Questioning how we enact the process of learning while highlighting the moments of educational exchange that can occur through conversation, Morgan Cahn develops an active and evolving library as she exchanges knowledge with visitors. Morgan’s site responsive installations and performances encourage interaction through participatory elements. One on-going work, Me(a)nder, sees Morgan stitch and mend visitors’ wears, offer advice and console broken hearts. Morgan wanders the sites from Baxter Park for May Meet In Mutual, 2012, to Cupar Arts Festival, 2013, or this year when Morgan re-developed Me(a)nder for New Scottish Artists at The Fleming Gallery, London.

Morgan Cahn, Me(a)nder, Cupar Arts Festival, 2013

To journey is also material for Richard Taylor who presents a small sculpture and a drawing connected by themes expanded upon in a new text read to the audience along with selected photography. The text will be read at 1pm, 2.30pm and 4pm, slightly edited each time after Richard journeys repeatedly to the top of Dundee Law hill and back down to Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge to read again. Richard’s practice confronts the ability text has to record and transform experience, leading to published works and live readings with apparatus. Recent projects include Scree Magazine Presents, The Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh, PerformingNOW, Generator Projects, Dundee and Epigone, Basement Arts Project, Leeds.

Richard Taylor, Hutchinsons Tack at PerformingNOW, Generator Projects, 2014

As with Richard, the reading of language is also a concern of Lada Wilson’s practice. After living in a number of countries, Croatian-born Dutch artist and curator Lada made her home in Scotland. She transforms words from different languages into objets trouvés that lead to participatory events. For shift, Lada invites the audience to take part in a verbal and visual exchange that will create a portrait of time from words and imagination, exploring our understanding of language and the structures surrounding it. Recent works include a series of projects for the Matthew Cabinet Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee from 2013-2014 entitled interAction(s), and Alphabetarij at PerformingNow, Generator Projects, Dundee, 2013.

Lada Wilson, Imperfect, 2014

As curator/facilitator of shift, Katie Reid plays with extending the functional role this often encompasses to make use of what temporarily becomes excess furniture and the overlooked nooks and crannies of Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge. Katie works site responsively often making projects that investigate our judgement of value, these include Camperdown Conversations with Beth Savage, 2013; May Meet in Mutual, Baxter Park Centre, Dundee, 2012, and leading workshops Working through Ideas with Sean Scott, 2014, and Currency of Ideas with Holly Knox Yeoman, 2012.

Katie Reid, Untitled (canvas corner), 2011

Becca Clark’s sculptural pulley systems developed for shift also find themselves somewhere between work and play. A series of small interventions by way of teeny movable sculptures assess the value of input and output, action and reaction. Becca also adds zines; a medium made for the work/art, art/work, art/life, work/life balance. Becca is organiser of the Dundee micro festival, Ickle Film Fest, committee member of Art Label Yuck ‘n Yum, one half of the collective RBBC and a third of the collective Pitch + Strike.

Becca Clark, Untitled, 2012

Site-visit at Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, 2014

shift is open on Sunday, 22 June, 12.30-4.30pm at Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, 44-46 Albert Street, DD4 6QQ, and is supported by the Dundee Visual Artists Awards through Leisure & Culture Dundee City Council with Creative Scotland and Enjoy..! Coffee Lounge, Dundee.

More: Facebook

Scientific fall (exploring tautology and reflection in image making and photography) by Scottish visual artist, Richard Taylor.

Since around 2005 Degrees unedited with http://www.a-n.co.uk has been supporting the critical context of degree show season through a platform for review as well as one of the first blogging communities to hit the web, designed especially for the student voice. We have students stretching their virtual thoughts from all over the UK and beyond so, talking of diversification… there’s voices from universities and colleges in London, Wales, Devon, the midlands reaching up to Northern England into Scotland.

This group on Central Station is great, it’s pulling in so much more interest! Degrees unedited (i.e.Richard Taylor) is happy therefore and would like to say thank you to the drive of Central Station!!!

If any more of you are visiting degree shows make sure you get on Twitter and either use #degreeshows hash tag or #degreeshow hash tag to recommend your pick of student work. a-n Magazine is pulling from your interest to get a student image on the cover or featured in the summer issue…

“We have a secret hidden group on Facebook where we exchange ideas but its nothing compared to a good chat over the phone.”

Most of the time Kimbal seems to be away performing in various countries – forever simplifying his acts so he can travel lightly with a recording device (I can usually tell when he’s not in the UK – the dialling tone is different – sounds like he’s engaged most of the time or perhaps somewhere unattainable).

I got to thinking how Kimbal’s work fits in to this strange beast that is ArtEvict. The nature of the spaces that are revealed each month bends towards an ephemeral approach – an ad-hoc deliberation in what is made and performed. Today’s telephone conversation came to a conclusion: Kimbal takes away, tidies up his ideas – he packs himself up to hitch hike to another land where he straps himself to a stranger. Then I come along and make a piece of installation art where I want props and sounds and flashing lights – basically making a mess.

