Portfolio

Current and Ongoing

Elia Academy 2021

I was selected to present at the ELIA Academy 2021 <The Extended Art Student>.  

Video Abstract:

Summery: 

The Digital Picnic Blanket: Looking and Listening as Reflection on Creating Shared Space in Online Pedagogy

As artists, teachers and learners we are still coming to terms with making, showing and discussing work during the ongoing crisis. The rapid shift to an online environment has forced us to become extended artists. Our reach now extends infinitely, we increasingly exist in a fluid, adaptable world.

In this presentation, I will lay down a digital picnic blanket. I will use this architecture to open the possibility that we can create a shared space for online teaching and learning that while problematic, could also help us define a more equal, less hierarchical educational space.

https://elia-artschools.org/page/ELIAAcademy2021

Passengers Residency: Being in Architecture

I was invited to take part in Being in Architecture, a series of residencies where artists are invited to respond to ‘being in’ the architecture of The Brunswick Centre – a Modernist, mixed residential and commercial development in Bloomsbury, London.

Over the course of the residency, I intend to produce a series of ‘graphic transcriptions’, records of time spent in the space made with graphic notation. In order to make this work, I intend to carry out field recordings and make photographic work in the space. As well as this, I will start a study of symbols and signs that I use in my notation, this lexicography will become the basis of future work.

I will be working with students from the MEng course at the Bartlett School (UCL), facilitating two workshops on making temporary architecture for the camera.

Workshop Brief:

Performing Structure for the Camera

Using the Brunswick Centre as a context, a supporting structure, you will be asked to use the camera as a device that slows or freezes time, allowing you to create work that can only exist within the frame of the image.

You're encouraged to develop ideas and prototypes that you are already exploring in your studio design projects. This is a really good opportunity to test physical prototypes of your ‘pavilions’ based on the circus brief. You will be encouraged to keep in touch with your other team mates, using Zoom or MS Teams on your personal devices.

After discussing some artists' work that might influence your experiments, you will be asked to find materials to work with. This can be found (i.e recycled) material but you are also encouraged to consider your own body and light as building blocks for your work. You will be given a simple camera that has a flash and is loaded with black and white film to make your experiments.

https://www.passen-gers.co.uk

Unit X: A Messy Interface

This year I have written and delivered a cross-disciplinary unit for 55 L5 (Second Year) BA students at Manchester School of Art. Supported by staff and invited artists with multi-modal practices, small groups of students have been invited to make work that problematizes the relationship between ‘IRL’ and virtual spaces. I have engendered a group research project approach to the unit in which staff, students and artists from outside the institution are working together to ask questions around our relationships to these spaces.

Work from A Messy Interface will be exhibited as part of Manchester International Festival in September 2021, in conjunction with the exhibition, I will host a conference in which participating students staff and artists will reflect on the work made together.

Unit Brief (p37):

Archive

Chisenhale Studio Residency: The Sound We Inhabit

(August 2019)

During my month at Chisenhale Studios I made five graphic scores, which were tested in open rehearsals and performed at the end of the residency. I wanted to open the residency space to other artists and local residents who were interested in the relationship between sound and image. 

Alongside writing and workshopping the composition, artist Holly Drewett and myself ran workshops for local residents which involved a blindfolded sound walk and making scores based on this experience. I also invited writer and academic Ken Hollings to perform a lecture How to Begin  which I accompanied with a spatial soundtrack of repeating locked grooves, which form the silences at the end of a vinyl record. 

Scores
100cm x 80cm Steel sheet, card, magnets, chalk pen, tape

Performance
Five movements (20mins) for Electric Guitar, Korean Flute, Violin and Bass Clarinet.

1:16s Extract:

Spontaneous Collective Silences (2020)

Ongoing study of ‘graphic transcriptions’ from field recordings made of full, ‘silent’, commuter trains.  

30cm x 20cm brass plate, instax film, magnets, tape, ink, laser print, watercolour, steel bar.

Mesh (2020)

Installed as part of a site-specific work at Manchester Central Library. The work depicts a photogrammetry scan of a Corinthian column that is an architectural feature of the space the work is installed in. Evoking the scrolling of a phone screen, an anachronistic gesture combining two different structures that enable the dissemination of knowledge.

1 minute video, 30cm x 15cm monitor

Modest Proposals (2019) 

Image: Modest Proposals performance, Emma-Kate Matthews (bass) Jon Ormston (drums) and Ben McDonnell (guitar) taken at JEMP festival, December 2019. 

An immersive piece of music for tone generators, drum kit, guitar and electric bass. A blend of improvisation and written material making use of graphic scores to consider how musicians can work together within a fixed structure. Modest Proposals is named after both the Jonathan Swift novel and text by curator Charles Esche.

Scores

A5 card, pen, charcoal, xerox print

Performance
20-30 minutes

Scaffold for a Temporary Structure (2019)

Planar Noise (2018)

ARC (2018)