Ou t Of B ou n ds 14 - 31 Octo b e r 20 1 6 130 Vica r L a ne
eaststreetarts.org.uk @eaststreetarts
Out of Bounds 14 - 31 October 2016 130 Vicar Lane & Patrick Studios
“Today, when we cease to be satisfied with the life that is offered to us in our own city, we no longer strive to change, revolutionise, or rebuild it; instead, we simply move to another city - for a short period or forever - in search of what we miss in our home city. Mobility between cities, in all shades of tourism and migration, has radically altered our relationship to the city as well as the cities themselves. But, above all, it is today’s artists and intellectuals who are spending most of their time in transit - rushing from one exhibition to the next, from one project to another. All active participants in today’s cultural world are now expected to offer their productive output to a global audience…” Boris Groys Art Power
Post Residency No two artists’ residencies are the same. East Street Arts’ origins are proudly and firmly rooted in artist led practice. They offer a wide range of opportunities which invite artists both in Leeds and across Europe to approach and debate artist led practice. The Artist Residency programme is one such invitation. Residencies can feel a bit like embarking on a blind date. Artists choose them wisely and consider what they want to test, witness, nurture and experience and how those exposures might expand and illuminate their work.
It is here that the supportive relationship between art organisation and artist is key in bridging cross cultural dialogues and expectations of projects and experiences. The work by the six artists in Out of Bounds all share responses to the urban landscape and freedom of movement though looking at man made dereliction, dwellings and reclaiming public spaces through DIY and interventionist strategies. Out of Bounds is not the end of the residency for the artists involved.
Residencies
You can only speculate what might happen; a residency is as much a mental and emotional shift as it is a temporary physical relocation. Sometimes you don’t need to travel far or maybe the traversing is more virtual (for instance, there are increasingly more ‘online’ residencies now available for artists). Whatever the model, shifting to a new and unfamiliar place can alter how an artist makes work and, more crucially, challenge what they think about the work they are making.
The perception of an artist’s work, which may hold cultural currency or gravitas in one region or country, can be perceived very differently when experienced by another ‘global audience’. This can be simply down to speaking a different language or having another type of art education or understanding of how ‘art’ works.
Whilst their exhibition is a reflection and evidence of the impact the residencies had on their work, the friendships, networks and thoughts collected will continue to be digested and processed, lingering for much longer than the duration of the residency. It is this that serves as the real legacy to the experience and what happened during those weeks, months or years. Having an exhibition a year after the completion of a residency is one good model to gain a greater understanding of the impact this incubation period has had on the artists work and development.
“...they can vary quite significantly in length; from weeks to months to years. What can also change is the relationship between artist and venue: Some residencies are large organisations offering space; others are artists led initiatives where creative minds can meet; then there are the more academic placements where the artists is expected to give lectures and workshops.� Matthew Caines, Guardian, June 26 2013.
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Out of Bounds 14th - 31st October 2016 130 Vicar Lane & Patrick Studios Over the last twenty years, East Street Arts has delivered Artist Residencies which support artists to take time out from the ordinary constraints of their day to day and spend time within new environments. Residencies offer artists time, space and resources to experiment with their work and try new approaches through being immersed in new contexts. Exploring ideas and opening up dialogue informs new work and the future development of their practice. East Street Arts’ Artist Residencies are non-prescriptive and processbased, allowing artists the freedom to play, respond, probe and reveal. We specifically take a flexible and open approach in terms of the location, scale, output, cost, access and partners. This enables us to work with, and benefit from, a wide range of artists at different stages of their careers, based locally or further afield, who bring alternative voices into our community. In the summer of 2015, six artists took part in a series of residencies and exchanges between Leeds and Bilbao in Northern Spain. East Street Arts, in collaboration with BilbaoArte (Bilbao) and pocagallery (Portugalete), organised an artist exchange between the organisations.
