ECG Newsletter Takeover

Introduction

The British Art Network Emerging Curators Group is a series of workshops and events, a source of funding for curatorial and research projects, and somewhere to think through urgencies in curating ‘British’ art. Operating since 2015, the peer support group establishes space and time to gather, both online and in person. It is a forum for constructive critique, unlearning, listening, sharing knowledge and ideas.

For many of us, it is a programme filled with conversation, friendship, exchange and collaboration. Reflecting on our year together in 2022, the word on our mind is support. Artist and writer Céline Condorelli defines this as that which ‘bears, sustains, props, and holds up’, ‘those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace’. 1 She describes the proximity necessary to support: the negotiations and alliances towards ‘being-incommon’.2 We understand this proximity not as geographic or physical closeness necessarily, but as a quality of relation, an intimacy and involvement. We feel that so much of being an ‘emerging curator’ in the UK at this time involves not being supported – & the attendant struggles and sadness that this entails. We regularly encounter problems where support structures disintegrate, are pushed to their limits, or were never there at all. Our group stands in contrast to this: it is a supportive endeavour that centres reciprocity, friendship and community. To mark our year of support, group member Eloise Bennett shares her weather reports from each time we met. It is within these meteorological conditions, beneath these skies, that our conversations unfolded –

☀ March

Sun, passing clouds, glimpses of blue. A few of us sitting by the river together before we begin. Spring flowers in abundance. We’ve spoken before but this really feels like a beginning. Bright light inward through the windows. Standing with a new friend beside the low blue fountain, taking a breath of air.

☂ June

Rain and grey skies. Some are very prepared for this (they have carefully read the email, checked the forecast). The dark and clouded night wraps us up, but we sit in an indoor garden under threads of clear white light. In the morning grey clouds turn to brightness – reflecting from green leaves through tall white windows, a closing dusk.

☁ November

A yellow glow on the horizon line as we arrive. Short days, marked by the darkening evenings and mornings as we talk over breakfast. Grey clouds gathering over the water, reflected in the surface: layers upon layers. The following morning: blue to the edge, where white wisps crowd the horizon. Brightest of skies marking our last time in person together.

Although each ECG meets for just a year, the turning wheel of our seasons has been extended and stretched out: it is ongoing through our continued collaborations. To celebrate both this passing and continuation, this newsletter takeover brings together contributions from six of us. Compiling this visual and textual work has taken on a slow rhythm, one in which we get to know one another’s work all the better.

Laura McSorley shares her insights on the realities and precarity of being a cultural worker. Laura’s writing candidly shares experiences many of us have in common. This account relates closely to her critical work around and within artist-led and DIY art ecologies, alternative models and the politics of labour. In their contribution, Yasmyn Nettle visualises the dominance of white curators and directors within Birmingham’s arts scene, unfolding the repercussions of this. Yasmyn highlights the vulnerability and exploitation faced by Black and Global Majority practitioners and calls for sincere and sustained change. Yasmyn and Laura’s texts reflect the ECG as a forum to critique existing structures in the art world. They bring frequently unspoken and overlooked experiences to the surface, and start to propose other possibilities. In dialogue with one another, they suggest that one of the responsibilities of curating, producing and organising is to articulate and realise alternative futures.

Writings by Jacqui McIntosh and Eloise Bennett explore works by contemporary artists, thinking and writing with these pieces to unravel their meaning and significance. Jacqui examines the energetic flow of Ann Churchill’s drawings and paintings. Her writing dwells with the vibrant colours, esoteric visions and the interplay between hand and unconscious mind in these works. This text is one iteration of Jacqui’s important research on spiritual development and artistic output, including automatic drawing practices and the influence of occult theories in both historical and contemporary art. Eloise takes a spiralling journey through the sculptural, sonic, poetic and archival realms of RA Walden’s access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing) to explore elemental connections, vulnerabilities and sickness. The text is accompanied by endnotes including music, poetry and spacecraft that fed into her writing and thinking.

Basil Olton shares a short poetic text, ‘Worlds within Worlds’ which reflects on the violence, entrapment and spectacle of still images of Black British communities. His writing explores the paired activities of rupture and suture – breakdown, breach, overspilling and stitching back together. As an artist, curator and researcher, Basil’s practice explores the effects of colonialism, the fragility of memory, commemoration and identity.

Basil Olton, Eloise Bennett, Jacqui McIntosh, Yasmyn Nettle, Laura McSorley

Emerging Curators Group 2022

Worlds within Worlds: Basil Olton

Black British community trapped in the stillness of repression,

La Jetée,

Black British community trapped in the stillness of repression,

La Jetée,

Museum effect. Windrush. Spectacle of the still image,

Repetition,

Violence of the still image,

Black music the cut/ rupture/ rhythm,

Repetition,

The improvised passing of fragmented moments

Rupture and suture

Rupture and suture

Heterotopias,

Worlds within worlds,

Mirroring yet upsetting what is outside,

Outside/ Inside

The rupture of the still image,

The violence of the still image,

The violence of Windrush.

Copyright Basil Olton 2023

☄ ✴ sky-watching with RA Walden’s access points: Eloise Bennett

RA Walden, access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing), 2023.

Installation view of Outlooks: RA Walden at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY, 2023. Courtesy the artist. Photo by Jeffrey Jenkins.

