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Gaia Artists (the team!)
Tree Cosies (2008)
ArtYarn is an on going project, which is dedicated to the act of ‘tagging’ an urban environment through the media of knitting and crochet with yarns and found fibres. Also known as ‘yarn bombing’, traditional handicraft techniques and contemporary social interventions are brought together as visually expressive art forms in the urban environment.
Stitching with a range of colours and textures and placing knitted panels and objects within a landscape of urban structures creates an extraordinary contrast against the architectural environment of a city. The idea of tagging with knitted items is taken from other existing street art forms such as stencilling and spray-can graffiti.
ArtYarn aims to repackage and re-emerge the idea of tagging as a contemporary art form replacing man made with man made handicraft. ArtYarn are Rachael Elwell, Sarah Hardacre and Louise Woodcock from Salford, Lancashire who are all practicing fine artists.
Web: www.artyarn.blogspot.com
www.artyarngaiaproject.blogspot.com
Email: artyarn@hotmail.com
James Brady
Castell y Gwynt: home of Urizen (video still, Snowdonia National Park, 2008)
visual artist | curator | producer | environmentalist
I hold an unashamedly idealist attitude to the natural environment and at the core of all my work lies a comfortingly futile search for some kind of spiritual or divine order in it. Through the mediums of digital video and site-specific earthwork sculpture I attempt to explore what is commonly regarded as the dichotomy between the 'natural' (organic) and the 'man-made' (artificial).
The concept of ‘landscape’ is a human invention and the (art) history of landscape representation and its significance in forming personal and collective identity is a persistent fascination of mine. By using the new media of digital video I seek to re-work the canonical imagery commonly associated with the tradition of Romantic landscape painting of the 18th and 19th centuries. Although these works have their roots in this art historical tradition they are intended to operate consciously and critically within the contemporary culture of the new Environmental movement. These landscape video works occupy a challenging and unusual, ever-shifting position somewhere between video, photography and painting. In these video works we encounter a specific simulacrum of landscape in real-time.
A fundamental aspect to my practice is the act of walking which allows me to explore landscapes and physically engage with their environments. I make low-impact, site-specific earthworks with organic materials I encounter en-route. These are manifest as objects – topographic markers – or drawings – to be discovered and openly interpreted by others. These earthworks are ephemeral – some may exist for days or even weeks – some for only a few minutes. The whole environment controls the finished state of my work come rain, wind, or snow. I merely make small interventions into a bigger ecological system far beyond my control.
Web: www.gaia-project.wetpaint.com
Email: james_gaia_project@yahoo.co.uk
Rob Bailey
Untitled (Rogue Studios, Manchester, UK. September 2008)
Bailey’s work is strongly illustrative and graphic. Following a recent residency at Rogue Studios in Manchester, he has experimented and expanded his practice into 3-dimensional forms – exploring ideas around objects and sculptural form, and continuing his investigation into the use of colour. Many of the forms and motifs he uses derive from both the urban and natural environment.
Rob Bailey (b. 1982, based Manchester, UK) graduated in BA (Hons) Illustration with Animation in 2005, from Manchester Metropolitan University. Recent exhibitions include: Hello World, a solo show at Common, Manchester, 2008; Stick, Stamp, Fly, Gasworks, London, 2007; finalist in Best of Manchester Awards, Urbis, Manchester, 2007; Exposures, Cornerhouse, Manchester, 2006; and more recently, Rogue Project Space in Manchester, a 10-week residency July – September 2008. Forthcoming exhibitions and projects include a co-produced short film commissioned by North West Vision, and a group exhibition at Cornerhouse, Manchester in late 2008, exploring drawing and animation.
Anne Earnshaw
In Memory of Mum (Lake Windermere, Cumbria, April 2008)
I intend my photography to be thought provoking and I hope it encourages people to think carefully about the natural beauty of their environment. I endeavour to bring people’s attention to the everyday in the landscape and emphasise characteristics that we often overlook and take for granted. I record what I see in nature in any one moment which is then preserved for future generations. I want my photographs to stir emotions in people and therefore to encourage them to want to visit and see the landscapes I photograph. I hope to make people more aware of the beauty and fragility of the places I photograph and to help to protect these areas.