East Street Arts
East Street Arts’ Artist Residencies are non-prescriptive and process-based, allowing artists the freedom to play, respond, probe and reveal. 9
From Leeds, artists Josh Gibbs and duo Annie Nelson and Chris Woodward spent a month in residency at BilbaoArte. In turn, artists Rosa Parma and Mawatres from Bilbao visited Leeds in September of the same year. Finally, in Autumn 2015, long-term studioholder and artist, Rebecca Appleby, spent a month experimenting with new ideas in East Street Arts’ Project Space at Patrick Studios in Leeds. Now, a year later, East Street Arts is hosting an exhibition of the six artists featuring their most recent works to showcase the links and dialogues that manifested between the artists’ work during their residencies. We did not want to miss an opportunity to showcase and explore these connections more deeply and to see the evolution of their work following the exchanges and residencies.
East Street Arts is a contemporary arts organisation in Leeds. Our mission is to focus on the development of artists through our events programme, membership activities, professional development and studio. 130 Vicar Lane is East Street Arts’ new art space in Leeds city centre, developed in collaboration with and supported by Hammerson property developers. The space will host a printmaking co-op and exhibition space. BilbaoArte is an arts centre in Bilbao, Spain, focusing on providing resources and infrastructure for emerging artists to develop new work through programme of residencies, exhibitions, screenings, workshops and seminars.
Reflection
Each artist’s work offers a reflection on the urban landscape and our collective interactions with it. There is a language to the constructed habitat and our socio-cultural use of it; there are also conflicts and limitations that arise from physical manifestations in this environment. Taking elements of the city, from bollards to public monuments, and using them to suggest new reactionary positions to their established purposes, each artist expresses a reflection of different aspects to our everyday surroundings.
pocagallery is an art space in Portugalete, Spain, run by artist Hondartza Fraga, for the promotion and exchange of contemporary artists.
Each artist’s work offers a reflection on the urban landscape and our collective interactions with it.
Artist Yoke Mawatres Josh Gibbs Rosa Parma Rebecca Appleby
Statement Artist Yoke, meaning to connect or join, is the collaboration between artists Annie Nelson and Chris Woodward. Our work exists in many forms and is driven by an interest in our environment and how it has been shaped historically by physical, political and social factors. The resulting projects are disseminated through exhibition, publication, online resource, and outside a gallery setting through public intervention in the hope of reaching a broad public audience. Our current work looks at the ownership of land and the conflicts of migration, aiming to draw attention to the perpetual desire for quick fixes and fast solutions.
Artist Yoke
Much of this has been informed by a ten-month research and production trip across Western Europe in a self converted campervan, looking at the current dialogue around the themes of borders and nationality.
Our current work looks at the ownership of land and the conflicts of migration, aiming to draw attention to the perpetual desire for quick fixes and fast solutions.
Top: Welcome Mat (2016) Bottom: Border Control (2016)
No Sleeping (2015)
Biography Artist Yoke is the recent formalisation of our collaboration after working together for nine years. We are both graduates of BA Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University 2010 and co-founded the art organisation Woolgather, alongside John Slemensek. The Woolgather Art Prize 2011 & 2012 were showcases of contemporary artists with public vote deciding the winners. Woolgather’s Art Vend 2013 - 2016 uses vending machines in public spaces to distribute artist multiples for £1.00 each. Chris undertook a year long residency at Inc. Workshop Leeds (2014 - 2015) and was décor artist at Hove Festival, Norway in July 2014.
Artist Yoke
Annie has undertaken residencies at the Cordoba School of Art, Spain (2013), Cyprus School of Art (2009), and recently studied Carpentry and Joinery at Leeds College of Building (2014 – 2015).
We have exhibited nationally and internationally in Wrexham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, Havana, New York and Bilbao.
Artist Yoke have exhibited nationally and internationally in Wrexham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Leeds, Havana, New York and Bilbao.
