20 Years of Cardiff Culture: Happy Birthday TactileBOSCH!
by Jen Abell
TactileBOSCH, experimental Cardiff arts collective, this year celebrates its 20th birthday. Penblwydd hapus TactileBOSCH (tB)! You are jolly good fellows indeed. Dear reader, I’d like to give you a neat and accessible history of these Cardiff art stalwarts, but there isn’t one story. There are thousands of colliding, colluding and interlocking journeys that have and continue to shape tB’s course. And Oh Mildred! It’s anything but neat. By way of introduction, here I give you a shortened, edited (read- dry cleaned) version of how I came to know the BOSCH and the BOSCHettes. When I first laid eyes on Kim Fielding, half the founding Fathers of TactileBOSCH, he was the coiffured, snorting, over sharing guest speaker of the then Swansea Metropolitan, now Swansea College of Art, 2009 degree show. Yes, I vaguely remember him talking about the work, the tutors, the Uni. But what I remember most is his mischievous, coercive cackle and incessant foot stomping, relaying the hilarity of his travelling companion traversing the event with a broken leg. A full re-enactment was given to said person’s attempt and failure to exit the car with dignity. Suited and booted graduate guardians were bewildered, I was intrigued. He didn’t plan, he didn’t think about the audience, and he didn’t have any notes. He didn’t need to. Every artist pumped out of South Wales art schools for a decade crossed the TactileBOSCH threshold. He, Simon Mitchell (founding Father) and gallery volunteers let artists try, let them fail and let them try again. As well as being a photographer and performance artist himself, Kim was an expert, with great instincts. He didn’t need a finished product, a concluded project, a ‘creative practitioner’ or an essay on ‘reach and audience profile’ as a password to public participation in the culture of Cardiff. TactileBOSCH’s first and most permanent home inhabited a damp, multi level maze of a former Victorian laundry on Andrews Road, the Llandaff North exit of Hailey Park, from
2001 to 2012. Serendipitously, within a week of seeing Kim at the degree show, my brother, artist John Abell, text me with instructions to come (NOW) to see a show by David Sopwith in tB. I ran for my coat. The work was wonderful. Waves of sculpted wood rolling overhead from rickety pigeon coop windows which must have had purpose when the site was a laundry. Kim visibly brightened when I told him which work was my partner’s, artist Geraint Ross Evans, in Swansea’s degree show. ‘Oh! The car crash kid?! Get him down here, we need to talk’. Talk they did, and TactileBOSCH’s next exhibition, Auxesis, saw Geraint’s degree work; large scale drawings of car crashes and an actual crashed car determinedly negotiated from a reclamation yard, installed in prime position at the entrance of the gallery. Sadly, a fully subscribed 12-24 month exhibition schedule featuring proven and established artists is standard across most galleries in Cardiff and indeed beyond, now. The flexibility of Kim, TactileBOSCH’s space and the BOSCHettes; a rotating team of dedicated volunteers, meant the energy of contemporary work by new artists could be exhibited immediately. Importantly, artists could experience instant audience feedback and gain momentum. Auxesis was an audience success and hugely important for my partner, fresh from his degree. Two mornings after the show’s opening, we got a call from Kim. ‘Uhhh, Gezza did you move the car?’. We hadn’t. The sculpture had been stolen in the night. For scrap. A perfect microcosm of contemporary art commentaries and found wildly funny by all involved. More wonderful collaborations followed; Citizen, Moist, Unchartered Perspectives (Blowback), Tenure. I met creatives, misfits, eccentrics, and geniuses. People making work for work’s sake. Geraint rented a studio and our participation in this welcoming and energetic community deepened. Despite visiting the studio most days, I still don’t think I uncovered all the rooms in the labyrinth. And always Kim urged me, ‘Jen Abell, you’re a writer, you should WRITE’. 2012 came, and with it, the news that our incredible piece of Cardiff Victorian history and indeed, contemporary lives was to be torn down for Kim declared ‘Wimpy Homes’. With this, our safe space to experiment, for artists to cut their teeth and inhabit affordable Cardiff studios was lost. Llandaff North will never house such a weird and wonderful Mecca again. We have a serious problem in Cardiff. Box room studios start at £400+ a month. Fine if you’re a maker, not if you’re an artist. Cost of living is increasing. Galleries don’t show unestablished artists and grants are biased towards creative practitioners, audience participation and community engagement. Impossible for artists that need to work alone or that find 12 page grant applications anxiety inducing. Difficult also for artists working such long hours for their day
32 CARDIFF TIMES