In recent weeks I’ve noticed marks in fields and wastelands: bent nodes, sections flattened by bodies passing through or resting, vehicles turning, or wind through the crops. I read, with horror at the timing, a live-feed from the congressional sessions featuring nonhuman biologics, reverse engineering vehicular debris, conspiracy, doubt and denial. Watching from train windows, down overgrown lanes and on walks at the edge of town, I wonder what these markings and movements might portend.

When I visited RA Walden’s studio in February a drawing was taped to the wall. It shows the structure of the six most common elements on our planet: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Rovers and space probes are programmed to seek out these molecules on other planets, caching samples and searching for evidence of ancient life or future habitable environs. Each of Walden’s drawings might be a map or score, composed of moments for movement and rest. Several months later, the drawings exist as large-scale, perforated aluminium structures evoking crop circles on a sloping bank in upstate New York. Hovering just above the surface of the earth, light shifts and reflects across them, and they are transfigured, too, by accompanying writings, sonic works and a research archive.

Walden’s work brings together fragments of thinking and feeling across crip time, illegible states of the body and the entwined lives of these molecules. Their writings draw attention to the constant co-constitution of bodies and environments, re-grounding sickness as part of this, in soil, cloud, ash, a spiralling snail shell, the glow of sulphur burning.

Sound pieces by Walden and artist-composer The Honourable Elizabeth A. Baker weave through unfamiliar terrains. I hear: breath, lamenting, metallic heaving, drones and birdsong, a whispered word caught in my throat. Sounds dissolve and echo, defying stillness and resonating between the six compositions. Evoking molecular intimacy, these works bring our landed bodies into direct connection with bodies of land, emphasising the vulnerabilities of both.

In metal, words and sound, Walden conceives of sickness as a form of visitation: the arrival and presence of an (uninvited) other, dwelling with and hosting. Visitation can refer to the appearance of a divine or supernatural being – sometimes sacred, sometimes unwelcome. It can manifest as both divine punishment and blessèd encounter. Until recently, knowledge about extra-planetary visitation and crop circles has been treated with disdain and disbelief, categorised as falsehood or hoax. The visitation of sickness is one which similarly incites a demand for proof, validity and legitimacy. Walden’s work asks us to listen closely to the echo of disdain towards crop circles, as they appear in the field and by the roadside, connecting it to the disbelief directed towards the experiences and needs of disabled people. access points // or // alternative states of matter(ing) circles the aftermath of visitation: the drawn-out moment of change in which what was familiar becomes unrecognisable.

With RA at the studio, I looked through a collection of publications arranged in small piles on the floor. This ephemera documents decades of attentive sky-watching and field observation, a developing lexicon, and instances of participation through the reporting of circles and sightings. Scans of these appear in Walden’s website for the project, a meticulous catalogue of captured images, video footage, samples and diagrams. The reports remind me of my own writings to record recurring pain, as though an archive of phone notes might constitute accepted evidence. Walden’s work acts to archive these publications, with their visions of interconnected organisms, receptive states, mysterious happenings and transfiguration. Self-published, carefully folded and stapled, they assemble a lore around extraterrestrial visitation, the body and the land.

The notion of hoax through which crop circles are dismissed has links to phrases of faux Latin, magic and sonic hauntings. Hoaxing is usually negatively imbued, related to forms of deceit and conspiracy. But in Walden’s work, the hoaxed offers a place to glimpse the unseen, to deviate from accepted forms of knowledge and to assemble a research methodology that dwells in unknowing. To conspire is, here, to weave narrative, symbol and language around phenomena and experiences that are deemed inexplicable, intangible and/or non-existent. Through interwoven sculpture, poetry, audio and video Walden maps our elemental connections, parallels our bodily and planetary vulnerabilities, sickness and visitation, while reflecting on change, transformation, doubt, and new methods for survival. I wonder about how we might conspire as communities through these poetic modes: like the sky-watchers comparing notes, commoning evidence, building in contestation and reconciliation.

☄ ✴ endnotes

things I’ve been listening to & thinking about:

Mica Levi’s Lipstick to the Void and Love from the Under The Skin soundtrack as well as their publication of scores STAR STAR STAR

The Nasa Voyager mission status page. A friend coincidentally updated me on the whereabouts of Voyager 1: it has been in interstellar space for over a decade now, but will remain within our solar system for another 14,000 years, minimum

Laurie Spiegel’s realisation of Johannes Kepler's Harmonices Mundi which features on the Voyager Golden Record

CA Conrad’s guidance for creating your own (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals, Conrad’s poetry – and wider concrete poetic practices – resonate for me with Walden’s experimentation here

This Karen Barad excerpt from Meeting the Universe Halfway: ‘Matter’s dynamism is generative not merely in the sense of bringing new things into the world but in the sense of bringing forth new worlds, of engaging in an ongoing reconfiguring of the world. Bodies do not simply take their places in the world. They are not simply situated in, or located in, particular environments. Rather, ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively coconstituted. Bodies (‘human,’ ‘environmental,’ or otherwise) are integral ‘parts’ of, or dynamic reconfigurings of, what is.’

& mineral intimacy, a poem by Daisy Lafarge

Walden’s poems can be read in this pdf, while the sound pieces can be listened to on the Storm King site. The exhibition website can be experienced here. Thank you RA for letting me take this small space to reflect on your work, and to Adela Goldsmith for support with images, permissions and captions.