The International Camp for Improbable Thinking was a 3 month residency (June - September 2010) by 6 artists all of whom were exploring the Improbable in their work. The artists work was collectively presented at the Cambridge Conflab on January 15 2011.

Asli Çavuşoğlu The focus of Çavuşoğlu’s work stems from experimental narrative exercises on loss, repetition, replicas and narrative interplay across various art media. In the work In Patagonia after Bruce Chatwin she re-enacts a journey in South America 20 years after Bruce Chatwin’s original, and depicted in the blurred reality fiction novel In Patagonia. Her journey can be read as the initiation of a fascinated reader of the book who wants to create her own experience, visiting those places named in the book and using the same transportation means Chatwin used, finding the same people Chatwin talked to. Asli Çavuşoğlu plans to address the improbable by looking into the knowledge potential in Cambridgeshire and incorporate this into a new sculptural work.

Andy Holden's work incorporates monumental outdoor structures, plaster and bronze sculpture, film, painting, recorded music and musical performance. Often showing these diverse media together, his work builds a fragmented yet richly textured collision of ideas, references and forms. In the work The Pyramid Piece currently presented at Tate Britain’s Art Now (to April 2010), a gigantic knitted boulder is presented alongside an accompanying film and a selection of small pyramid souvenirs. The Pyramid Piece acts as a means of representing and reconciling the guilt of an event from the artist’s childhood – stealing a rock from the Great Pyramid of Cheops, Giza. For Wysing, Holden will develop his musical practice more deeply by creating a music festival for artists’ music, and invite public participation within the festival.

Fabiano Marques approaches his work is as if it were a game, building structures which have their own rules of interaction. His playfulness often responds to specific settings, as in Mar Pequeno (2003), a work that takes the name of a tropical setting some 150 kilometers away from Sao Paulo, Brazil where many rivers join the South Atlantic. The work documents a 7-hour interaction between the artist and a series of floating wooden structures which, at times, function as a raft. More recently, Marques has developed a sculptural airplane using the design of the plan for the city of Brasilia, and in testing its ability to fly he will also seek to test the concept of Brazilian modernism and identity. He will seek to apply his approach to making utopian projects a reality in his commission for this camp.

Julie Myers makes work in response to place and encounters with people. Combining geographic data with aural history, local knowledge, collective and shared experience. Using film, photography, sound, web and locative technologies to produce projects that range from sophisticated mediascapes and interactive films to hand-drawn maps. Previous work has been commissioned by: Arts Council England, The British Film Institute, The British Council, The Institute of Contemporary Art and The National Portrait Gallery, London. Industrial collaborators include: Adobe Systems, USA, British Telecom, UK and Philips Multi Media, FR.

Emily Rosamond is an installation artist and academic researcher working across drawing, sculpture, writing, performance and video. Her work explores objects as agents of social space, and her current research interests include characterization in contemporary sculpture, affect theory, intersubjectivity, Guattarian ecologies, and speech-acts. For her new commission she will openly study concepts of spacializations of consciousness found in the work of various thinkers such as Plato and Freud. Rosamond wants to address these concepts and push how we circumvent space. For her commission she will be constructing a site specific work based on her concept of the ‘constellation of material instances.

Bedwyr Williams works include stand-up comedy, sculpture and painting, posters and photography. Drawing on his own experiences he approaches the world both satirically and wholly seriously simultaneously, revealing both his and our own idiosyncrasies and neuroses. Through a broad range of media, a strong sense of surrealistic humor and a sharp critical mind, he explores notions of what it means to be an artist born, living and working regionally. Bedwyr Williams has been invited for his interest in researching and exploring new approaches to sculpture, and his interest in taking inspiration from the local environment.

Photographs © LiquidPhoto.co.uk