My interest and research into the American photographer Ansel Adams has encouraged me to look more closely at the landscape which has led me to question how my photography can be used in the future and contribute to better environmental awareness. Ansel Adams photographed the same subject over a period of time, he noticed changes to the landscape and the environment and he then became politically active in the protection of the environment. His photographs have been significant in the way in which they have been used to promote the environmental movement; they have influenced the work of other artists as well as politicians to think about their environment and the human intervention in it. People have seen the landscape through Adams’ eyes and camera. I would like my photographs to do the same.
Web: www.anneearnshaw.co.uk
Email: anne.earnshaw@hotmail.com
Ben Gwillam
Static Composition (Artists Unlimited, Bielefeld, Germany, 2008 - photo by Benedict Brandhofer)
Ben Gwilliam is a sound artist and improvising musician currently based in the UK. He describes his practice as drawing attention to those sounds between things, be it objects, spaces or recordings. It is these sounds and their contexts that reveal visual and musical processes of listening and looking.
It is from this curiosity about sound-making/recording/finding and how abstract/descriptive that sounds can be, that he makes parallels and similarities unpicking the relationship between those uncovered sounds and moments of primary experience.
Since 2003, his music has been developing an improvisational relationship with open reel magnetic tape and prepared sound recordings, exploring decay, silence and harmonics in solo and collaborative arrangements. In more recent times, the inherent sounds of blank tape began as a source to remove and layer upon with the performance, making a dense and some times sparse sounding music.
In 2004 he was awarded an AHRB Postgraduate Award, and has since completed his MA in Contemporary Fine Art with distinction. He was nominated for the 2007 Jerwood Artist Prize. He has worked and shown internationally in Exhibitions, Residencies and Festivals including ‘art@radio’, 2002 USA, Artoll Labor, 2002 DE, ‘Hothouse’ 2003 Liverpool, ‘The Fear‘ residency, 2003 Hull Time Based Arts, UK, ‘ineditos 2004’, Madrid & Barcelona, ‘stance’, 2005 market gallery, Glasgow, and ‘Unsilently’, 2005 CAC, North Adams, USA, ‘Sonic Arts Expo 2006’, Manchester, UK, ‘Klang-Labor 06’, DE.
Web: www.thosesoundsbetween.co.uk
Email: info@thosesoundsbetween.co.uk
David Haley FRSA
Sometimes Making Art Can Be Difficult (ESA Arts Conference, Luneburg, Germany, 2007 - photo by Marek Kruszewski)
Haley’s art focuses on whole systems ecology and critical futures thinking, to question the narratives of global warming, the global economy and the Sixth Extinction of species. The dance of creation and destruction, also demands that new opportunities and meanings for the other side of collapse must be found. These he pursues through arts projects, academic pursuits, education and various advisory positions. As a Research Fellow in MIRIAD at Manchester Metropolitan University, Haley directs the A&E [art&ecology] research unit and leads the award winning MA Art As Environment programme.
Recent projects in the UK, China, Taiwan, Germany and the USA include The Writing On The Wall, performed poetic artworks on global warming; River Life 3000: Like There’s No Tomorrow, sculptural installation; Rivers from the Future, a critique of the aesthetics and ethics that value the ‘new suburbia’ over freshwater; A Walk On The Wild Side, eco-urban art-walks and films that consider Manchester as a living organism; and Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground Gaining Wisdom, with Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison to determine how we might ‘withdraw with grace’ as the sea level rises.
Web: www.greenmuseum.org/c/enterchange/artists/haley
www.artdes.mmu.ac.uk/profile/dhaley
Email: d.haley@mmu.ac.uk
Sarah Hardacre
Songthrush: How to Study Birds (2007)
Sarah Hardacre’s work explores the construction of knowledge and the institutional shaping of history and the natural world. Her particular interests lie in the appearance of a ‘Natural History’ and the evolution of the museum. Works emerge somewhere between sculpture and installation and often appear again, reflected in vanitas like photographic landscapes.
Appropriating the forms of arbitrary collecting and the transmutational techniques of taxidermy, each piece of work presents a rupture, a momentary disturbance; questioning the clichés of chronicle and examining the gap between rational reasoning and irrational influence.
Sarah Hardacre graduated BA (hons) Visual Art at the University of Salford, with first class honours, in June 2008, and continues her artistic practice at Islington Mill studios in Salford and The Hotspur Press in Manchester. In addition to her independent practice Sarah is a member of ArtYarn, a Salford based textile art collective and a contributor to the Bureau for Culture Management project in Berlin, Germany.