Statement Intervention / Memory / Mediterranean / Death / Black Flags / Train / Gordon Matta-Clark / Public Space / Graffiti / Left Turn / Rachel Whiteread / Basque Country / Silver / Cement / Street / Poster / Tokyo / Spray / We Are All In Danger / Youtube / Fight / Floods / History / Sticker / I LOVE MY WORK / Bridge / Rosalyn Deutsche / La Publika / Black / Je Vous Salue Sarajevo / Eskerrik Asko / 3 / Bus / Monument / Story / Hymn / Life / Debate / Mawa
Biography I was born in Madrid in 1986 but have lived and worked in Bilbao for ten years.
Mawatres
The rain and the grey sky have influenced my vision so much that I only see black flags.
I graduated in Fine Art from the University of the Basque Country, where I am currently developing my doctoral thesis. The research relates to the idea of intervention, art and city, art and public space, context‌ My work expands across different fronts both in creation, management and development of site-specific projects. My level of English is basic and I speak no Chinese. Despite this, I have benefited from grants to carry out projects and residencies in Beijing, New York, Leeds and London.
The rain and the grey sky have influenced my vision so much that I only see black flags.
Bilbao Darkhouse 4 (2015) Credit: Naroa Gallego
Statement Peculiar patterns and aesthetics in construction guide the narrative of my practice. It might be derelict buildings, fragments of buildings from coastal villages lost to the sea in East Anglia, or more recently, swathes of newly-built houses in Ireland – uninhabited and unwanted in the current economic climate, often at an unfinished stage of construction. With my most recent project, Darkhouses, I predominantly use broken and/or abandoned building and decorating materials, displaced objects of construction mirroring the patterns I see across developing conurbations. By isolating, blending and manipulating these patterns through examining the found materials’ use, I place them in new situations within my uncertain, patchwork, fantasy world.
Josh Gibbs
In this world, I toy with relationships between models and their real counterparts, adopting and exploring various roles that are active in the process of constructing and marketing buildings - from sourcing materials and building with them, to the eventual commercial stage.
In this fantasy world, I toy with relationships between models and their real counterparts, adopting and exploring various roles that are active in the process of constructing and marketing buildings
Biography I graduated from Leeds College of Art in 2011. I have since lived and worked in Leeds and Norwich, and have undertaken various art residencies in the UK and abroad. As well as taking part in the exchange between Bilbao Arte, Pocagallery, and East Street Arts in August 2015, I was also part of East Street Arts’ Leeds Pavilion at Warrington Arts Festival, an open studio-style residency in October 2015. I also recently completed a researchbased residency at MART, Dublin in April 2016, as part of the IrishInternational exchange programme, Cultural Dialogues.
Josh Gibbs
This research focussed on investigating trends in housing and construction across the city and Ireland as a whole in relation to the current socio-economic climate.
I have since lived and worked in Leeds and Norwich, and have undertaken various art residencies in the UK and abroad.
Top: Bilbao Darkhouse 1 (2015) Bottom: Bilbao Darkhouse 2 (2016)
Phil Kirby Sit, Settle, Remain, Linger. resident (n.) mid-15c., “an inhabitant, one who resides,” from resident (adj.). resident (adj.) late 14c., “dwelling, residing,” from Old French resident and directly from Latin residentem (nominative residens), present participle of residere “to sit down, settle” reside (v.) late 15c., “to settle,” from Middle French resider (15c.) and directly from Latin residere “sit down, settle; remain behind, rest, linger; be left,” from re“back, again” (see re-) + sedere “to sit” (see sedentary). Meaning “to dwell permanently” first attested 1570s. residue (n.) mid-14c., from Old French residu (14c.), from Latin residuum “a remainder, that which is left behind,”
I live in Leeds. Which makes me a resident I suppose. It’s not a term I’d ever employ in normal conversation, but the word has a pleasing etymology and I like that it embraces notions of lingering, settling and simply sitting down doing nothing very much at all. I don’t even mind the idea of being left behind. Most of the best books I own were found on the remaindered shelves. The place suits me. Unlike the “active participants in today’s cultural world”, who, as philosopher Boris Groys suggests in the opening quote of this catalogue, have no roots, ties or commitments and are relentlessly flitting about in search of the next stimulating project, I am a city dweller. I’m here to stay. I don’t agree with Groys either that staying put equals “satisfaction with the life offered in our own city”. Satisfaction need not be