At some point we have to reach equilibrium and perhaps this will happen in the performance itself. Certainly my drawings seem to be acting as modes of communication – they seem to strike ideas within the nomadic man’s mind.

So I also got to thinking of how even in Kimbal’s stationary habitation – a warehouse/studio/flat/bed-living working area in north Hackney – is also a place of ever-changing racing activity. I want to install myself in this and build my ideas next to his self-made MDF bedroom. To this idea I thought of a tent made of paper to match his medium density box.

This image is that which is drawn by another the person on shift before me. It looks like a tent or a pyramid. A hidden space within a hidden space is perhaps a make shift studio constructed upon arrival in London through collaborative exercise and conversational/visual exchange. It can also be a drawing tool or a habitable or moveable studio.

Find out more about Richard Taylor here.

/////

Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

“We’re now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there’s a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass – it’s not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame.”

There’s an age where both Ine and Pie go well together and a new form of energy is created. Right now I am around ten minutes from the border between Scotland and England, heading south east of Dumfries towards the next stop, which is Carlisle. My final destination, after meandering through the hills of Ayrshire down in to the valleys of the Lake District and through to the northern hills of Lancashire, is eventually Manchester.

There was an age when this journey would have been altogether more troublesome and harder to navigate. As the window set to my right dost frame each scene as I occasionally look out, the landscape escaping before my eyes, there’s a hill another hill a town a townhouse a church a paddock a river lake tree forest fence and field. All rolled in to one and relative to us as a travelling hanger of internal sound.

We are not reserved – just quiet

Before all these ‘objects’ of the landscape, the very fabric of a traveller’s horizon would have been North South East and West by way of tree, hill, lake and track – all forayed before each step forward. And none of these tunnels or bridges would ever have existed. Right now I think of the short walk books my father keeps in his trunk at the top of the stairs, behind where the dog used to sleep.

The page says jump (with a smile) It was on a walk through the Peak District that I lost one of these books. He blames me as he entrusted the book in my hands. I was the navigator following the instructions set before me with each turning page.

“Walk three miles east of the pink tree set before you and come to a fence two metres in height. From this fence head down a track through a stile and over a dry stonewall. From here see the tip of a reservoir to your left. Follow its line around North West arriving at a dam. Scale the dam reaching midway between water and stone. Jump off in to the water and swim to the shore on the Eastern side. Once there head north to a second stile…”

And so on. I do this with a smile of course, as I’d rather forget how I left the book, having survived its rigorous instructions, on the top of the car – we set off, the gravel underneath us crunching and expanding space beneath our tyres, the book flew off the roof caught by the Winter’s afternoon sky.

And we are now in England and the accent is altogether different. Carlisle is as grey as Glasgow’s West End on a sunny day and from here the world seems to be not so much as awake as the humdrum of the engine I sit behind. I am facing north west now and there’s not a stile in sight, just more bridges and tunnels that disguise our guise as a linear traveling collective machine.

/////

Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

STARTING IN LONDON WITH A COMPASS & A DIRECTION EAST (location black ball)

“…what started off as fast has now become somewhat slow. I think its all the train journeys taking their affect. I have another train journey ahead of me. Glasgow Central direct to Kings Cross or is it Euston: either or I then have to find the dam place when I get there and if its not next to a tube stop then I’m fucked. I do not understand London unless its close in design to the very well designed graphic that maps out the underground system. Buses. They scare the hell out of me. So I will just walk everywhere – like a true nomad. This will take some time but after 6 hours on the train my legs will want to be stretched.

The dam place. The place the thing will happen where we will exchange travel and perform – it will transgress with a non-melodic improvisation of what we made so much effort to melodify. I like that word. MELODIFY.”

There was a location – the location was Tesco “the only large Tesco (black ball) in that area that’s not Tesco Express” – so he was definitely in the right area. I popped my head out the window on the top floor seeing his fluffy blond hair. He had his bike, his lower legs showing to avoid getting the bottom end of his traveller’s jeans stuck in the pedals. Its how he gets around the capital – on his bike. By the time I was at the bottom of the steps he was locking up his two wheels and shouting fish and chips. I took some time figuring out how to release myself from the gates and then we were off – but this time on foot. We were as quick as our minds and quickened by the threat of wet rain towards a disused fountain basin for shelter. I had eaten. I watched him devour his takeaway as we chatted about the day. Its as if we needed to get the niceties out of the way before talking serious business. This took a while. Talking face to face is less immediate than the email conversation we were used to. A lot of crap was in the exchange – unnecessary chat that was essential to get us where we needed to be.

“Last week – it was around about this time last week that we were in London together. I had pad-tai he had fish and chips.

Subtleties – this is what we need – the subtle ties that tie together a full-blown but conceptually “subtle” work informed by a dialogue that is happening now. This dialogue almost happened in a trendy bar in Hackney – where this tale doth lay itself. We’re a bunch of potential collaborators talking shop over a couple of sharky-beers served by an exceptionally fierce French women donning a strapping fringe as high as the confidence she so exuded.