Web: www.myspace.com/salfordskyline
Email: salfordskyline@gmail.com
Rebecca McKnight
Th'Arctic
Rebecca McKnight is Artist in Residence at the University of Salford and creates artwork through process-driven projects. Rebecca's current project, Th'Arctic, involves Rebecca training for and completing a 35-day, 300-mile expedition between the two highest communities in the Canadian Arctic. Rebecca is developing a body of artwork for exhibition based on the experience and has a blog where people can track her progress see www.rebecca-mcknight.co.uk.
For the URBAN/ECOLOGY project Rebecca will be exploring and sharing Liverpool's 'hidden' urban ecology through another process-driven project, which will begin with Rebecca choosing spaces and places in Liverpool that relate to one of the four elements: Earth - Water - Air and Fire.
Rebecca will investigate the places through physical and emotional immersion, exploration, surveillance and create stories, poems, drawings and installations in the spaces that will be developed into a comic based publication or series of paintings to share the spaces with the public. By exploring and sharing the hidden ecology within these urban spaces/places Rebecca aims to shed light and intrigue on places that are sometimes thought of as dark and dull.
Web: www.rebecca-mcknight.co.uk
www.eight-creatives.co.uk/Artists/rebeccamcknight.html
Email: reb.mcknight@gmail.com
Jacqueline McCormick
Settle (film still, 2007)
International Dance Artist Jacqueline McCormick has been teaching, performing and making dances for over twenty years. Her work has been greatly influenced by her research into improvisation, especially Contact Improvisation. She has directed and performed in her company DanceAbout, works that take a dancing journey through the outback of the self. Jacqueline has an M.A in Dance from Mills College , California and was Associate Professor of Dance at Connecticut College (2000-2004) and Western Oregon University , USA (1985-1996.) Jacqueline is presently the Dance Director for Cheshire Dance, UK .
As a dance artist she engages with the body; combining the flexibility and fluidity of dance with organic, efficient and sensory based movement. Her work interlocks traces of memory with touch and texture. Along with Contact Improvisation Jacqueline’s curiosities lie in dance forms that emphasise ‘process,’ bringing the dance artist to engage the whole body-mind, the feeling, sensing, learning and expressive being. Her training includes Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, and Release Technique. All of Jacqueline’s work is informed by her extensive knowledge of the kinesiology of the body.
Most recently she has been exploring dance and film, in 'Settle', a sensorial journey in search of stillness, through forest, river and underwater, Jacqueline investigated the beautiful Breitenbush river and Old Growth Forest in Detroit, Oregon. Jacqueline’s earlier work 'Selfless' was shot in the dry wash of Joshua Tree National Park. Both works are movement responses to the natural environments, providing a way for audiences to re-engage with the land through these physicalised discoveries.
Web: www.cheshiredance.org
Email: Jacqueline@cheshiredance.org
Janette Porter
Norton Priory (3rd July 2007)
Janette Porter works as an artist, as a project researcher and offers artistic direction on arts and environmental projects, she trades as ENVART which was established in 2004. Funds are gained through successful bids to the public and private sector to secure work. She has an MA in Art as Environment (1997), from Manchester Metropolitan University, and a Degree of Batchelor of Arts (Combined Subjects) with Honours, from The University of Liverpool (1992).
Porter has 14 years of experience working as an artist and engaging with communities in both urban and rural contexts. Porter works in a broad range of rural and city-scapes, as well as with a diverse breadth of community groups. The tools, and outcomes, of her work take many forms, for example: the plough, the wild flower, the river course, the celebration cake, however it is the movement and process of the art-works that is often most interesting to her audience. The ongoing group process is an important element of this style of work. It is the revealed communal perception, and appreciation, that she seeks to share with others. This art process weaves collected ideas into the fabric of the communities; the work relies on collaboration, as often there are many stages and complexity to the concepts worked on.
Preservation of cultural diversity is an important working principle; this supports the re-interpretation of folklore rituals and traditions. Porter shows an empathic concern with reconnecting people to nature and to the heritage of their locality. Porter’s constant work throughout often provides insight into people place interaction and dis-interaction. Creative expression is the tool she uses to unlock often invisible entities which are revealed through quiet contemplative workshop sessions.
