures that include work from Emma Hart’s recent exhibition Dirty Looks (2013), a number of Jess Flood-Paddock’s food inspired Snacks, and Kate Owens' Towards Zero (1–18) (2013) –eighteen soap bar sculptures created from the act of washing paint off her hands.

The Cookham Erratics (2011) by Andy Holden – six large knitted sculptures which are replicas of pebbles, supposedly collected from the churchyard that Stanley Spencer painted in at Cookham – will be displayed in full.  A babble of voices emanate from these woolly crags, telling the story of their own history – mixing fiction and reality, geology with art history and theology, alongside elements from Holden’s own biography.

Jonathan Baldock’s wall sculpture Mumbo Jumbo (a masquerade habit) (2013)  – a series of small ceramic, stick-like sculptures, hung in a line, configured as if to form a mysterious language or modern day hieroglyphs – will be displayed in full, alongside several of Laure Prouvost’s text works; simple signs with provocations such as “You Are Here”.

Caroline Wendling displays a large table cloth covered in drawings and text which was created collectively by the audience who took part in the performance Walk, image, imagine (2013) in Bury St Edmunds. The drawings and language where their personal responses to the physical and psychological journey that Wendling had taken them on.

Jordan Baseman’s film Skin Coloured Chairs (2013) features the writer Simon Bennet describing his journey into adulthood via childhood care homes, young offender institutions and eventually prison, where he eventually discovered he could write – an event that changed his life.

Soheila Sokhanvari has produced a series of new works, using her father and family as subject matter, exploring how we form our identity, in paintings that use the classic Persian miniature as their format – something she has done all her life, since her Iranian father taught her as a child.

Ben Wilson was one of the first artists to live and work at Wysing, where he made a large out door sculpture entitled the Tree Keep on the landscape, which still exists today. He has since chosen to make a life painting squashed chewing gum on the streets of London, becoming a cult figure that the national and international press have termed “chewing gum man”. This is a radical act of transformation, turning unwanted litter into colourful portraits, signs, abstractions, or aspects of the urban environment that surrounds him. For the first time Wilson’s archive of images of these works will be presented, printed to scale.

Juneau Projects are working in collaboration with the our young artists' group Circuit group to make a parallel exhibition as part of Hey, I’m Mr Poetic, presented in Amphis; a structure made in 2008 by artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser in 2008.

Alongside contributing work to Hey, I’m Mr Poetic, Juneau Projects will create a new chapter in their work I am the warrior – an ongoing project that invites people to bring their own work, or something they have made, to present in the gallery in specially designed spaces and structures. 

At Wysing, Juneau Projects will work with Circuit to present an exhibition of things made by 15-25 year olds.

Via these artists and ideas, the exhibition aims to address Wysing’s role as a place for artists to make and experiment – from its initial incarnation as an ad hoc community founded and funded by the artists themselves, to the structured centre of studios and programs organised to meet the needs of artists working today.

Across this time, although the freedom of vision that being an artist enables has remained consistent, the idea of what role an artist takes, what they do, how they live, what they make, and how this relates to the world around us is constantly evolving.

Hey, I’m Mr Poetic is the first of two exhibitions looking at the different histories of Wysing Arts Centre and suggesting possible futures, with the second exhibition taking place on 13 Sept – 9 November. Hey, I’m Mr Poetic is curated by Kathy Noble.

16 February – 30 March 2014
Open every day, 12-5pm

Click on the image to see more installation shots by Plastiques Photography

Read Marie d’Elbée's review in Thisistomorrow, here.


 

Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century is a group exhibition of newly commissioned work by artists who worked at Wysing during 2013 as part of our artists' residency programme: Anna Barham, James Beckett, Keren Cytter, Cécile B. Evans, Michael Dean, Gustav Metzger, Rupert Norfolk, David Osbaldeston, Seb Patane, Charlotte Prodger and Florian Roithmayr.

The title of the exhibition is taken from writer Andrew Blair’s early 1874 science fiction novel of the same name; a wildly speculative intergalactic future forecast. Although the book's predictions, including the creation of ‘a hundred different zoological armies’, may now appear wide of the mark, they are a useful indicator of the mores of the time. The text stands in interesting contrast to 2013 Wysing residency artist Gustav Metzger, whose influential writings and activist activities from the 1950’s onwards have been prescient of our current concerns. Whereas Blair suggested passive spiritual change, Metzger advocates decisive responsive action.

Metzger’s text, Lift Off, which is included in the exhibition, asserts his recollection of his childhood desire for what art could be: “When I was young I wanted an art that would lift off – that would levitate gyrate, bring different – perhaps, contradictory aspects of my being. The search for – the need to encapsulate varying kinds of contradictory elements, the urgency of stopping sharp – extinct – twist and: razor-sharp endpoint. After the experience, we expand reconnect with a normality which is not the same as it was. But normality once changed, is not the same.”

Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century takes Metzger’s concerns and influence as a starting point from which to bring work by the other 2013 artists-in-residence together. The eleven artists included in the exhibition, whose work emerges from a wide range of working practices and methods, each share in common the time they spent at Wysing in residency as a point of transition. These new works exhibited allow reflection on where their work has come from and together allow for speculation on where the work may go next.

Whilst in residency, Seb Patane collaborated most closely with Gustav Metzger, working on a new sound piece. Patane invited Metzger to recite a passage from The Political Theatre (1929) by experimental German theatre director Erwin Piscator which he used to create a new sound piece. The text recounts a description Piscator wrote of his ill-fitting army uniform just before going to war. The correlation between Metzger’s own experiences as a German Jew who came to London as a child refugee in 1939, and Piscator’s later anti-military stance, inspired Patane to create this extraordinarily affecting work.

Michael Dean used the time and space at Wysing to focus on writing, something fundamental to the way he makes artwork. As a result of his residency, Dean began work on a graphic novel dealing with the confusion of intimacy, communication and physicality. His initial graphite drawing for one of the first pages, an ambiguous narrative formed from amalgam of cartoon tongues, will be on display. Housed in an MDF domestic tableau, the viewer has to lift and hold a concrete tongue sculpture to view the work.

Cécile B. Evans has produced a new work in association with Loughborough University's Radar arts programme. The work will be presented in two parts, the first of which is a series of 3 sculptures developed with Cay Green, PhD Candidate in the School of Design. The pieces are mundane personal effects- a comb, a screwdriver, and a pair of scissors- modes of technology with relative immunity to updates and upgrades. The files produced from the design collaboration will be 3D printed and presented in front of location studies that will be used in the subsequent part of the work, a video featuring the object. The project is an inquiry of the emotional investment of devices and the transient nature of spirit.

During her residency at Wysing, Anna Barham worked on the ambitious HD video Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike), exploring the relationships between spoken and written language; subject and system; body and machine. The voiceover was constructed from multiple versions of a text which Barham processed through rudimentary speech recognition and synthesis software and subjected to repeated edits and reprocessing.  Score presents that text here as a series of prints on holographic paper. Made on the same machine that is the main protagonist of the video, the prints point to the many different feedback loops used as methods of production within Barham's work.

The rhythmic repetition of images and text is typical for Keren Cytter's work, and in her new work Corrections she makes exceptional use of camera work and editing. In a heavily structured and tangled plot, two men plan their parents' murder under the watchful eye of witnesses. The unending deconstruction forces contemplation of narrative structure.

James Beckett’s explorations of minor histories often bring together incongruous research areas in ways that make their relationships appear entirely logical. For this new commission Beckett has taken the starting points of Russian Suprematism and the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Using the rules of production from the cult game rather than other more artistically accepted modes of chance such as the I Ching, Beckett shows the steps required to make an artwork, whilst, in it’s museological display, performs a satirical take of Modernist art production.

Rupert Norfolk’s often sculptural works play with the viewer’s expectations and assumptions of how a work operates in space. Whilst on residency at Wysing, Norfolk produced his first moving image work, Balls. Shot in Wysing’s gallery space, the video consists of a mesmerising infinite loop of five simultaneously bouncing basketballs dropping in and out of sync with each other. Made through digital editing, it depicts a convincing display of a clearly impossible occurrence through its precise composition and pace.

David Osbaldeston’s The Measure of Some Things is the first in a series of what the artist refers to as an image recognition device. As if the product of an amateur philosopher, the work appears as both a Cartesian diagram and a table made from seemingly ad-hoc material parts, like a quasi-scientific still-life. Co-ordinated for their metaphorical potential, these elements comically allude to the status of the art object as something ultimately ‘speculative, unexplainable, or immeasurable,’ where language breaks down.

Distance and desire are key tropes in the physical display of Charlotte Prodger's work. Recent works fetishistically reference the visual vocabulary of retail design and the slick functionality of high-end sportswear. Her work Prospex is constructed of a found image of a man’s wrist wearing a Seiko divers' watch encased between thick layers of Perspex with overlapping circular holes cut through it. The gesture of punching through to the image creates a restricted opening into a terrain that is at once familiar and oblique.

Florian Roithmayr’s new work Earplugs, takes a recurring motif in his work as the subject of two printed banners set in concrete bases. The two banners display images of earplugs held in both left and right hands with a clinical, instructional aesthetic. They display a moment of calm irresolution, the thought of use rather than silence, the form that they now take and the potential space they may inhabit.

To coincide with the opening of the exhibition Nicolas Deshayes has been commissioned to produce a new donation box for Wysing Arts Centre which will feature permanently in Wysing’s reception area. Deshayes works with glossy, synthetic materials, such as anodised aluminium and vacuum-formed plastic, to create skins, bulges and organic forms. For this commission Deshayes has created a visceral work akin to a gastrointestinal tract, into which visitors can insert their donations.

A new publication produced with An Endless Supply accompanies the exhibition. The publication collates responses to the question "Where do you see yourself in twenty-five years?" from sixty-seven artists, writers, academics and contributors to Wysing’s 2013 programme.

Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century launches a significant year for Wysing, as we mark our 25th birthday. Throughout 2014 our programme will aim to look at the potential of the future through what we know of the past; realised through ongoing residencies, artistic retreats, events, exhibitions and an innovative Futurecamp during the summer of 2014.

Annals of the Twenty-Ninth Century is curated by Gareth Bell-Jones and gives an insight not only into the ambitious work produced at Wysing and where this may lead, but also to the research, discussion and exchange of ideas that take place at our rural site outside Cambridge.

We are grateful to the Henry Moore Foundation for their generous support of Annals of the Twenty Ninth Century alongside funding from Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Arts Council England.

X-Operative, X Marks the Bökship
17 November – 20 December

Click on the image to see a selection of work.

Subverting and playing with how we read, write, collect knowledge and what we think of as a book, specialist East London independent bookshop, publisher, and project space X Marks the Bökship is setting up at Wysing Arts Centre for a special programme that is part exhibition, part events series and part functioning shop for artist’s books and independent publishing.

The title X-Operative is taken from an essay by Ksenia Cheinman, who uses the term to describe common places where the cultural space becomes creative, productive, commercial, domestic, and educational all at once. Using this as a blueprint, X Marks the Bökship has curated an exhibition including specially commissioned artworks and display systems by Adam Burton, Sophie Demay, Rory Macbeth, Beatriz Olabarrieta and Keef Winter, which support a wide range of publications available to read or purchase from each station. Independently produced by artists, designers, writers and thinkers, these books sit in relation to five separate themes illustrating the multi operations of X Marks the Bökship: reading & writing, production, performance, distribution and exchange.

The five artists, who all have a strong relationship to writing in their practice, have each taken one of the themes as a starting point for their commission.

At the entrance of the exhibition, on the theme of ‘exchange’, designer Sophie Demay has created a purpose-built moveable stage and reading area. This space will be used for performances in the events programme, also functioning as a space for conversation, reading and discussion for the duration of the show. Feel free to play an artist’s record of your choice. Placed on the stage and on the theme of ‘writing and reading’, Rory Macbeth’s Reading Glasses (Fraud), 2013, is a set of spectacles produced to same prescription as Sigmund Freud.

While they accurately reproduce the experience of wearing Freud's glasses, they simultaneously hopelessly fail to allow us to experience what Freud would have seen. You are invited to try them on and examine the journals and texts placed alongside.

Occupying the centre of the space, on the theme of ‘production’, artist and publisher Keef Winter’s Self Editing, 2013, is a destructive production line. In a performative event at the start of the exhibition books on production are shredded and reformed into eleven cast concrete tablets which remain for the duration of the show. Alongside, in a selection of four new works on the theme of ‘performance’, Beatriz Olabarrieta has used publications as construction material and as sculptural objects. The carefully selected books are handled by Olabarrieta in ways which pull out the performative practices of their authors and subjects, with her constructions created as their stage set.