complacent. The original meaning of “dwell” was “to mislead”, and every city dweller is to some extent misled and misleading about the place they call home, but that doesn’t mean we put up with anything. Urban life is a complex construction of routines, repetitions, and rituals. We inhabit a space and we literally make it a place through our shared habits. Habitudes produce a habitat. If we didn’t closely follow what our neighbours did, copy how they felt, match their assumptions and fall in with the general flow we would not simply be bad citizens. We physically could not survive. It’s the price we pay for settlement. Imagine trying to cross a road if every driver was expressing his individual creativity and belief in personal freedom at the wheel. We
all rely on our fellow citizens habitual behaviour. We rely on boundaries to keep us safe. But boundaries also separate, divide and exclude. And the customs and practices of our tribe can become an anaesthetic, dulling the pain and discomfort and inconvenience that the urban environment entails. Which is why we need art. Art introduces a bit of play into the daily round. Loosens the wheels. Dislodges the stabilizers. Art tests the boundaries. This exhibition, “Out of Bounds”, shows work made by artists on a Residency programme. A residency offers an opportunity to be in a place, but not of it (“not conformed to the world, but transformed by the renewing of your mind” as the great St Paul said.) An artist in residence can look where a resident would tell you there’s nothing to see, and see what is generally disregarded. All the artists in the exhibition are united by a concern for urban residue; with what is left behind, discounted, overlooked, devalued, dumped and destroyed as the city sheds its dismal past and looks forward to a shiny new future. The art work here makes us aware that a city is always an object in the making; made, unmade, remade. Nothing is accidental. The urban landscape and everything it contains is a human act of composition. Dereliction, ruin and urban decay are not natural phenomena whose sublime effects are to be documented. Urban destruction is an intentional act too. We are complicit, but it needn’t be the way it is. In an essay “Art and Money” Groys sums up why contemporary art matters: Art practices reveal the materiality and composition of the things of our world...
Urban life is a complex construction of routines, repetitions, and rituals. We inhabit a space and we literally make it a place through our shared habits. Habitudes produce a habitat.
here lies the critical, enlightening character of truly contemporary art: while the commodities produced by our civilization circulate on the global markets according to their monetary and symbolic value—with their pure materiality manifesting, at best, through their private consumption—it is contemporary art alone that is able to demonstrate the materiality of the things of this world beyond their exchange value. Sometimes, in our daily round of distraction and inattention we need reminding that stuff counts. It would be easy to take from this exhibition a new awareness of the sort of objects which inspired the work. Bollards in Leeds proliferate, new developments are erasing familiar landmarks and dereliction is everywhere, though our scattered ruins are rarely as fabulous as are Detroit’s.
But what I have mainly taken from the work is a way of looking at what is so familiar it’s almost beneath notice. And it goes back to the meaning of being a resident and a particular type of dissatisfaction that I’ve never been able to name before. How do we sit in the city, and how does the city sit with us? I’ve looked again at the benches in different parts of town. They perform the same function - they are recognisably patterned after a Platonic template - but their material difference is staggering. Benches share a family resemblance but it’s obvious once you look that many are definitely the poor relations, ruined from the start, mean and squalid. A human designed, built and placed these objects in a particular place. In the town centre the public seating is often made of marble and architectural stone. Some aspires to the condition of art, much has a more solemn funerary look. The functional aspect - providing somewhere to sit and socialise - has been subsumed under the attempt at a public display of grandeur and civic pride. I asked the council leader why the seating in a new development was made of such cold, hard, rain-collecting material that wasn’t very appealing to the posterior; “It’s easy to maintain,” was the reply. The benches in my own part of town have become a public order issue. The local police have designated them “magnets for anti-social behaviour” and are looking to get them removed. Residents cannot be trusted to sit and behave themselves on their own high street. Some mysterious, inherent property in the material attracts the bad elements like moths around a street lamp.