Web: www.lateexchange.com
Email: janetteporteruk@gmail.com
Tim Pugh
Cylch Llys Helig (Great Orme, North Wales, 2005)
I am involved in the creation of ephemeral artworks that have been made from a wide variety of locally found, site specific materials and sited in contrasting sympathetic locations such as woodland and beaches. A number of ideas and themes behind the continued evolution of the work are derived from aspects related to issues and concerns in the natural environment; some of the works are created in response to observations of natural phenomena and change such as the processes of erosion and growth.
Increasingly my work has also been influenced by subtle interventions of mans past influence on the land such as archaeological and historical/geographical issues specific to an area. At times, I feel my woodland and beach debris installations are an attempt to discover an alternative natural 'code' or previously hidden language whilst sketching out detailed design drawings help to clarify how these arrangements can take shape.
I am influenced by a wide range of sources of inspiration, such as natural flora and Geology and how past Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures and other civilisations have interpreted the natural world. I aspire to collections of plants, fossils and stones, focusing on individual colour and textured surfaces. Ordnance survey maps and weather charts are used as back up informative sources in order to recreate personalised maps made from natural materials or sketched out in charcoal on rocks and trees. I also relate to artists that have interpreted the landscape inked through to map and historical sources, such as Robert Smithson and Richard Long.
Web: www.timpugh.co.uk
Scott Thurston
Momentum (Shearsman publishers, 2008)
Scott Thurston began writing in the poetry scene situated around Gilbert Adair’s Sub-Voicive Poetry reading series and Bob Cobbing’s New River Project workshops in London in the late eighties. He gained a Ph.D. in Linguistically Innovative Poetry and Poetics in 2001 and currently lectures in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Salford where he runs an MA in Innovative and Experimental Creative Writing.
Scott’s creative practice as a writer attempts to steer a course between an awareness of the material nature of language whilst acknowledging its capacity to communicate directly or indirectly. He works in an improvisational fashion, writing short poems which respond to experience and memory in spontaneous ways. These poems build up into sequences which become records of processes of thinking and development over time. Scott is fascinated by how thought and language move, and the capacity of the poem to track and trace this subtle energy.
Thurston’s books most recent books include: Momentum (Shearsman, 2008), Hold (Shearsman, 2006) and Turns (with Robert Sheppard) (Ship of Fools/Radiator, 2003). He is currently working on a long poem entitled Internal Rhyme.
Web: see Scott’s pages at The Archive of the Now www.archiveofthenow.com/
Email: S.Thurston@salford.ac.uk
Tenneson & Dale
Green Paper (2008)
Our ongoing artwork, ORDER ORDER, explores the link between the Houses of Parliament (the epitome of order); the Minimalist movement (the ordered, pure art) and the various forms of public information signage (the physical manifestation of order). We test combinations of the components which constitute the Institutional Framework (outlined within The Table of Elements).
The works are Labour, Liberal Democrat and Conservative.
The works are red, yellow and blue.
The works are prohibition, hazard and mandatory.
The works are geranium, primrose and blue.
We make works specifically designed for institutional spaces with public access.
Each piece is dictated by regional governmental statistics.
The works are determined by their environment.
The environment is the institution.
The institution is the framework.
The framework is bureaucratic.
The bureaucracy inspires the works.
The bureaucracy places the order.
The bureaucracy orders the work.
We do not impose the order, the order is imposed on us.
Web: www.axisweb.org/seCVPG.aspx?ARTISTID=11444
Email: tennesonanddale@yahoo.co.uk
Elizabeth Willow
Nest
My work is often about longing to be somewhere else. I am inspired by stories, real or imagined (if one can make such distinctions, that is), and how they influence us, how they affect our dreams and desires and understanding of the world. I use found materials, both natural and unnatural (again, if there is such a clear distinction), and I am drawn to lost, shed, abandoned and broken things, objects which have their own stories.
What I make will have different forms, shaped by ideas and materials; and the creative process, particularly collecting, is often as, if not more, important and meaningful to me than the outcome. Sometimes I make sculpture, sometimes installations or performances.
My work is often about contradiction. A particular contradiction which has a great influence is that of living in the city and yearning for wild places, for the woods and the sea. I am aware of a need to somehow have both, to try and find a way to keep a strong connection with the natural world despite working and dwelling in a man-made environment.
Web: www.curvegallery.co.uk
Email: violetelizabeth@poetic.com
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