Finally, on the theme of ‘distribution’, artist and publisher Adam Burton has written a pamphlet, Untitled (), 2013, investigating the problems of independent distribution and how some of these problems might be resolved by an alternative independent distribution network amongst other options.

Over the duration of the five weeks, each construction will become activated as the focus of a packed events programme focusing on each theme including talks, screenings, workshops, readings and performances.

The events allow for an environment for exchange and study as well as action, reflection and discussion and include contributions from Anagram Books, And Public, Eleanor Vonne Brown, Adam Burton, Adam Chodzko and Rob Young, Michael Dean, Chris Evans and Will Holder, Rory Macbeth, PERSONA Journal with Melissa Gordon, Jessica Wiesner and Marina Vishmidt, The Fox with Mathew Whittington, and Lucy Woodhouse.

Rebecca Jagoe will be based at Wysing Arts Centre as Bökship Writer-in-Residence for the duration of the exhibition.

Saturday 16 November 5-8pm
Preview and Launch event

5-7pm Keef Winter Lets Build Our Own Tomb, Durational Performance
6pm Introduction by Bökship founder Eleanor Vonne Brown
6.30-8pm Lucy Woodhouse Experimental Ink Jet, Durational Performance

After an introduction to X-Operative by Eleanor Vonne Brown artist and publisher Keef Winter activates his installation, shedding books about production and reforming them into concrete book blocks throughout the evening. Alongside, Lucy Woodhouse uses printers and scanners to create live visuals and unique prints in the gallery.

Saturday 30 November 1-5pm
Day for the exchange of ideas led by Eleanor Vonne Brown

1-2pm Publishers Lunch
2-5pm Reading and discussion group, workshops on the themes of production and distribution for independent publishers with Adam Burton, Anagram Books and And Public.

From 1- 2pm there will be a free lunch available for publishers and those interested in publishing to meet and discuss new projects they have been working on. Afterwards there will be discussion on the theme of distribution led by artist Adam Burton. Speakers from varied fields, bookshops, a distributors, online platforms and independent publishers will meet to discuss solutions to current problems with distribution. 

Saturday 7 December 3-5pm
In-Conversation

Screening of Adam Chodzko’s Plan for a Spell (2001) followed by an in-conversation with the artist and Rob Young, author of Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music.

From what seems like random patchwork of images and sounds Adam Chodzko’s Plan for a Spell conjures an oblique but compelling picture of Britain at the turn of the millennium. Playing with ideas of repeating patterns and cryptic codes (whose hidden meaning is always just about to be revealed), the piece even promises to be the definitive word on its subject, while self-consciously disclaiming how this knowledge could ever be possible. In this special screening at Wysing Arts Centre, Adam Chodzko looks back on the piece, and its place within his wider practice, in the company of writer and critic, Rob Young, Editor-at-Large at The Wire magazine, and author of Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music, published by Faber and Faber. The screening will be followed by a signing of the accompanying publication Plans and Spells by the artist.

Adam Chodzko’s Plan for a Spell was commissioned as a Film and Video Umbrella Touring Exhibition in association with Mappin Art Gallery. Supported by Arts Council England. This event is part of Film and Video Umbrella's 25 Frames.

Saturday 14 December 3-5pm
Launch of new publications and journals with talks and readings including

PERSONA magazine - East Coast / West Coast a conversation between Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson re-enacted by Melissa Gordon, Jessica Wiesner and Marina Vishmidt.

The Fox Journal - Mathew Whittington launches new journal

The Wanderer by Franz Kafka - Rory Macbeth presents an audio piece from his forthcoming book

Errors Hit Orient - Lyrics by B.S. Johnson. Live musical performance with Chris Evans and Will Holder.

Fourteen Leverhulme Arts Scholars have been using Wysing's gallery as an expanded studio during July and August. Come and see an exhibition of the new work they have produced on 21 & 22 August, 12-5pm. Evening reception to mark the close of their residency Thursday 22 August, 7-9pm, all welcome.

Click on the image to see more photos of the exhibition and opening event.

LEVERHULME ARTS SCHOLARS EXHIBITION
Open: Wednesday & Thursday, 21 & 22 August, 12-5pm
Evening Reception: Thursday 22 August, 7-9pm

Fourteen Leverhulme Arts Scholars have been using Wysing's gallery as an expanded studio during July and August, and have participated in a dynamic programme of group workshop activity aimed at developing their practices, led by established artists who have a history of working with Wysing: Lawrence Epps, Cally Spooner, Mark Aerial Waller, Caroline Wendling and Caroline Wright..

The Scholars in 2013 are: Lara A’Court, Joss Allen, Guy Broadhurst, Hannah Clarkson, Jack Cornell, Katherine Fishman, Lucy Hodgkiss, Kyle Kirkpatrick, James Madden, Adam McGowan, Rebecca Moss, Maria Teresa Ortoleva, Rachel Rayns and Kari Robertson.

Come and see the new work they have produced in a gallery exhibition that will be open to the public on 21 & 22 August, 12-5pm. Plus join us for an evening reception to mark the close of their residency Thursday 22 August, 7-9pm, all welcome.

A strange cross between a butchers shop and a nightclub; a solo exhibition and performance event, 26 May – 7 July 2013.

Click on the image to see a selection of work.

Click here to download a copy of the exhibition text A Conversation between Jonathan Baldock and Lotte Juul Petersen, Curator, Wysing Arts Centre.

Jonathan Baldock’s first solo exhibition in the UK in three years will include an entirely new body of work which he developed during a period in-residence at Wysing, November to December 2012. The exhibition will be composed of felt, knitted and ceramic sculptures (both as object and costume), corn dolly masks and wall prints, presented as an installation around a centrally constructed stage.

Works will reference elements as disparate as pagan ritual, archaeological excavations, the art of corn dolly making, mimicry, the carnivalesque and theatre, ancient stone monuments such as Stonehenge, and Samuel Beckett's televised work Quad 1981.

Jonathan will talk about the exhibition with curator and writer Kathy Noble, previously Head of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary and Curator at Tate Modern, at a special in-conversation event on Saturday 29 June, 4-6pm.  

Exhibition open every day, 12-5pm until 7 July. Closed Bank Holiday Monday, 27 May.

Leading British choreographer Henrietta Hale will collaborate with Baldock on a performance during the final days of the exhibition, as part of Wysing's Annual Open Weekend, 6 & 7 July, 12-6pm, that 'activates' the works. Costumes as sculptures, masks and objects in the exhibition will be worn and used as tools for the performance.

Jonathan Baldock (b.1980) studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Maine (USA), 2007; Royal College of Art (MA Painting), 2003-5; Winchester School of Arts, (BA Fine Art Painting), 2002-5. He has had solo exhibitions at Cell Projects, London (2010), Annarumma Gallery, Naples (2011) and Colloredo-Mansfeldský Palác, Prague (2012), and participated in group exhibitions at Chapter Gallery, Cardiff (2011), Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2011), Studio Voltaire, London (2010) and Turner Contemporary, Margate (2009).

Read more about Jonathan's recent performance work at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai here

10 February — 24 March 2013
Daily 12noon-5pm

9 February, 6-8pm: Relatively Absolute Exhibition Launch
Saturday 23 March: Relatively Absolute Events

Click on the image for installation shots of the exhibition

Relatively Absolute is a group exhibition consisting of newly commissioned work, as well as the source material that has informed it’s making, by the twelve artists, and the writer and musician who worked at Wysing during 2012 in our residency programme.

The exhibition gives an insight not only into the ambitious work produced at Wysing but also the research, discussion and exchange of ideas that happens during residencies at our rural site outside Cambridge. Central to the Relatively Absolute is the idea that hidden systems and structures can be used to uncover meaning, narrative and paradox.

Relatively Absolute includes moving image and sound-based pieces - a new, silent, single-screen monitor-based work by 2012 Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price and a site-specific sound work composed by musician in residence Luke Abbott, available to listen to whilst walking Wysing’s grounds.  Sculptural works (many of which came out of work made in Wysing’s ceramics studio) include Emma Hart’s visceral forms that ‘spit out’ photographs and regurgitate ideas, and two biomorphic bronze-glazed ceramics by Salvatore Arancio.

Nicolas Deshayes presents a new sculpture of three steel framed tables with tops made from vacuum-formed yams, mirroring the tables of clay test pieces he produced whilst working at Wysing. Edwin Burdis’s table made from a painting of a fig is exhibited alongside a text-painting based on his recently composed opera, performed at Wysing in early January. Two new works by Jonathan Baldock combine the tradition of abstract painting with ceramic forms presented on a boldly coloured surface.

Flora Parrott contributes a new shrine-like installation, whilst Stuart Whipps shows new prints of casting moulds produced in Mexico for large concrete structures. Jess Flood-Paddock’s inverted clavicle sculpture also takes casting from another new work as a starting point, and Philomene Pirecki has made an installation from photographs, and the photographs of photographs.

Text works also play an important part in the exhibition, with a new text by Ed Atkins produced a small publication and a wall-based piece by Nilsson Pflugfelder. And Patrick Coyle’s year-long residency culminates in a publication which, like the exhibition, uses oblique references as well as unusual literary perspective, to connect the influences, incidents and his own experience of all the artists, artworks and events that have taken place during his twelve months at Wysing.

he source material contributed by the artists remains unattributed, inviting the viewer to draw out their own conclusions about conversations and research that has gone on during the making of the work. Material includes Palaeolithic hand axes c. 700,000 - 40,000 years BC, a photographic reproduction of a Henry Moore maquette, an unpublished manuscript of 1970's experimental writing by an unknown writer found in a London junk market, the complete works of Gilbert Sorrentino, a recording of a hand dance by Tilly Losch performed in 1933, a selection of spiritual merchandise and a playable LP of BBC Radiophonic Workshop sound effects from 1976.

A review of the exhibition by Maggie Gray for this is tomorrow is here.

Curated by Gareth Bell-Jones. Supported with funding from Arts Council England, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Henry Moore Foundation.

On Sunday 24 March, 2-4pm we will be hosting an Arts Award Support Session for young people on BTEC and Creative Media Diploma courses working towards their Bronze/Silver/Gold Arts Award. This free session coincide with the final day of the exhibition  and we invite you to review and discuss the exhibition, as well as take part in a Q&A session with a Wysing artist about careers in the arts.

30 September — 28 October 2012
12noon-5pm daily

A number of special events take place during the exhibition.  Click here for more information.

Download the exhibition text here.

Solid on Our Source Planet includes work by a group of artists who took part in a recent Escalator residential retreat at Wysing: Annabelle Craven-Jones, Mat Do, Clare Gasson, Claire Hope, Glen Jamieson, Kit Poulson, Kari Rittenbach, Florian Roithmayr and Alan Stanners. The exhibiting artists initially came to our rural site during the retreat which was developed in collaboration with artist Mark Titchner, to explore ideas on the subject of ‘the self’. The title, Solid on Our Source Planet stems from a line in the poem Only Alive Now by the Reiki Master Joy Magezis, who came on the retreat to provide reiki sessions with the artists.

Subsequently, the artists have formed an informal, evolving collective. In this exhibition, works by the individual artists, in a range of media including sculpture, moving image and painting, will be presented in a context of discussion and reflection alongside documentary material of the group’s activities and future plans. The exhibition is part of our ongoing Wysing Arts Contemporary series and all work is for sale. In addition, the artists have created an editioned print especially for the exhibition, which can be bought online click here

Annabelle Craven-Jones was born in Gloucestershire and studied Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art and Chelsea College of Art, London. Her work locates universal thought processes within the wider context of today’s increased therapy culture and that of ‘emotionalism.’ She has exhibited widely and recently received an Arts Council Grant for the Arts award which included the solo show PROPOSAL FOR MINDSCAPE (neuroAESTHETIC) at Cruise&Callas, Berlin (2011). She also curates a peripatetic performance event THE SOCIALISATION PROJECT. She is represented by Cruise&Callas, Berlin.. 

Mat Do lives and works between Southend-on-Sea and London. Working across a range of media including film and video, digital print and performance, his practice explores ideas of ambition and reinvention at odds with the physical and psychological topography it inhabits.  Solo projects include ‘Florence Mine’, Egremont, Cumbria (ongoing),‘Grizedale Arts’, Coniston, Cumbria (2011), ‘The ties that bind us are stronger than ever’, AND/OR Gallery, London (2010) and ‘Incommunicado FM’, Site Gallery, Sheffield (2008). Future collaborations include The National Trust & Petworth House, Sussex and The Grundy Gallery, Blackpool.