This is, of course, a whopper. The reality is conflict between groups of people not the location of a rugged construction of wood and iron. I may be entirely wrong about what the artwork in the exhibition means. I could be completely deluded in my wayward response. The only way of knowing is by going and having a look for yourself. Artists residencies have an obvious effect on how and what an artist chooses to produce. But a less obvious benefit is to the city and its residents, how it changes them and challenges them to see things as an outsider would. And maybe get a little unsettled. Phil Kirby theculturevulture.co.uk
Art introduces a bit of play into the daily round. Loosens the wheels. Dislodges the stabilizers. Art tests the boundaries.
Statement
Biography
Drawing, screen-print, photography and publishing are the disciplines that have marked the underlying theme of my latest projects.
I live in Bilbao. I work by drawing and screen-printing some of my drawings onto t-shirts. I work with self-edition, feminism and punk: Precariousness in my hands.
In 2013, 2014 and 2015 I have created the projects CHICAS ENOJADAS, RRR and JANE WARTON. The three projects build a dialogue and analysis of images of women that, often, have shown anger or outrage for various reasons or who transmit the energy of unconformity that I have wanted to portray. The format and the research are intertwined: Drawing, audio-visual, painting, counterculture, textile, text, essay, matter, discourse, process and the figure of the artist.
In 2009 I set up Riot Flesh, an independent brand of t-shirts, and have been co-directing T-festa with Laura Fernández Conde since 2011. Both of us also have worked at PUERTA with Jorge Núñez since 2013, which is a space for workshops, work sessions, meetings, film screenings and debates. My studio is in Calle Zabalbide opposite PUERTA.
Rosa Parma
The initial reference is the underground movement Riot Grrrls, a subcultural movement that combines feminist consciousness and punk style and politics, who promote a attitude taken from punk philosophy: the so-called DIY (do it yourself) movement. My works start from images from the internet or other sources, as well as personal or imaginary archives, and develop through portraiture using drawing. The drawings are translated into screen-prints for t-shirts and, through photography and photocopy, I have also created a series of fanzines for each project.
My works start from images from the internet or other sources, as well as personal or imaginary archives, and develop through portraiture using drawing.
Statement Exploring the palimpsest nature of structural decay, my sculptural ceramics examine contemporary urban archaeology through form & textural investigations. Â Collecting abandoned or overlooked fragments, both physically and photographically, of urban life, I collate the discarded or neglected materials & remnants. Be it car parts, an undistinguished bridge or the instructive markings left by workmen, the shape, form, line & texture is echoed in the works becoming a record of my personal relationship with the city. Â During the construction of each sculpture, particular emphasis is placed both formally and conceptually on balancing structure, order, control and the antithesis of nature and organic expression.
Rebecca Appleby
Collecting abandoned or overlooked fragments, both physically and photographically, of urban life, I collate the discarded or neglected materials & remnants.
Biography I graduated from a BA Hons in Ceramics by Edinburgh College of Art in 2001 and now live and work in Leeds. I have been an East Street Arts member and studio holder for many years and I also hold a membership with Northern Potters and the Craft Potters Association. My work has been featured in multiple art exhibitions nationally. Recent exhibitions include Ceramic Art York 2016, a Craft Potters Association event presented in partnership with York Museums Trust, and Ceramic Art London 2016. Ceramic Art London is the Craft Potters Association’s flagship event and it is recognised as the most exciting contemporary showcase of current ceramic art, with exhibitors drawn from the UK, Europe and worldwide.
Rebecca Appleby
This year I was awarded the winning prize for ‘Best Newcomer’ by Ceramic Review.
My work has been featured in multiple art exhibitions nationally. Recent exhibitions include Ceramic Art York 2016, a Craft Potters Association event and Ceramic Art London 2016.
making space for artists registered charity 1077401 eaststreetarts.org.uk @eaststreetarts
making space for artists registered charity 1077401 eaststreetarts.org.uk @eaststreetarts