With is an exhibition
that has been honed from a long-term project, whereby methods of
co-participation are utilised and tested, probing the limits of
collaboration, often in ways particular to a technologically infused
way of life. The six exhibiting artists - three collaborating pairs -
each have an individual practice that deals in some way with history
and knowledge, and in being brought together here, seem to exist on
the outer layer of sediment, upon sediment, of memory and shared
history; with the ways in which these are preserved and shared, or
abandoned, being examined in the work on show.
Jean Lave and Etienne
Wenger, who introduced communities of practice in 1991, emphasise the
social impulses and needs of humans. In line with these
considerations, how social interactions are mediated by technology,
and what this might change about them is explored by Sarah Sanders
and Jacqueline Wylie, as the two artists co-participated at a
physical remove. Wylie is currently undertaking research towards a
PhD into how social media and other emergent technologies have
affected artistic practice, and in previous work both Sanders and
Wylie have expressed ideas and concepts by spatially and materially
enacting them; here, making use of Skype to co-participate and
converse.
The extent to which we are
able to access, let go of, or get rid of our memories, and objects or
images from our pasts, is almost reversed on-line, where it can be as
difficult to destroy, as it is to preserve in the physical world. It
is the destruction, or more gentle letting-go of objects and memories
that concerns Julie Del Hopital and Nicola Dale. Referring to a scene
in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) where objects are shown
sunk and abandoned underwater, Del Hopital and Dale are presenting
footage of the two of them abandoning mementos to the River Mersey.
Here, flowing water could be symbolic for time, and holds a deeper
personal significance for the artists, as they both grew up close to
rivers.
Waterways feature again in
the collaboration between Annie Harrison and Jenny Steele, also
taking the form of a film, and focussing on the Piccadilly Canal
Basin that their studios overlook. Both artists are interested in the
urban environment, with buildings and cities as influential
receptacles of human memory, desire and fear. Within this
collaboration, unlike the rivers Mersey and Mauldre, that are pivotal
to Del Hopital and Dale's activity, another kind of water, this time
man made, and much stiller, is the focus of a shared concern in the
mapping of place and history.
Growing out of a series of
crits held during 2011 and 2012, a larger community of practice has
been divided, cell-like, first into 6, then into pairs. The common
interest around which that group initially formed has been clarified,
or fermented by this process; of splitting and concentrating activity
and belonging. What has emerged is a testing of communication, and a
watery focus on what is important to the the participants day-to-day,
and what has been influential in the past, reflecting the processes
and principles outline by Lave and Wenger, in that the artists have
revealed what they seek in common to understand.
Lauren Velvick - 10/2013