Clare Gasson lives in London.  Her practice originates from text – her own and those she finds on the walls of a city or in files in an archive.  She works in a variety of ways: from working with the voice, performance, film, photography, posters, sculpture, city walks to writing scripts and scores.  Recent exhibitions and performances include ICA, Turner Contemporary, South London Gallery, Tramway, Arnolfini Gallery.

Claire Hope is based in Leeds, pursuing a practice-led PhD in Fine Art at the University. She is interested in exploring how ambivalent experiences of the human psyche, shared visual culture and flows of capital, may relate to opposing individual and collective desires to objectify, control and fix human experience. She has exhibited internationally for 12 years; recently showing a LUX commissioned video, being listed as one of ‘100 Artists to Watch’ in Modern Painters magazine, screening work in progress at David Dale Gallery and participating in the retreat on ‘The Self’ and Open Weekend at Wysing Arts Centre.

Glen Jamieson is an artist photographer who lives and works in Norwich. The problem of landscape’s reluctance to conform to depiction, and the photograph’s unreliability to truthfully depict, is at the core of Jamieson’s work.  Recent publications and exhibitions include A Matter of Distance, (Ordinary Culture, 2012), Suspicions of a Peninsula Town (YH485 Press, 2010) and In Search of the Hometown, (YH485, Great Yarmouth Seafront TV, 2009. He is a steering committee member at OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich (January 2011 - present).

Kit Poulson is interested in conversation, in matter and mutter, in negotiation.  Much of his work has been concerned with an exploration of how we use the static as the recognition and apprehension of vitality.  He works with a variety of media, particularly painting and installation. He frequently collaborates, and this reflects an interest in thought as a performance and a concrete happening.  In these collaborations he has worked at various points with sound, music, sculpture, dance, text. He recently published a book (The Ice Cream Empire, Bookworks).

Kari Rittenbach is a critic and curator based in New York.  She organizes small-scale curatorial projects as primary work surface.

Florian Roithmayr lives in London. His work often refers to a particular experience of environments as actualized manifestations or testing-sites for abstract ideas. Past, present and future exhibitions include Vilma Gold Gallery, New Contemporaries, Extra City, The Approach Gallery, Grazer Kunstverein, Neuer Aachener Kunstverein. 

Alan Stanners trained at Glasgow School of Art.  His work poses questions and sets out manifestos, exploring the legacy of surrealism, through bold abstract paintings and texts.  He has exhibited widely including solo exhitions at CCA Glasgow (2012), Outpost, Norwich (2011) and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2010).

Downloads:
Exhibition text

8 June — 9 August 2012
12-5pm daily

An exhibition of newly commissioned and existing work that looks at the idea of architecture as an expanded personal archive and a depository for memories.  Part of the national Love Architecture Festival in June, it includes talks and events looking at the space between art and architecture. 

This exhibition of newly commissioned and existing work explores the notion that a building can act as an expanded personal archive and a depository for memories. A range of sculpture, drawing and video, work with, or reference, the connection between architectural space, memory and experience. Throughout the exhibition a number of events brought artists and experts together to discuss the relationship between art and architecture - listen to these events here.

Jackie Chettur currently works with text, photography and performance to uncover the ways that we imagine and remember spaces. For Recollect she presents new work exploring the physical space of the house as a metaphor for the emotionally claustrophobic relationships in the book Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. By selecting sections of text and printing them as new titles on collectable editions of the book, Chettur reframes this widely-read book. A stereoscope gives the trompe l’oeil image of the porch of the Frome house, a mundane space that becomes pivotal as the narrative unfolds. Both pieces use old technologies (stereoscopes and the printing press) to present a contemporary reading of the text, written in 1911. 

Jackie Chettur also has a studio at Wysing, click here for more information

Phil Coy presents his work Façade; for the first time shown as part of the set for the film of the same name. As the title suggests, the work looks at the construction of reality and the deconstruction of built space and language. By showing the mechanisms of television: the make-up room, the studio, the green screen and the auto-cue, Coy demonstrates how even simple experiences are layered with visual and technical tricks. He uses archival footage and the language of architectural ‘walk-throughs’ to explore some aspects of contemporary architecture, including the connotations of power associated with the use of glass in corporate architecture. Working with a production film crew and architectural visualisation specialists Miller Hare, Façade's production process implements the tools and hierarchical systems associated with corporate media production in order to reveal the constituent parts of that system. The film’s narrator, television presenter Julia Somerville, repeats the word façade and gives its definition, adding a layer of irony to the way that the film builds up and breaks down the appearances of its characters.

Three sculptures from the series Abandon in Place, and a film, Analytical Chronology of Three Dimensions are the work of Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry (who were also resident at Wysing during The Department of Overlooked Histories, 2011). The upper sections of the sculptures, are based on John Madin’s Central Library, Birmingham, and the lower parts based on the Apollo 1 launch pad, which remains as a monument to the astronauts who died in the shuttle in Cape Canaveral. Each of these two elements contains one meteorite which is visible in the surface of the concrete.  Through representing the Central Library, a condemned Brutalist building from 1972, Kihlberg and Henry play with the architectural model as a sculpture of a finished and flawed building rather than a proposition for something new. The concrete forms seem to represent the storage of static information at odds with the fluid way in which we visualize the consumption of knowledge with new technology.

The film Analytical Chronology of Three Dimensions is an experiment in developing a visual or cinematic grammar based on the temporal/spatial properties of lingual grammar. A series of tenses applied to simple verbs are expressed in relation to various types of space; the abstract mathematical space expressed in the book Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, the physical space of a gallery building, its architectural maquette, and the projected space of the video itself within that space. This layering of perspectives demonstrates the fluidity with which we experience seemingly static spaces.

The video 4.5 ft. and to the left, behind me by Una Knox is projected onto the back wall of the gallery. This piece follows a man, Steve Woodhouse, on a physical journey around the corridors and storage rooms of a London museum storage facility as he describes his work managing the images of the museum collection and his experience of a medical condition known as ‘temporal lobe epilepsy’ where déjà vu precedes epileptic seizures. As he moves through it, the building becomes a metaphor for the man’s mind with its empty corridors, storage boxes full of unseen objects and large clock-face seen from the inside. The narrator describes unusual experiences or bizarre sensations, raising questions about reality and perception. This thematic is further explored by the way that Woodhouse, who also works as a professional actor, discusses the duality of actor versus acted persona whilst effectively ‘playing’ himself in Knox’s video.

The group Better Futures Forever responded to the exhibition by curating their own show, with the work of five artists, in Wysing’s gallery before Recollect was installed. In editing these images, certain elements of Wysing’s gallery have been amended or improved, raising questions about how memories of real space and activity are fixed and manipulated. By co-opting a public space for private use and allowing access to this act only through mediated images the group play with tensions between public and private space.

Two prints by Sean Edwards made as part of a residency in the Maelfa Shopping Centre, Llanedeyrn, are included in the exhibition. The Maelfa, once a busy shopping centre situated on the outskirts of Cardiff where the artist grew up, was due to be demolished when Edwards took up residence to record the space in an act that sits between personal recollection, nostalgia and documentation. The care taken over documenting this seemingly failed public space speaks of the importance of personal memories and insights in spaces controlled by public planning. Focusing on small moments in the fabric of this large architectural setting Edwards makes intimate yet abstract images that could describe spaces familiar to many people. Despite the architectural scale of the prints, they are pasted onto the wall in a low-fi manner that suits the un-monumental imagery they convey.

Rosie Pedlow and Joe King exhibit Bivouac, a large sculpture and a carousel of 80 photographic slides. The slides show structures made from organic materials that frequently and anonymously sprang up over the course of a year in an area of Suffolk woodland surrounding the artists. Pedlow and King began to record this process that seemed to sit between human construction and organic patterns and subsequently ‘abducted’ one of the dens. Encountering the structures only as traces the artists associated them with the mysterious, potentially mischievous activity of sprites or ethereal characters. The spaces represent the construction of informal architectures built as and used for play.
A programme of events will run as part of the exhibition.

Works in Recollect could be purchased through Own Art, the interest-free loan scheme.  Wysing Members, Supporters and Patrons can enjoy a 10% discount on purchase price.

12 May — 27 May 2012
12-5pm daily

Brought together for a six-week residency under the metaphor The Cosmos, and taking the past, origins and knowledge as starting points, artists Salvatore Arancio, Flora Parrott, Nilsson Pflugfelder and Stuart Whipps presented a range of new work in the gallery and across Wysing’s site.

Click here for more information about The Cosmos residency.

Each artist developed a distinct body of work in response to this residency and through conversations with a range of local experts and enthusiasts in a programme of public events and informal meetings aimed at exploring the huge concepts that constitute our understanding of The Cosmos. These new works explored, in some way, the manner in which we structure knowledge in science, spiritualism and in human culture more generally. This period of research has generated the beginnings of many projects and the works shown at Wysing are the first iteration of larger bodies of work that the artists will continue to develop.

Salvatore Arancio developed a series of works playing the visualisation of science and the merging of fact and myth in knowledge. Drawing on his interest in historic illustrations of geological discoveries he is exhibiting a large screenprint of minute grains of a piece of granite, alongside a series of small collage works. A series of new works in clay, undergoing a period of drying before being fired, are shown in our ceramics studio, where they have been made.  Our recycled structure Amphis, 2008, is the location for the screening of a video made entirely from clips from the series The Cosmos by Carl Sagan with a new soundtrack by Arancio. The film encompasses imagery picturing theories from physics, the human body and built environments through history and has the visionary, almost psychedelic, low-fi appearance of a 1980s vision of the future.

The sculptural works developed by Flora Parrott during this residency and presented in the gallery, attempt to think through abstract concepts using manipulated organic materials including coal, silk and oyster shells. Four compositions of images and objects act as frameworks to understand four particular concepts: deep time and compression, singularity and expansion and interconnectedness and the primordial mound. Through research into the use of Mandalas, ancient tools for spiritual focus, Parrott has been exploring the physical and psychological filters that people instinctively put in place that allow us to define the limits of conscious thought and prevent constant contemplation of enormous, paralysing ideas. The works presented here could act as frameworks that interrupt or disrupts these filters to allow fluid thought.

The work of Nilsson Pflugfelder (Magnus Nilsson and Ralf Pflugfelder) is situated on the intersection of critical spatial design, architecture, art and discourse. As a response to The Cosmos they have proposed a large, gleaming outdoor structure to be situated in the grounds of Wysing. This galvanised steel triangle will act as a contemporary folly-like space with no obvious function and no obvious entrance. Although the sculpture will have a minimal, futuristic feel, its typology, proportions and atmosphere reference ancient structures. The lack of discernible purpose for this strangely rarefied space may give it the feeling of a site of pilgrimage. Within the gallery is sited a black object which will become the central element of the structure, once complete.

Stuart Whipps often takes overlooked narratives from recent history as the starting point for making films and images. During The Cosmos he researched Edward James, an eccentric character who used his personal wealth, power and influence to solidify and materialise his unconventional beliefs. Whipps presents a series of images taken in Las Pozas; James’ surrealist concrete garden (built from 1949 – 1984) set in the rainforest in Mexico. The images, projected medium format slides, show the casts used to make the concrete sculptures, the sculpture and its surrounding forest.

This year artist Patrick Coyle documents the residency programme through performance and writing. At 6.30pm on 12 May, Coyle presents a performative tour interpreting the works of the four residency artists. Documentation of this is available in Wysing’s reception alongside a reading area and further information on all the artists.  Read Patrick's blog here

24 March — 25 March 2012
Daily 12noon-5pm

Over the previous months, Wysing Young Artists, who are aged between 14 and 19, have visited studios, made trips to galleries and been mentored by some of Wysing's studio artists.

Their exhibition over the weekend of 24 and 25 March offered a chance to see a culmination of their work so far. The exhibition also launched the new Wysing Young Artists in Residence programme. Click here for more information about the programme.

4 February — 18 March 2012
Daily 12noon-5pm

The group exhibition The Starry Rubric Set (the title taken from a quote from Milton’s poem Paradise Regained) considers classical astrology as a device to bring together new works made by artists who were in residence at Wysing during 2011 as part of The Institute of Beyond and to introduce the three themes of Wysing’s 2012 programme: The Cosmos, The Mirror and The Forest. 

The exhibition includes site-specific works, moving-image, sound work, sculpture and prints that loosely explore systems and structures of space and time.

