artists in pubs

As the Winter nights draw in, Birmingham’s artists seem to keep finding reasons to hold events down the pub.

Pub Conversations with James Hyde and the latest in the 100 Verses for 3 Estates project.

Or is it just Gavin masterminding the whole thing?

season’s greetings

At some stage last week a (presumably Polish Mexican) nativity scene magically appeared in the sitting room.

…on top of the cable TV box and DVD-player.

Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks

The the Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks project was launched on Friday September 1st at a gathering hosted by Springhill Institute.

Artists, curators and project spaces are invited to contribute a fragment of their current activity: be it doing, making or thinking. Having completed their page, they are then asked to to pass the sketchbook on to an artist of their choice for completion of the next page. In this way, the process of gathering these contributions will result in a sort of highly subjective cartography that maps out the current terrain of specific individuals and also the links between a progression of artists.

Volume 13

Volume 13 started off with sculptor Atsuo Okamoto: he agreed to fill in a page of the sketchbook and pass it on to another artist; I agreed to keep a small section of the artwork “Volume of Lives” with me until I die. Anything’s fair game in the world of artistic collaborations!

Volume 5

Orie Inoue: Is she a fashion designer? Is she an animator? Is she an illustrator?

You decide… (but probably it’s all of the above and more!)

Volume 1

Battling a department that produces endless human figures, Ami now also has to work out how best to deal with an almost empty sketchbook…

Volume 11

Currently sending postcards to herself and contemplating a project involving invisible things, Eri was last seen planning how to use a smell as her contribution to the sketchbook.

Volume 15

On a sunny but cold Sunday, we travelled to Moriya to find out more about the Arcus project.

We had a look around the buildings and then a chat with the programme director. After that we met artist in residence Goh Ideta who was kind enough to spend time showing us his portfolio and talking about his works.

His profile on the Arcus website sums his work up pretty succinctly

Works with experimental devices that utilizes light, shadow, and space to understand “perception,”“sensation,” and “existence.”

or you can check out his website here, but I get the feeling these are works you have to spend time inside to really do them any justice.

Volume 19

Googling for “artist led projects, tokyo” eventually led me to Kandada. Their website is in Japanese (of course!), but armed with their English language map and this blog entry giving an interesting snippet of background information, I went to have a look.

First up, I really liked the show they had on (Hong-Goo Kang ‘s Road to Eouido), but then I’m probably a bit partial to journey projects at the moment…

Secondly, completely getting into the spirit of passing the sketchbooks on to other artists (!), the director volunteered staff member Ueno Masao to participate on Kandada’s behalf.

Welcome aboard Masao!

Peer-to-Peer Sketchbooks regained

I’d got to the point where I was resigned to having lost the 8 sketchbooks I shipped over for dispersal in Japan.

Due to arrive in my first week here (ie over 2 months ago) they eventually turned up this week, looking like they’d been sat on by a sumo wrestler or something.

I’m not sure what customs thought they were going to find, but I hope they weren’t too disappointed…

Still, that now means that rather than the 4 sketchbooks I thought I’d have to make do with, I now have 12 in total and things are going full steam ahead to invite people to participate. That means lots of visits to galleries and project spaces looking for… well, I’m not sure what, but I know it when I see it!