A central principle of astrology is integration within the cosmos. The individual, Earth, and its environment are correlated with each other as one; time and space is equivalent. Changes observed in the heavens are therefore reflective of similar cycles of change observed on earth and within the individual. As above, so below; as below, so above. There is a symmetry in the individual as a microcosm and the celestial environment as a macrocosm.

There are a number of parallels between classical astrology and John Latham’s Time Base theory. Across the centre of the gallery space is a reproduction of the time base spectrum from a performance of Latham’s The Government of the First and Thirteenth Chair. Alongside are reproductions of the original 1978 performance at Riverside Studios. The spectrum is made up of 36 bands, from ‘least event’ (1) to ‘universe as event’ (36). The story of humanity occupies the 13 bands from 17 - 30. Human experiences lower down the spectrum are baser and more animalistic, higher numbers represent more enlightened experience. Two stacked chairs are positioned on the time base, one painted black, represents the least event. The other, painted white and stacked on-top, represents the universe as event. The two chairs stacked illustrate Latham’s system of understanding the universe.

The exhibition is lit by a new installation by Giles Round. The Diagonals of March (for Diego Rivera) uses two full walls of the exhibition space. The idea for the work was conceived in the house of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and uses the same plaited cabling and lighting structures as employed in Mexico. The geometric mural of coloured cabling ends in a series of spotlights which illuminate the gallery space. Projected on the barrel roof of the gallery space is Kate Owens’ screensaver By the Pricking of My Thumbs. Evoking the celestial in the mundane, the work consists of a series of photographs of linoleum which slowly fade from one to the next. Below Kate Owens’ work sits Rob Filby’s John Deere Drawbar 2140, a piece of farm equipment that has been reconditioned with phosphorescent (glow in the dark) paint. The work is charged by the lighting around it which forms its physical memory.

A new commission, Slowly Crunching by Nicolas Deshayes consists of two large polystyrene panels at the end of the space. The rear of the work is coated in phosphorescent paint and serves as a projection screen for Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry’s film This Story is About a Little Boy. Images from the film burn into the paint forming a lingering after-image. The work is a reconstruction of a film according to its recollection through subjective memory. A friend of the artists was asked to recall a film which had moved him in some way and made an impression on his life. His recollection of The Fallen Idol by Carol Reed was recorded and used as the narrative structure to re-edit the visuals of the film. Confusions, alterations, hesitations and added events were reanimated in the reconstruction of the film-as-memory.

Between screenings of This Story is About a little Boy, Laure Prouvost’s sound work This Voice – Pink could can be heard throughout the space. This work, a visual work described through sound, addresses the audience directly and personally. Also included in the exhibition are two video works by Prouvost, Sculpture of Grandma and Finger Point Green. The two works recorded from Prouvost’s perspective show her attempts to describe artworks by her conceptual granddad and grandma. What is before the camera obscures what Provoust is attempting to describe.

Marjolijn Dijkman’s Wandering Through the Future is a video collage of fragments of 70 film productions from all over the world. Passing all sorts of apocalyptic landscapes and scenarios, the one-hour video leads you through the future from 2008 until 802.701 A.D. in order of appearance. The film tries to examine the way the future has been given shape and how the different scenarios relate to each other.

Ruth Beale’s prints Acid Utopia and An Epoch of Rest are hand-drawn reworkings of a 19th century frontispiece and a date-stamp page respectively. The images are from two different library copies of News from Nowhere - Williams Morris’ tale of a visitor to a future pastoral idyll where workers are content and formal education is obsolete - one a historic first edition held in the British Library, and the other the only copy held by Southwark Libraries, Beale's local library service. They are part of a series of works that layer investigations into libraries and books with acid trip-outs, to explore the tandem possibilities of mental and social emancipation.

Outside of the gallery onsite are Hilary Koob Sassen's Mannerist Bollards. The wrought steel sculptures form an endpoint amidst Wysing's winding concrete. They also serve as a stage for a performance and as bolt plates capable of supporting sculptural elaboration.

A new publication by An Endless Supply accompanies the exhibition. The publication collates responses to the proposition "From your position, predict two points in motion that will come into alignment" from 45 contributors to Wysing’s 2011 programme.

4 December — 22 January 2012

Slipped presented the work of artists who bring a criticality to the history and materiality of ceramic. With Aaron Angell, Caroline Achaintre, Lucy Conochie, Coco Crampton, Mark Essen, The Grantchester Pottery, Lawrence Leaman, Phil Root, Giles Round and Jessie Wine.

Click on the image to see installation shots of the exhibition.

The approach that the artists in Slipped have taken to working in clay is as an extension of their performance, painting or sculptural practices, resulting in work that often takes the materiality of clay as a starting point for pieces that combine the tactile nature of ceramic with conceptual rigour.

Slipped highlighted the potential of Wysing to act as a catalyst for collaborations between artists; much of the work was created in Wysing's on-site ceramics studio especially for the exhibition. Works demonstrated an interest in folk arts, craft, British modernism and legacies of twentieth century art and design and included domestic, potentially functional objects, painted plaques, small installations and freestanding sculpture.

For Slipped, The Grantchester Pottery, developed by Phil Root and Giles Round at Wysing, presented its first full range of domestic wares in a postmodern palette. Drawing on historical precedents such as Roger Fry's Omega Workshops, The Grantchester Pottery is interested in collective approaches to production. 

Similarly, Coco Crampton pursues an interest in the heritage of traditional craft disciplines, creating idiosyncratic collisions of materials and processes that explore the polarised relationship between tradition and the modern, and their relative percieved values. Crampton's Bowers reference systems of growth and natural order; modular stacks of unitary components, branch-like wooden constructions, faux effects surfaces, and spiral growth patterns in hand thrown clay.

Sharing an interest in architectural surface with Crampton, Giles Round offered a Fuming Pot of sage to cleanse the gallery space as part of his Neo Brutalist series of works that take on the texture of broken concrete at Wysing. The Wasters, a number of selected clay off cuts become distinctive architectural forms presented on the classic, functional 606 Universal Shelving System designed by Deiter Rams in 1960. Mark Essen's clay pipe and ashtray presented an interest in the fine line between the functional and obsolete. Essen employs wood and marble shaped by use to display his ceramics which are small observational gestures formed in a material he finds complelling because of its long history and malleable but functional properties.

Aaron Angell's works act as an expressive homage to the common imagery of British psychedelic folk music. His expressive approach to sculpting and glazing stoneware resulted here in four individual intricate, abstract scenes that share common motifs and gestures. Lawrence Leaman's prints, Motor Mouth, 'A' and their air drying clay work Moon with Laces, take the contemporary suburban marginality of a Welsh border town as a starting point. Their graphic sensibility offers a visual counterpoint to the potential nostalgia of exploring ceramics.

Caroline Achaintre's work combines materials such as patent leather and steel with ceramics to create sculptures that are complexly attractive; a collision of materials that is at once appealing and repellent. Jesse Wine's sculpted stoneware forms, coated in rich layers of coloured boot polish, have a sumptuous erotic feel; their surfaces embody hours of layering, texturing and smoothing. This process of layering is made visible in Swimmin Pool and Always Fashion and matched by an overlaying of Wine's points of reference: contemporary consumer culture; design; pornography and traditional art from around the world.

Lucy Conochie's standing plaques and assemblages were an investigation into an ambiguous space between devotional painting, the sculptural object, and the still like within the history of painting. Each piece could also act as a linguistic signifier, with Conochie building a relationship between the languages of painting and poetry. These earthenware tablets referenced drawings and larger unmade sculptures. Phil Root's Party Pieces take some recurrent pattern motifs from his paintings, and presented them as a series of stand along coloured shapes in 3d.

Slipped was curated by Wysing's Artists and Programmes Curator, Elinor Morgan.

13 November — 27 November 2011

Each work in the exhibition was developed by the artists  An Endless Supply, Ruth Beale, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry and Emma Smith during their residencies within The Department of Overlooked Histories. The works encourage us to examine the way that information is presented and read, drawing out a wider concern of the Department around the way that history, and the information that forms it, is created, developed, preserved, presented and understood.

Click on the image to see installation shots of the exhibition.

Ruth Beale’s pamphlets and screenprinted posters form part of a larger body of work, England's Pleasant Land: A Remake. The poster, inspired by early twentieth century pageant posters, represents a framework for the outcomes of Beale’s research project. It advertises a series of performances and projects in various forms which highlight issues/tensions relating to preservation and historic/natural authenticity within a contemporary idea of the countryside.

This project is a proposal for a re-imagining of the issues played out in a pageant play, England’s Pleasant Land, by EM Forster from 1939. Though both fun and knowing in its use of form, the Forster play perpetuated the problems with pageants by not challenging timeless notions of rurality and class hierarchies. The form of the pageant popular from 1900-1930s was that of an historical reenactment centred around a particularly linear, empirical telling of history.

Here Beale reinterprets what is fundamentally a polemic for preservation of the countryside into a series of ‘vignettes’ that question what a pageant might be or do now. She has taken an antiquated form, reinvented it and is using it to explore the very notions of historicisation and preservation that it represents.

Emma Smith’s performance of a new composition: Bourn Bounds Bob Major, in the tower at Bourn Church on Saturday 12 November at 7.30pm is accompanied by a presentation of the composition score and a set of handchimes that tonally match those found in the Bourn Church. The score presented here is the outcome of a body of research into the use of bell ringing as an ancient mode of communication. Smith has worked with bell ringers and mathematicians to construct a coded language based on the mapping of ringing methods.

Studying the geometric structures that are made possible through the mathematical sequences of ringing, Smith mapped the process named ‘Plain Bob’ as selected and regularly played by Bourn’s ringers, onto a map of the village. Through this layering process the main thoroughfares and boundaries determine the rows to be played. Converting this geographic map back into sound Smith has developed a composition that can take its player on a journey from the tower at Bourn Church down all the village roads to the extent of the parish boundary.

The wallpapered design stand presented by An Endless Supply houses a 100 page type specimen, designed and published by the duo as part of a body of research into the activities of the Curwen Press between 1911 and 1935. The specimen features Curwen Sans, originally drawn by Harold Curwen in 1911, and uncovered and redrawn by An Endless Supply 100 years later.

The font has been redrawn from original prints sourced from the Curwen Press Papers held at Cambridge University. The type specimen functions as a critical history of the typeface featuring new writing on the processes of revival and acting as a vehicle for considering the study of history in general. The screenprinted wallpaper that forms the dust jacket of, and backdrop to the specimen is a redrawn version of one of many wallpaper designs by the Curwen Press.

This work not only raises questions about the revival, reinterpretation and representation of overlooked design but actively enters into them by digitising and making available this typeface which although a forerunner to more avant guard typeface design has now slipped into obscurity. During their residency An Endless Supply installed a print studio at Wysing and offered their services as a design studio for the Department, resulting in the design and screen printing of Beale’s posters and the design of Smith’s score.

Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry’s new video, Analytical Chronology of Three Dimensions is a proposition for a visual grammar, colluding grammatical tenses of the English language with their possible realisations in physical space. The link between the construction of grammar and architecture is made explicit through the rhythmic correlation of the visual and audio.  Taking the way we position ourselves in time through language as a starting point the film presents the construction of four seemingly straightforward verbs: ’do’, ‘speak’, ‘see’ and ‘think’. The complicated way that we construct time, and the language that conveys its construction becomes apparent as the voiceover explores a range of possible conjugations of these four fundamental actions and their representation in a visual grammar.

By taking a single shot of a book and expanding it out into the space in which the film was shot and is now shown, and then into the exterior of this space, and finally its architectural plans Kihlberg and Henry open up not just the mechanisms of filming and screening but the way in which we engage with architecture and documents within time.

13 August — 28 August 2011

Pursuing the Turquiose Universal was a gallery presentation that marked the close of The Institute of Beyond's Department of Psychedelic Studies, a six week residency during which artists Mark Essen, Hilary Koob-Sassen and Kate Owens researched and produced new bodies of work that explore the psychedelic in new and nuanced ways.

Click on the image to see installation shots of the exhibition.

Taking George Berkeley’s theory of subjective idealism, (the ‘theory that the physical world exists only in the experiences minds have of it’ ) as a starting point Mark Essen developed a new film work with accompanying soundtrack heard through a concrete radio.

Filmed in the area around Wysing, Archangel George presents the traces of human disruption in a landscape that is now abandoned and deserted. Viewed with Berkeley’s question, ‘Is there anything visible but what we perceive by sight? ’ in mind, Essen’s landscapes might become alien or abstract. We could begin to question not only which marks have been left by human activity, or how Essen’s framing of the landscape affects our understanding of it, but perhaps even how much of it exists without our perception of it. 

Appearing as obsolete relics from this context, Essen’s concrete and ceramic sculptures accompany the film in which they feature. His solar powered radio, which appears heavy and inert, is in fact an active and receptive object with the ability to pick up information from a wide geographic area.

Hilary Koob-Sassen’s sculptural works, Frankie in Filletville, explore metaphoric models of human culture in time. Like the societal structures they describe, these nautical sculptures are bold yet fragile forms. The black marble he uses is carved down until it becomes a series fine, flowing slivers that are monumental but frail.

By offering physical representations of ideal structures, and possible economies and ecologies, Koob-Sassen condenses his complex concepts into tangible sculptural forms. Frankie (Frankenstein) is a figure of human endeavour, whose ground is Filletville, a model of biological scale. Frankie in Filletville models human culture within the larger biological narrative, punctuated by the origination of new scales of body.

Koob-Sassen presents these two pieces at a moment when one possible structure is being abandoned in favour of a new, potentially improved model. The figure Frankie is perhaps in transit between two vessels embodying different systems for living.

Kate Owens’ new series of prints and sculptures Alarms & Embarrassments have been made by exerting pressure on two materials which are fundamentally different but equally robust. The prints were produced by pressing heavily onto the surface of 17th century oak beams, while the sculptures are energy drinks reduced down to a solid state. The act of compressing causes the material to relinquish its conventional form, taking on a more concentrated yet elusive structure. *

Within the repetitive black and white stripes of a 17th century farmhouse interior, irregular markings and notches in the dark oak beams create interruptions and unexpected gaps. These glitches awaken a sense of materiality and human presence within the building.  Acting as reminders of past history and missing knowledge, these irregularities become triggers for the imagination; creating space and freedom within the restrictive and sometimes oppressive, context of a listed building. Two particular beams have sections cut out at picture hanging height, as if to make enough room to hang a painting. Isolated from their original context, the prints taken from these two beams appear as brackets framing an ever expanding and contracting gap.

The potential force contained within each 500ml can of energy drink has been re-routed into an alternative output. By boiling off the liquid the drink is reduced to a dry black solid. The matter expands in the final moments of cooking taking on characteristics of the vessel in which it’s cooked. The resulting sculpture holds the essence of the original material, presented in its heightened state.

Damien Roach, who launched the exhibition with an exploratory DJ set, also presented a new limited edition book, Jim Gets Belligerent - published by his own imprint fromadarkenedsunroof.  The source for the publication is a Google Video clip from 2004 of a young man - Jim - smoking the psychoactive plant Salvia Divinorium and filming himself. Jim discusses what is occurring throughout, in an attempt to accurately relay his experiences real-time.

The text was produced by providing a transcription company with the clip's audio track, which was then notated in detail, including every sound and word.  The result is an often poignant series of reflections that offer a platform from which to consider some fundamental ideas around the nature of reality, language, expectation, transcendence, leisure, boredom and hope.

23 July — 24 July 2011

This exhibition was an attempt to create a dialogue between artistic interpretation and psychedelic experience. To critique – via a single allegorical intervention – some of the norms that govern the standard hermeneutic situation of a viewer engaging an artwork and deciding to say or write something formally ʻmeaningfulʼ about it.

The exhibition was devised by curator Paul Pieroni in response to an invitation from Wysing Arts Centre to produce a project with the resident artists from the Department of Psychedelic Studies.

On display in the main gallery were four artworks, respectively by Kate Owens, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Damien Roach and Mark Essen. At the far end of the gallery was a film. The film documents an earlier encounter between each of the works on display and Lawrence Upton and Benedict Taylor.

In their collaborative performances Upton and Taylor channelled a poetical mode of reading artworks that transgresses the basic rules and codes of artistic language and interpretation. In this qualified sense, Pieroni  considered their actions productively and positively ‘psychedelic’.

Psychedelic experience has a very interesting relationship with language. In a psychedelic state (e.g. a DMT trip) formal symbolic structures seem to fracture and crumble away. Such experiences (however defined) propose new and variegated modes of enunciation that push language and meaning to their very limits (and sometime well beyond). In effect, psychedelic experience cannot be quantified by the toolbox that regular linguistic structures provide. It pushes things further…

Upton and Taylors reading of works by the residency artists is an example of a psychedelic symbolic possibility within the mode of seeing and speaking about art. And while of course we need regular standards within artistic interpretation (in the same way as we need normal language), by momentarily exposing normative hermeneutic procedure to a converse force (here psychedelic language), we enact a temporary reframing of the situation, exposing for a short time a truly perverse set of possibilities lying internal and ever-present to the mechanisms of meaning itself…

30 April — 5 June 2011

Phil Filby & Rob Root, a two person exhibition by Rob Filby and Phil Root.

Phil Root explores painting through different mediums to create multi-layered environments that can be viewed as whole or separate entities. The motivation to create an environment rather than a singular work is so that people can have a bodily, as well as intellectual, interaction with the work.

Untitled (Legs) was inspired from a figure in a tarot card and is deliberately medieval. The patterning and bordering are suggestive of card like qualities, bringing out its relationship to image and object. The work is also the basis of the limited edition screen print produced for the show. One of Root’s most striking pieces features ceramic bowls on top of an ice plinth, which gradually melted over the course of the exhibition leaving the bowls floating in a trough of water. The piece explores the idea of erasure and references works by Francis Picabia such as En faveur de la critique (1945). Root exhibited a range of new work created especially for the exhibition including installation, sculpture, ceramics, paintings and wall drawings.

Rob Filby’s practice is object orientated, but crosses into the two dimensional in the series Mood Boards which imagines future works, and the Work & Co. photographs which document his sculpture in the company of cats. In the exhibition space which he filled with musk incense, Filby exhibited a new body of sculptural work including re-conditioned glow-in-the-dark agricultural parts, re-coloured newspaper, and a sausage casing 'necklace'. Filby's practice is interested in the meaning and unmeaning object, and amused by the possibility of communication through such convoluted and obtuse means as art making. His limited edition comprised an insertion into a local paper advertising some of the exhibited works as for sale.

Works in Phil Filby and Rob Root  were for sale, and could be purchased through Own Art, the interest-free loan scheme. Wysing Members, Supporters, Patrons and Collectors enjoy a 10% discount. 

1 - 17 April 2011

The Department of Wrong Answers gallery presentation by artists Rob Filby, Laure Prouvost & Francesco Pedraglio, Giles Round and Cally Spooner.  The artists developed new work in relation to the residency theme, part of The Institute of Beyond. More info on their residencies here.

Click on the image to see installation shots of the exhibition.

Laure Provoust and Francesco Pedraglio created a new video, billboard, signs and an installation within Wysing’s recycled building Amphis (renamed 'Jody’s ba'r). The works provided mesmerizing juxtapositions of images, text and sound with a clear focus on broken up narrative. All of the interconnected pieces arose from the artists’ short story The Lot that was available to read in the gallery on one of Giles Round’s furniture works. The short story humorously depicts a fictitious department’s desperate work environment; an obscure camp dedicated to search for unrecognizable objects and dig abstract ideas from muddy meadows.

Rob Filby created a new series of 'mood boards' depicting scenery or surface texture from around Wysing's site, alongside seemingly dispassionate and disconnected references to, among other things, lettuce, tongue, lichen and sausage casing. During the exhibition launch an interior designer from the nearby village of Cambourne was on hand to describe the mood boards to visitors. Two new sculptural counterparts that re-imagine the mood boards were also offered, presented on the furniture work of Giles Round.

Giles Round developed and presented a series of furniture made from materials found around Wysing’s site; drawing reference to the 60s nomadic self-build movement and the work of Gerrit Rietveld and Mies Van Der Rohe. Presented upon one table was a sculptural work loosely based on the erotic drawings of Bloomsbury painter Duncan Grant. Round’s furniture also performed as platforms to display works of fellow Department artists. The Department closed with a dinner, Wysing, an archeology, hosted by Round on Sunday 17 April from 7pm in which the furniture found a new use.

Cally Spooner writes in dialogue to perform absurd collisions of arguing characters, looping narratives, miscommunications, mis-readings and interruptions. Her new work, a filmed monologue, performed the crisis of acting out-loud, achieving excellence, and finding something useful to say, in public. The work entitled Piece For A Pending Performance (19 min) was installed in Wysing’s Open Studio. On Sunday 17 April 5.30-6pm Spooner transformed the studio into a theatre to rehearse a brand new production, which attempted to shift a recorded, ascetic monologue (for a rather emotional actress) into a live dialogue on public life, and good manners.

18 October — 28 November 2010

Partnering presented work developed through improbable and productive artists’ partnerships with Phyllida Barlow, Caroline Wright, Helen Rousseau & George Szirtes; EASTgoesEast; Luca Frei; Abbas Hashemi & Simon Woolham; Catherine Hemelryk & Hayley Lock; M4SK 22; Emma Smith; and Helen Stratford & Diana Wesser.

Phyllida Barlow, Caroline Wright, Helen Rousseau & George Szirtes engaged with each other’s practices through an eighteen month research project entitled I. In the project they investigated the relationship between drawing and writing. The ‘studio’ installation in Wysing’s gallery included an audio conversation recorded between the four of them, a script by Caroline Wright and Helen Rousseau and a backdrop photograph of Caroline’s real studio at Wysing and copies of materials produced so far. During the exhibition the studio installation hosted one of their meetings, open for visitors to encounter.

EASTgoesEast is a collaborative project developed from EASTinternational and Norwich University College of the Arts in partnership with Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków, Trafó Gallery, Budapest, Studio of Young Artists Association, Budapest, and OUTPOST, Norwich and is organised by Kaavous Clayton. He invited the artist Karolina Kowalska to show the work. The curator and three of the artists involved in EASTgoesEast, Karolina Kowalska, Jonathan O'Dwyer, and Krisztian Kristof, all contributed material to presenting different areas of interest within the common resource and further expanding this international partnership.

Luca Frei showed the work Untitled (…the Sun is the tongue, the Shadow is the language). The work focuses on the role of time within the concept of generosity. In the work, Frei developed a series of ceramic sculptures with support from former Wysing studio artist and ceramicist Bob Race. These playful pieces resembled clock faces but on a deeper level represent the generous exchange of time and experience, deeply crafted into the making of the work within Frei’s recent residency at Wysing. The works are installed on five panels leaning discreetly on the wall, creating a rhythm, a spatial gap and a shadow.

Abbas Hashemi & Simon Woolham showed their first collaborative project Möbius Band. The two artists, who both have studios at Wysing, developed a series of works directly responding to their different approach to drawing. The drawings were transformed to unusual three-dimensional objects inspired by the mathematical shape möbius - a surface with only one side and only one boundary component. Ten new sculptures were displayed on a platform alongside a new animation performing the principle of a möbius shape with the artists.

Catherine Hemelryk & Hayley Lock worked on the idea of embedding new histories across five literary and art historically significant venues in the UK. In their artist-curator partnership they lay clues to each house, inviting visitors to enter and explore starting points of this new project entitled Telling. The portraits, landscapes, minerals, twigs and mementoes were artefacts from adventures and as yet untold stories displayed in the vitrine and on the wall. The objects were united in the family album, opened in 2011.

M4SK 22 is a collaboration between artists Simon Woolham and David Moss making music and film. Mixing acoustic and electric instruments roots, soils and dusts, samples and software, found internet archives, paint and drawing in a desire fired sonic crucible with undercurrents of a hidden occult. M4SK 22 productions were exhibited in a black, intimate, outdoor shed between Wysing’s main studio building and stable block. M4SK 22 also ran a special workshop in which participants were invited to create masks from collected materials and act out their mask characters in a film workshop over the launch weekend.

Helen Stratford & Diana Wesser work together as interdisciplinary duo urban (col)laboratory based in UK and Germany. In their process-led research practice they investigate the rhythms and routines by which people negotiate, define and produce everyday spaces. They developed a specially choreographed work in which they invited visitors to explore the architecture of Wysing through a series of practices. In addition, they installed three photographic works that documented these types of practices in different places accompanied by a quote from an official description or from the architect’s responsible for each place. Finally, in reception, a video work explored a public place in the City of Manchester as a stage for everyday performances.

Emma Smith has a social practice that is both research and production based and responds to site-specific issues. Using an inter-disciplinary approach, including organised events, performance, participation, sound and drawing, she explores the art of everyday life. A special printed poster announced the event to take place on 27 November at Wysing. The poster was inspired by a poster designed in 1880 at that time announcing a communal event which took place in Wysing’s nearest village Bourn. This special event at Wysing included readings, recitations, story telling, songs, tea and presents.

9 April — 23 May 2010

Aid & Abet, Beyond, C-O-L-L-I-D-E-R, Kaavous-Bhoyroo, Lost Toys Records, Market Project, Outpost, PROJECKT, Semi Formal Discussion Network, Stew and YH485 Press.

Artist-led initiatives and studio groups from across the eastern region re-located to Wysing’s Bourn centre for six weeks in an unusual take on the established art fair model. With well over fifty artists contributing plus special events, PRESENTS highlighted the breadth of artistic output in the eastern region.

Aid & Abet is an artist led initiative based in Cambridge, co-founded by Wysing studio artists Sarah Evans, CJ Mahony and David Kefford. Aid & Abet functions as a grassroots organisation providing creative platforms and outlets for artistic practice through a three way interaction between artists, artworks and audiences. For PRESENTS Aid & Abet chose to work with London based letter press studio A Two Pipe Problem who have designed Aid & Abet’s first print material featuring their name as well as two new posters from the Exquisite Corpse Series. A Two Pipe Problem also collaborated with CJ Mahony to graphically produce a new text based work, Anya.

Beyond is a new information network established by Catherine Hemelryk, Julia Devonshire, Kaavous Clayton, Laura Bowen and Lotte Juul Petersen that uses the A4 page as the starting point and grows one page at a time. Beyond is produced in different places and facilitated by curators, artists, cultural producers and writers. Beyond has invited all participants of PRESENTS to contribute to the first issue as well as commissioning works and texts by other artists and curators. Visitors were invited to combine any individual pages from the display in Wysing’s Reception to make their own copy.

C-O-L-L-I-D-E-R is an artist group who explore the theme of encounters through narrative and site specific works. The group first met at the Escalator Visual Arts Retreat Neither Here Nor There (June 2009) and were inspired to form a group following the experience. They are Will Clifford, Sarah Evans, Bettina Furnée, Catherine Hemelryk, Hayley Lock, Rachel Oxley, Mark Ross and Caroline Wright. For PRESENTS they developed their first collaborative work, Pipeline, a long structure of pipe material connecting a double compartment booth within the gallery and Amphis (the recycled building made on the site of Wysing in 2008). The installation invited visitors to communicate through the pipe creating playful encounters. Souvenirs made by individual members of the group were displayed in Wysing’s Reception.

Kaavous-Bhoyroo is an arts agency founded by Jane Bhoyroo and Kaavous Clayton in 2008 to commission new works by emerging and established artists. Kaavous-Bhoyroo commission artists’ editions providing artists with an opportunity to explore new ideas. They have worked with artists including Simon Liddiment, David Kefford, Lee Marshall, Coco Crampton, Rob Filby and Leo Fitzmaurice. For PRESENTS all of these editions were shown as a retrospective installation in Wysing’s gallery. Kaavous-Bhoyroo also launched their new spring quarterly edition by R.J. Hinrichsen; a sound piece on printed cd in a screen-printed sleeve. For the duration of PRESENTS it was available to borrow on an MP3 player to take for a walk around Wysing’s site.

Lost Toys Records is an initiative by Andy Holden & Johnny Parry. As well as having released several albums, Lost Toys Records put out a series of unique, handmade and numbered editions. Featuring both Lost Toys artists, as well as guests to the label, each edition includes a hand made sleeve, designed by the artist in collaboration with Lost Toys Records. For PRESENTS Lost Toys Records exhibited a Lost Toys Lounge - a display of videos, paintings, posters and records, as well as a space to sit and listen to the music. The homely display included work by Andy Holden (Grubby Mitts), Phil Root (Pyramid Pyramid), Buzzard Lope, Ricky Leach, Betty Frances, and videos by Andy Holden and Johnny Parry. Betty Frances and Ricky Leach also performed for the launch of PRESENTS from 4.30-6pm on Saturday 10 April.

Market Project is an artist group established at the Escalator Visual Arts Retreat, Economics of the Art System (October 2009). They are Annabel Dover, Laura Earley, Julie Freeman, Alistair Gentry, Helen Judge, David Kefford, Annabelle Shelton, Elaine Tribley and Martha Winter. This fluid collective researches and engages collaboratively with new methods of improving and sustaining their careers as professional artists, with a particular focus on creative engagement with economic and revenue aspects of the art world. For PRESENTS Market Project constructed a series of square boxes where each member has individually responded to this display method. All works, books, ideas and research are for sale.

OUTPOST is an artist-run contemporary gallery in Norwich founded in November 2004. It supports an artist membership of over 300, and is run by a voluntary steering committee made up of artist members. To date OUTPOST has presented over sixty solo shows in its gallery and three selected annual members shows as well as various off site projects including Zoo and Outhouse in 2009. In January 2010 OUTPOST Studios opened to artist members creating a further system of support for them. For PRESENTS, OUTPOST invited artist James Epps to present Hazard Warning series, a work concerned with the authority and space of the artwork within the gallery framework. In the work specific pieces are manipulated, undermining the sign and changing our reading of this image.

PROJECKT was established on the 1 January 2009. Through curatorial experimentation it provides new and innovative contexts for contemporary artists and practices. PROJECKT presents Field Broadcast a project initiated by Rob Smith and Rebecca Birch that enables artists to stream live work from fields around the world to your computer via a desktop application, live from 8-16 May.

To access the broadcast visit www.fieldbroadcast.org and click download viewer and follow the instructions. A bell rang in Wysing’s gallery to mark the start of each new broadcast and there was a special live screening at Wysing on the 16 May. Information about accessing the performances was also available in the gallery. 30 artists performed including Juan Cruz, Alex Pearl, Simon Faithfull, Ian Whittlesea, Toby Huddlestone, Susan Collins, Sara Bjarland, Dan Coopey and Ed Atkins.

Semi Formal Discussion Network is an initiative of artists R.J. Hinrichsen and Mark Wilsher. The network is a conceptual model designed to generate in-depth discussion about art. A simple leaflet was produced that acted as an invitation and stimulus for people to organise their own discussions based on a set of four rules, available for free in Wysing’s reception area.

STEW is an artist led gallery and studio space in the centre of Norwich. The name derives from the shared ideal of food playing a central role in the space and reflects the mixed practices within the building. The earliest board meetings were based around cooking, eating, discussion and decision-making. For PRESENTS Stew worked collectively to explore other ways of sharing their practices culminating in the collaborative exercise entitled Lump Sums. Shown in Wysing’s gallery, with a nod to conventional museological display, Lump Sums was an edition of 10 coins that are a reasonable representation of the group as well as individual ideologies. The production of these coins is indicative of the innate level of skills sharing and making within the STEW studios.

YH485 PRESS is a publishing and curatorial initiative based in Great Yarmouth, started in March 2009 by visual artists and writers Aaron Juneau, Jonathan Watts and curator Harriet Mitchell. Working on a peninsula on the easterly edge of the British Isles, it follows that YH485 Press is on the edge of the contemporary art world as an urban phenomenon. YH485 Press does not suffer wilful marginalization or provincialism. For PRESENTS YH485 Press launched new photobooks by Martin Pigott and Glen Jamieson and their second newspaper, surface after the release of periphery earlier last year. In addition YH485 presented a showreel of video works.

7 January — 28 February 2010

The Cassiopeia Plan was an informal trilogy of three video works that together offered a narrative journey for the viewer to travel through and reflect upon. In the works, Waller proposes ideas of co-operation and redemption; in manoeuvering out of dead-ends and towards new unlikely visions.

White Stag, 2001 consists of a film, a drawing and a sculptural work and is a humorous adaptation of the ancient Roman myth of Diana and Actaeon. Actaeon, having accidentally seen Diana bathing, is changed by her into a stag. Reinterpreting Actaeon’s desire, depicted by the Roman poet Ovid’s original myth, Waller locates the narrative within a modernist, open-air swimming pool. The Cassiopeia Plan begins therefore with two individuals faltering on the brink of a journey towards the white stag’s idyllic pastoral landscape. In the work, Diana’s binoculars lead us into a sublime vision.

Within the gallery installation, a Bedouin tent offered a strange, intimate and idyllic space for contemplation and relaxation, in which different films were presented including a yoga instruction video and a meditative image showing a Moroccan fountain. As part of the tent, a carpet presented several reference books that encourage further discovery.

Towards the rear of the gallery was Waller’s latest work, commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, shot on location at the centre and including a cast of participants all of whom came forward following a public call during late 2009. In the film Waller examines further improbable encounters of different narratives and spaces.

The work reflects on the relationship between the individual and the collective; influenced by the absurd and satirical paradox created by G.K. Chesterton in The Man who was Thursday. In the 1908 novel, a poet is forced into a conflict between the forces of structure and anarchy, unaware of how intertwined the competing forces are. Waller’s film was inspired by this improbable story and the momentum of being together; albeit in unexpectedly changing roles and actions. The work references even more unlikely action; from the fascinating horror film Dead of Night (1945), to local encounters beyond Wysing.

The Cassiopeia Plan reached an improbable climax by bringing all these unpredictable encounters together.

With special thanks to: All participants in the film and production: Amy Botfield, Debby Lauder, Helen Stratford, Helen Judge, Honor Carter, Julie Brenot, Mark Ross, Patricia Derrick, Sally Jane Webster, Tim Goldie, Nick Barber and Simon Mullen and Gloria Sayer and The Roundabout Revellers, Great Gransden.

As part of Wysing's Year of the Improbable, Mark Aerial Waller also curated a series of events.

A review of the exhibitioin in Frieze Magazine can be read here.

2 November — 20 December 2009

Julie Brenot, Lucy Conochie, David Kefford and Lee Marshall.
 

The artists in Expanded explore the boundaries between painting and sculpture, the image and the object.

In Julie Brenot’s work one image forms a starting point for a series of expansions; an urban landscape is reduced to a graphic image and then expanded and abstracted through a series of drawings and paintings until finally an environment is achieved.

In David Kefford’s drawings, sculptures and montages, idiosyncratic objects and images are brought together to create individual objects that ‘speak’ to one another within the framework of the gallery space.

Lucy Conochie takes architectural details as the starting point of her expanded paintings, painting directly onto walls and other surfaces.

Lee Marshall’s paintings draw on the techniques of street art; tag-like motifs, such as the cloud, rainbow and prism. In his work references from graphic design, advertising, computer games and comics are drawn together in large scale immersive environments composed of individual painting and sculptures.

Expanded coincided with the launch of Own Art at Wysing Arts Centre. The scheme, facilitated by the Arts Council, enables Wysing to offer interest free loans for the purchase of artwork - both from the exhibition and also all year round from the studio artists based at Wysing Arts Centre. More information about Own Art can be found here.

4 September — 1 November 2009

'Generosity is the new political' explored the complex and ambiguous concept of generosity. Rooted within a system that merits symbolic value over market worth, acts of generosity contradict the accepted notion of production and exchange.

The exhibition featured the work of eight international artists. Five of the works were new commissions, created during research periods at Wysing Arts Centre during 2009. The exhibition demonstrated both the positive and caring aspects of generosity but at the same time, revealed its ambiguity.

Freee
Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! 2009
Works by the art collective Freee take sides, speak their mind and divide opinion. In this new work, the artists and a group of witnesses from Wysing spent a day in Cambridge performing a ceremony to rename some of the city’s favourite streets after leading radical thinkers of the 18th century. Inspired by E.P. Thompson’s pivotal work The Making of the English Working Class, Freee invited us to recognise how these radical thinkers of the working classes were not victims of history but people passionate about progress. The work also had a presence at Zoo Art Enterprises, London, 16-19 October.

Tellervo and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen
I Love My Job, 2008
This darkly humorous video work told the story of four nightmarish events that take place at an office, a flat, a restaurant kitchen and a factory. The artists invited workers from Gothenburg, Sweden, to tell them the darkest moments of their work life. The artists then re-created the events with a team of actors, introducing elements of fiction. In the four scenes the artists gave the story tellers a chance to express their work situation, emotional stress and worries via the cinema screen. However, each story also depicts the possibility for thinking about survival strategies and revenge imagined by the workers.

Christodoulos Panayiotou
Tomorrow is Today, 2009
Christodoulos Panayiotou's new work Tomorrow is Today is a conversation between the artist and his former theatre professor Jean Verdeil on the pedagogic legacy of socially engaged theatre with the practices of contemporary socially engaged art. Two framed works referred to this in the gallery: a poster announced the event together with a photographic print; a performance entitled The end by Panayiotou realised in the baroque theatre Markgräfliches Opernhaus in Bayreuth in Germany. The dialogue in Tomorrow is Today was re-enacted as a conversation, directed by Jonathan Young from Shams Theatre, in a special public event on the Sunday 1 November at 5pm at Wysing.

Luca Frei
Untitled (…the Sun is the tongue, the Shadow is the language) 2009
Frei’s approach to his practice is exploratory and questioning. In considering this new commission, Frei determined to explore the meaning of generosity throughout the making of the work. He focused on the role of time within generosity, developing a series of ceramic sculptures with supervising support from Wysing studio artist and ceramicist Bob Race. These playful pieces resembled clock faces but on a deeper level represent the generous exchange of time and experience, deeply crafted into the making of the work.

Celine Condorelli
Life always escapes, 2009
A common designates land on which one has the right “to take or use some portion of that which another man’s soil naturally produces,” which includes collecting firewood or keeping one’s animals for grazing, and is as such one of the only alternative property models left in the UK. Using Rights of Common, Condorelli created a ‘common room’ out of modest wooden waste materials, which housed a collection of postcards, photographs and documents from her research into the Commons. The installation included a wood-buring stove that heated the gallery during the autumn by burning wood gathered from local Commons.

Kateřina Šedá
It doesn’t matter, 2005-7
The drawings and video installation in the gallery were the result of a series of exercises aimed at encouraging the artist’s recently widowed grandmother, Jana, to do something other than watch television. Šedá persuaded her grandmother, who was suffering from depression, to try to recollect every item sold in the hardware shop she managed for 33 years and then draw them. During the film it becomes clear that this is far from a therapeutic exercise or proof of the restorative power of art. The work questions at a deep and complex level the act of giving and caring, with poignant honesty.

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson
The Caregivers, 2008
This video work portrayed two migrant care-workers from the Ukraine and Romania, and their elderly clients in Rovereto in Italy. The work discussed the care–workers’ daily working lives and looks at the rapidly growing phenomenon of Ukrainian women migrating to Italy to work as care-givers. The work included a specially commissioned musical score, based on a piece of journalistic text about the phenomenon. The Caregivers was commissioned for Manifesta 7, the European art biennial.

Bik Van Der Pol
Untitled (Gold), 2009
The work of Bik Van der Pol explores the potential of art to improve situations, add what is missing or highlight what’s hidden. The result of their research into the notion of generosity was Untitled (Gold), a work which looks at the perceived opposite of generosity – greed. The motto depicted in the work is an extract from a poem by the British poet Thomas Hood, which discusses how gold is a material that continuously tests both our generosity and our greed. Untitled (Gold) emerged from the landscape of Wysing from mid September onwards.

The Guardian, Skye Sherwin, preview

Frieze Magazine, Andrew Hunt, review

AN Magazine, Olga Smith, review

e-flux journal - Celine Condorelli

28 June — 23 August 2009

Townley and Bradby, Helen Stratford and A Kassen showed work and documentation in the gallery Wysing from their residencies as part of the Communities Under Construction programme.

 

Communities under Construction was a three year programme of residencies at Wysing Arts Centre in which the selected artists worked within and in response to the villages and communities surrounding Wysing Arts Centre.

During the early part of the year, and throughout the summer, artists A Kassen, Helen Stratford and Townley and Bradby were in-residence together at Wysing, living and working at the Centre. The exhibition was formed entirely of work produced by the artists during their residency period and developed in collaboration with individuals and groups in the village of Bourn and in the new settlement of Cambourne.
 

After having researched Wysing and the surrounding villages the artist group A Kassen, who are based in Copenhagen, developed a spectacular artistic idea in collaboration with Bourn Airfield and which resulted in the work Minus Roof. Visitors to the Centre on 18 July were taken to Bourn Airfield and flown over Wysing to look down into the gallery space from the air, aided by the fact that one third part of the gallery roof had been taken off for the purpose. Other visitors experienced an open gallery with a section of roof removed with the Cambridgeshire sky and flight activity on view from within the space. These two places and viewpoints were brought together in the double projected film shown in the gallery, also entitled Minus Roof. In recent years A Kassen evolved their work into a collaborative playground for projects that seek to re-imagine the encounter between artwork and public; realising projects that have a comic book quality and in fact even producing a comic book of their ideas.

During her residency Helen Stratford used site-specific and audio-based interventions to make visible the practices that produce and maintain public space in the nearby settlement of Cambourne. Gathered during her residency, which continued through August, these practices include the voices of local residents, teenagers, groundsmen, road sweepers, light scouts, planners, and people working on their allotments. A table in the centre of Wysing’s gallery space worked as a meeting point for talking and discovering what Helen uncovered during her residency. Her research revealed both the heavily maintained, and the overlooked and un-noticed public space in Cambourne, and proposed alternative uses for them. Through her residency Stratford drew on the practices of on performance, architecture and writing to explore how places and identities are produced and performed through every day objects and activities.

Townley and Bradby’s work functions primarily as a framework through which others can reflect on their surroundings. This reflection is often playful and invites participation. For their residency, Townley and Bradby spent three months living at Wysing with their children. Often working in collaboration with their children, they created an intimate portrait of the landscape and the communities around Wysing Arts Centre. They developed and tested out a variety of tactics to inhabit open spaces in and around Bourn and Cambourne, as well as making journeys across South Cambridgeshire. One event involved chalking out the swift, complicated and coordinated patterns of car parking outside the village nursery at drop-off time. In another event Townley and Bradby took a 1.5 metre wide inflatable red ball to the edge of Cambourne. They used the ball to measure and activate fields that will be covered with houses within the next few years. Townley and Bradby left their giant red ball in Wysing’s reception to be used in the grounds of Wysing. Please ask if you would like to borrow it!

Read Laura Allsop's blog post about A Kassen's Minus Roof on the ArtReview Blog here.

Read Jonathan Griffin's blog post about A Kassen's Minus Roof on the Frieze Blog here.

17 May — 28 June 2009

Elena Cologni, Simon Davenport, RJ Hinrichsen, Andy Holden, Katherine Hymers, Olga Jurgenson, CJ Mahony, Rob Smith, Townley and Bradby, Mark Wilsher.

Performed presented a selection of video, photography, installation, performances and documentation of performed actions and interventions by ten artists based in the east of England.

From Andy Holden’s series of LP records melted and morphed into bowl and vessel structures and hung like baskets from the gallery ceiling, to C.J. Mahony’s unsettling, intimate and humorous text based works exhibited in quirky and surprising locations throughout the gallery space, this stimulating exhibition explored the relationship between the artist and viewer and sought to create a challenging and engaging meeting point between both.
 

Works included the durational pieces WINDscale by Rob Smith, a time-based work that reveals the random effects of the wind by only becoming fully realized when the wind conditions are right, and Mark Wilsher’s series of Estimated length drawings, 2009, that were accompanied by a live performance of five estimated minutes on the 12 June.

Video works included R.J. Hinrichsen’s Melville Road; a video still of the actual street in London in which a choir can be heard repeatedly rehearsing and in which the moment is intensified by both the frozen image and to the people you can hear but actually not see, and Olga Jurgenson’s videos that examine the human themes of migration, work and identity. Katherine Hymers’ work spans film, video and performance, utilizing the body throughout as a presence and a tool from which to direct an enquiry out to a viewer and in Performed she showed a new video work that addressed the viewer in a highly emotional and ambiguous space.

 

Elena Cologni reprised the ‘document’ of a work made at the Tournai Cathedral in Belgium. In the work entitled Il Soffio (at the back of mind), 2008, she obsessively ‘remade’ the black white tile pattern of the floor in situ and transformed it with her own pencil drawing. Townley & Bradby showed, amongst other works, Advice to artists leading tours 2008-09, documentation of a performance in which they randomly selected members of the public who were visiting the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich and invited them to accompany the artists into the basement. Finally, Simon Davenport’s work pursued lines of flight that depart from recognizable aspects of contemporary culture. His projects are delivered with an improvised aesthetic, where the appearance of the installed objects and stage props is often subordinate to their performative function.

Click here for the accompanying programme of events.

12 April — 10 May 2009

Wysing presented As long as it lasts by Simon and Tom Bloor, curated by Gavin Wade; a body of new works inspired by the artists’ interest in modernist sculpture and flawed utopias.

The Bloors produced a series of new sculptures as unrealised proposals for public artworks inspired by the concrete ‘play sculptures’ of artists Bryan Blumer (1925-1981) and John Bridgeman (1916-2004), commissioned in the 1960s by the City of Birmingham Public Works Department as part of the landscaping schemes for the new housing estates and redevelopment areas in the city. The Bloors’ interest in the utopian potential and the failed reality of such development projects has further led to the use of sculptural elements within the exhibition.

Echoing civic parks, urban waste grounds and regeneration zones, the works in the show explored layers of urban play by alluding to young peoples’ custom of colonising open spaces, claiming them as extensions of play areas and hangouts.

For Wysing, the exhibition both reflected its pursuit of an artist’s utopia; through studios, artists support programmes, and international residencies and retreats, and reflected Wysing’s growing collection of structures located on its eleven acre site.

A limited edition A2 silkscreen print by Simon and Tom Bloor accompanied the exhibition.
Edition 6, price £100 unframed.

A catalogue supported by The Elephant Trust was also available during the exhibition.
Exhibition organised by Eastside Projects, Birmingham.

An artist talk accompanied the exhibition.

19 January — 1 March 2009

Animated includes work by artists which is grounded in contemporary culture and prods and pokes at our everyday existence with a mischievousness and gentle humour. With Jo Addison, Julie Brenot, Matt Cook, Sarah Evans, Simon Liddiment, Anne-Mie Melis, Alex Pearl and Simon Woolham.

Jo Addison is an artist who transforms ordinary, modest objects into imaginary alternatives, challenging our perceptions of our everyday surroundings.  As tour guide, she invites the viewer to see the humour and elegance in the mis-spelt, the crossed-out, the improvised or the handmade.  In the work Services, a cardboard turntable suggests perhaps a desolate landscape.  Her juxtaposition of celebration, humour, the unsavoury and the commonplace becomes an uplifting experience. 

Julie Brenot explores the territory between fiction and reality.  Referencing visual, pop and music culture, she takes recognisable objects and alters them slightly.  The featured works include a series of paintings and installations using already existing pictures, novels, vinyl records and posters which are then reinterpreted to tease, puzzle and deceive the viewer in a light hearted way. For example in one work, If you think I don't know what you want me to do, she appropriates 9 novels of Vladimir Nabokov's "La transparence des choses", using the power and fascination it exerts on the viewer’s imagination. 

Matt Cook works primarily in performance and sound.  His work explores rhythmic structures in site-specific situations, capturing the daily cycle of everyday life, then animating it and replaying it back.  His work invites us to observe, reconsider, question and appreciate the nuances of our everyday surroundings.  In Map Wysing Event, a new work created for this exhibition, Cook spent 5 days at Wysing Arts Centre, exploring the countryside inside a circle of 5 miles in  diameter around the centre, recording the sounds he heard on his walks.  This new composition captures the everyday sounds of the local area.

Sarah Evans investigates light, space, movement and time as it appears in nature, and then transforms it, creating new and imaginary environments using drawing, animation and sound. Infected with something beautiful: part one is a looping, hand drawn, color pencil, animation that has been created specifically for the iPod. The film is a low tech, silent, slight and playful intervention for what is a familiar contemporary audio technology, with the sense of sound inferred through rhythm, flow, pulse, and breath.  Evans’ work  reveals imaginary hidden places, creating chance encounters for the audience that imply the minuteness of what is known compared to the unknown.

Simon Liddiment works conceptually using diverse materials. Typically, his work takes the point of departure in familiar identities and materials, which he then manipulates discreetly, exploring the humour in everyday objects and playfully re-interpreting them.  For example in the piece entitled 1, he presents a visual pun with an economy that belies the painstaking and careful decision making process involved in creating the work. Or in another work Feint Horizon Liddiment has carefully redrawn an A4 ruled sheet on a larger piece of paper, framed in a solid box. By redrawing the note paper he is discreetly reinventing its daily function. Though still recognizable, the paper is all of a sudden suggesting a feint horizon.

Anne-Mie Melis explores scientific, environmental and ethical issues in an objective and unbiased way using primarily drawing, sculpture, animation and photography.  Focusing specifically on plants, she has been working with plant geneticists to explore the visual nature of genetically engineered plants.  In the animation series A Case of blushing, New Window, How to conform, she explores the possibility of how our everyday surrounding plants might evolve and develop into something entirely different. Her playful yet slightly disturbing work falls somewhere between science and art, natural creation and interference, raising questions about the engineering of nature into a new world.  

Alex Pearl explores the acceptance of failure or disappointment as important parts of the human condition.  The works presented here are a mix of epic mini films, installation and sculpture that make light of big issues and are in turn both haunting and funny.  In Sing, an animation film, a lollipop stick sings a haunting lullaby, yet there are five different versions, all performed separately on five different screens.  Like an out of synch barbershop quartet, the work is playful yet acknowledges its own limitations and a hopeless desire for greatness. 

Simon Woolham is concerned with occupied spaces, the environment that surrounds us and the narratives that unfold within them.  Through biro drawings, paper interventions, animations, for example school playing fields, junked underpasses, broken fences, and worn paths, he unearths the unpredictable and fragile process of memory, bringing to life familiar scenes and motifs with humour and wit. In his pop-ups an often hilarious universe of grotesque stories and situations are made public. For example the pop-up work entitled We bought a load of fireworks and let them off in the sheds, it only went a bit wrong highlights in a humorous way the fragility of human social behavior.

With thanks to Taylor Vinters, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge and the Cambridge Film Trust for their support.

23 October — 30 November 2008

N55 is a collective of artists based in Denmark who see art as part of everyday life and who are particularly interested in architecture and design. It is a non-commercial platform and they document their works and interventions in the form of manuals, so they can be developed by third parties.


 

Their vision of a democratically organised collaborating body of self-reliant individuals is described in their writing and embodied in their designs. Most of their writing takes the form of manuals, and for Wysing Arts Centre they produced a Walking House manual. The manual was developed into a fully functioning object following Interact, an Arts Council funded placement.

Working closely with specialists at MIT Institute of Engineering in Massachusetts they built a fully functioning Walking House – the house walks using adapted linear actuators. The design allows the structure to move slowly at the same pace as a human can walk, about 5km an hour in real terms.


 

The Walking House was at Wysing throughout 2009 andtravelled to the Ruhr region of Germany for the International Capital of Culture 2010. It continues to travel to different communities across northern Europe.

Click here to visit N55 on You Tube and see the Walking House take its first steps.

19 September — 5 October 2008

Wysing went INSIDE OUT; turning our entire 11 acre site over to the 24 contemporary artists who worked here from studios.  Artists took over kitchens, offices, greenhouses and the gallery spaces as an alternative take on the open studios format, revealing hidden and unseen places that may never have been noticed before.

Wysing Inside Out ran for three weeks during which we programmed a weekly series of events, film screenings in association with the Cambridge Film Festival and artist led alternative site tours, live music and performance evenings as well as three weekend workshops for all ages.

Over the weekend of the 26-28 September in particular we linked up around the Region to celebrate the launch of the Cultural Olympiad.

Artists included: Jeremy Andrews, Michael Brennand-Wood, Julie Brenot, Elena Cologni, Clare Crouchman, Mark Dixon, Sarah Evans, Abbas Hashemi, Oliver Hein, Katherine Hymers, Helen Judge with Cathy Dunbar, Nicholas James Juett, Olga Jürgenson, David Kefford, CJ Mahony, Nora Maycock, Anne Mie Melis, Bob Race, Stephen Robinson, Kiki Stickl, Andrew Tanser, Matthew Topham, Chris Wood and Simon Woolham.

20 March — 27 April 2008

The London based artists collective Public Works worked with Bourn map-makers, ramblers, land-owners and local primary school for a year looking at creative ways of talking about the local area. This residency culminated in the exhibition - Cross Country: An Exploration into Rural Public Space.
 

For three days before the exhibition launch a temporary structure was sited at Riddy Lane, Bourn, from where guided walks, talks and rambles took place, followed by map making workshops led by artists at the structure itself and back at Wysing's new Reception building.

Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages.org also took part in both the exhibition and the talks - together with Torange Khonsari from Public Works hosting a one day debate asking ‘What is the role of rural space and culture?’

The temporary structure then travelled to Wysing to occupy the gallery space, joining other works by artists N55, Jose Arnaud-Bello -who had both worked with people of Traveller origin in the area. Wapke Feenstra and the Bibliobox - a travelling archive of rural art practice featured in the gallery exhibition - the culmination of the past year's residencies.

Public Works is an art/architecture collective consisting of architects Torange Khonsari, Andreas Lang and artist Kathrin Bohm, who have been collaborating in different constellations since 1998. Their projects address the question of how users of public space are engaging with their environment and how design and programmatic strategies can support and facilitate physical, economical and social infrastructures in the public realm. Public Works’ art and architecture collaboration is using the methodology of art led processes to explore how existing social dynamics can inform spatial, architectural and urban proposals.

19 January - 24 February 2008

Wysing re-opened following a one-year closure period that saw a £1.7 million capital development project create new studios and a new reception building. The occasion was marked by an exhibition of work by the twenty four artists who were working from studios at the time.

Artists who were working at Wysing at the time and who exhibited in the first exhibition in our new buildings were: Jeremy Andrews, Franko B, Michael Brennand-Wood, Julie Brenot, Elena Cologni, Clare Crouchman, Mark Dixon, Sarah Evans, Abbas Hashemi, Oliver Hein, Katherine Hymers, Helen Judge, Nicholas James Juett, David Kefford, CJ Mahony, Nora Maycock, Anne-Mie Melis, Bob Race, Stephen Robinson, Kiki Stickl, Andrew Tanser, Matthew Topham, Chris Wood, Simon Woolham.

An exhibition of drawings for sale that were donated by artists was also exhibitied as part of the launch. The artists were: Guy Bar Amotz, Jeremy Andrews, Jose Arnaud-Bello, Franko B, Kathrin Bohm, Michael Brennand-Wood, Elena Colgni, Clare Crouchman, Shezad Dawood, Mark Dixon, Sarah Evans, Simon Faithfull, Marcia Farquhar, Jem Finer, Abbas Hashemi, Oliver Hein, Katherine Hymers, Henrik Plenge Jacobsen, Juneau Projects, David Kefford, CJ Mahony, Nora Maycock, Anne Mie Melis, N55, Gideon Pain, Alex Pearl, Stephen Robinson, Terry Smith, Kiki Stickl, Andrew Tanser, Matthew Topham, Chris Wood, Simon Woolham

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 5: Mess Hall, 18 May - 10 June

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The fifth collective to occupy the space were Mess Hall (USA).

Mess Hall from Chicago incorporated a whopping twelve different events into their residency – everything from clothes-making and franken-furniture recycling workshops to a communal hugging events and sewing workshops, which included sewing members of the public together via their clothes. As part of the residency Mess Hall hosted the independant publishing fair, Publish and Be Damned.

This photo shows members of Mess Hall with Sebastian Ramirez (second left) who was Wysing Curator at the time and curated Seja Marginal, Seja Herói.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 4: Platoniq, 20 April - 13 May

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The fourth collective to occupy the space were Platoniq (Spain).

Platoniq’s contribution to Seja Marginal, Seja Herói provided a context for their new commission Blockbooster, which was part of the Enter_ festival of art and technology, which Wysing was involved in organising.

As well as a more formal exhibition they turned the space into an alternative learning centre, staging skills swaps and talks on knowledge exchange, including creative commons and open-source software. Platoniq used the space as their HQ from where they web streamed all events and activity.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 3: La Culpable, 23 March -15 April

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The third collective to occupy the space were La Culpable (Peru).

La Culpable embraced being on Mill Road and for two weeks were in the space every day and evening, talking and interviewing local residents for an ongoing radio broadcast. They also compiled a CD of music, recipes and opinions of Mill Road residents and then broadcast it in the space and also hosted a number of film screenings and events. They also installed a kitchen area and cooked many delicious free meals for the public.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 2: i-cabin, 23 Feb -18 March

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in a programme that celebrated the marginal. The second collective to occupy the space were i-cabin (Juliette Blightman and Sebastian Craig, London).

i-cabin took the overall title for the project Be Marginal, Be a Hero and transposed it to their marginalised position within the London arts scene. They invited artists who had set up their own project spaces to comment on how they operated in an arts scene dominated by so many other galleries, all of whom were apparently pursuing the same artists for their programmes.

The artists organised an in-conversation with Richard Birkett, at the time Curator at  the Whitechapel Project Space.

Seja Marginal, Seja Herói (Be Marginal, Be a Hero) parts 1-5
Part 1: Danger Museum, 19 Jan -11 Feb

During 2007 Wysing re-located to central Cambridge, converting a discused car showroom in the Romsey area into a temporary gallery and project space. We invited five international artists' collectives to be resident in the space, in a programme that celebrated the marginal. First to take up residence was Danger Museum (Norway and Singapore).

Danger Museum approached Cambridge as a “a field for exploration, a place for scientific exploration and a site with its own local history and mystery.” They researched some of Cambridge’s historic collections, including Kettle’s Yard, The Fitzwilliam Museum, The Folk Museum and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and included objects from their collections in the narrative of a large wall painting.

They also curated a film series by other artists including John Smith and Jacques Tati. And Dr Mark Elliott of the Mseum of Archaeology and Anthropology gave a talk on objects from their collection.

29 May - 30 June 2006

The Black Moss comprised of two works by Juneau Projects, one of which Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space  was developed by the artists during their residency at Wysing in the autumn on 2005.

Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space was a text based computer game and visitors were invited to play the game. The game described various landscapes and asked users to make decisions on how to move through these landscapes. Part of the game was written at Wysing and visitors familiar with the area will spot local places and landmarks. Gamers left maps and clues for new gamers and these were pinned to one of the gallery walls.

In, I’m going to antler you Juneau Projects worked with two groups of young people over a long period to form two fictitious bands – The Ebony Angels and The Embers. The two bands worked independently of eachother, designing and making their own costumes, creating publicity material, making artwork for cd sleeves and writing their own songs which they recorded at a professional recording studio. Juneau Projects worked with the young people throughout this process and  work included Wysing's gallery was a collaboration between and the artists and young people. The bands have never played together and the gallery environment sets up a face-off between them in a playful ‘battle of the bands’. The music in the gallery, triggered by a motion sensor, is a selection of the both bands’ songs.

The Black Moss was organised by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and toured to the Model Arts and Niland Gallery, Sligo, FACT, Liverpool and Glynn Vuivian Art Gallery, Swansea. The exhibition was been supported by the Arts Council England Touring Programme and the Henry Moore Foundation.

1 October - 15 November 2005

Samantha Clark was in-residence at Wysing throughout 2004 during which time she researched various ideas relating to the common ground between Romanticism and scientific enquiry. The resulting work, The Subtle Ether, was a 22 minute long video that was projected in Wysing's gallery.

The Subtle Ether is an invention of nineteenth century Physics; conceived as a substance that fills the space between ‘things’ and helps explain how light behaves. Its existence has never been proven and, since the early 20th century, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics has replaced the subtle ether with another putative gap-filler, ‘dark matter’.

Samantha Clark researched The Subtle Ether and aimed "to create a state of waiting and watching, opening up a quiet space between things, where meaning can evolve suggestively through relationships between sound and image."

The resulting video was formed of six sections, each relating image and sound from widely divergent sources, including an iteration of the Koch Curve against the music of Bach; a ‘squeezed’ Cambridgeshire sunset against ‘stretched’ traffic sounds in a Swiss city; floating jellyfish against NASA recordings of the sound made by meteor showers; an explanation of the chemical composition of common salt against a Dolly Parton love song; swarming midges and short-wave radio transmissions; gloves drying on a line and more Bach, but this time played haltingly by an amateur pianist.

16 July to 5 August

David Kefford, who had a studio at Wysing at the time, spent the summer of 2005 transforming Wysing's gallery into a total environment of new work, produced in the gallery space over a period of one month.

David Kefford was commissioned to create new work for the gallery at Wysing, with a proviso that he should not incorporate any pre-existing work but use the time to develop a new series of works in response to being in the space. 

Wysing's gallery therefore became a temporary studio, in which to test new ground in an exploratory and expansive way. The resultant exhibition was an energetic and psychologically charged immersive environment of objects that were formed of found materials.

Throughout the residency period, David welcomed many visitors into the space to talk about the work as it was in the process of being developed.

Click on the image to see more installation shots.