We were chatting about life drawing and how he wanted to use me as a model. This I was not ever so sure about. One thing I was adamant about though was my plan to stay in his flat / studio for five days running up to the performance. Something will happen there – something of dialogue and of substance – sustenance. Draw draw draw draw draw is sustenance as much as food. And light.”

We got where we needed to be after a short cut through a foreboding park that might have been called London Fields. It was a little south I think – towards Bethnal Green – but really I was just following him whilst leading the conversation.

The other side of the park was littered with trendies being sceney: chatting and drinking and spilling out on to the street. We got ourselves to a bar: they were so busy the staff had to down several shots before serving us – this took a while. But it did not matter too much I was entertained by such verbal-farts as “cheers. Here’s to massive cock and sex every day” and “WHAT DO YOU WANT – A GLASS OF WATER?”

Finally we were served and decided there was not much point in talking too much about the work. Our time at the bar with cash in our hands made me realise it’s better to wait and to then do – not pre-empt for this might confuse.

A pity Kimabl didn’t pre-empt the rain though. By the time I got back to the flat and up the stairs it starting pissing it down and he got wet for sure – no fluffy hair just drab dank locks instead. Here’s to a bottle of wine next time pal.

/////

Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

What gives perspective is the horizon – but what happens when it’s hidden?

Elements of travel are to become something of self-made residencies: marked periods in time – weeks or weeks and a half away – distancing myself from habit allowing space for concentration. The studio is hidden to me – places I have never been but essential in their non-familiarity.

“We have some funny bits going on today – sticks and blindfolds and ink and paper (lots of paper) and cameras and structures plus string, poles and rope and plastic ties. The additional material is light – this comes from luminescent balls, wind-up torches and the flash of a remote camera (built in to the structure).”

“…Kimbal introduced the site to us – he was wearing his ever-fashionable bright red raincoat: I shall be taking my red, green, black and white golfing umbrella. They’ll come with waterproofs too the others who attended and are yet to attend…”

I hope in the mean time that we’ll find enough time to get things done and to fit everything in. His plans seem to be a lot more observational than mine – he wants to emanate touch in order to make drawings and I seem to be entirely involved with conceptual scenarios – props – designs – stages and environments created with the slip of a pencil. There is a difference in what can be intimacy in drawings and then also something wide, something altogether collected from thought that’s not physical but more controlling.

His ideas are simpler and perhaps more affective. Mine seem to be more planned, over complicated and altogether construed with not having seen the place with my own eye’s. The part about seeing the space and Kimbal having shown it me – this was entirely made up manufactured. It still remains fictional and the observation made about him wearing a red cloak (coat/waterproof) was taken from another photograph I have seen of him. The quote is something fantastical as is the opening paragraph – fantastically categorical like the drawings might always be.

I wonder if this incoherence will embed itself in the work – just half an hour we have I wonder how much time there will be afterwards and before to pack up, back up and leave and set up and go. I am trying desperately not to pre-empt anything but my train tickets are on the lip of my bedroom mirror marked “mid May travel” – something that soon will be replaced with “early/mid June travel” – and then perhaps “late/mid (south west) July travel”.

Find out more about Richard Taylor here.

/////

Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.

ArtEvict. My friend Kimbal Bumstead has asked me to re-stage a performance we did together in 2008 – this time in a wearhouse in East London. In fact these ArtEvict guys, they seem to take on the semblance of organising a rave – the location always follows the notion of perfomance, it remains hidden until a mail out is sent – and there is never a singular location – every month it changes. The rave may be something to do with ‘cultural’ tenancies in wherehouses and other spaces – such tenancies that at times meet disagreement: ArtEvict follows along the same lines – it moves from one space to the next relying on the ephemeral approach that performance art installs in an artists work. (More information of ArtEvict – www.artevict.com/abou-us.php)

There has been multiple projects between Kimbal and myself, notably a curated site-specific exhibition in an old church and bell tower near Leeds Central Station. This was as the clocks changed for Daylight Saving (the exhibition took this name as a timely device for conceptual applicability). We facilitated each other as the works were installed and thus we were inbuilt in to one another’s work as much as the space itself. My hidden space came from the relationship between public display (the exhibiting of a work) and the work-done behind the scenes. I was commuting from Glasgow every month or two in the 7 months prior to the opening – each time I re-visited the site and re-allocated my installation. The ideas grew as I began to realise how the (hidden)space could be used as a studio. With a set of keys and a torch I explored the bell tower and set up shop in the top most compartment just below the time keeping device. I was hidden from view but from there I could look down upon the world (or the city centre of Leeds anyhow). (More information on DAYLIGHTSAVING – rich-taylor.co.uk/archive/daylight-saving)

This Blog will follow the cohesive approach to facilitation and performance in the build up to a collaborative work between  Kimbal Quist Bumstead and myself (Richard Taylor) for the May 2010 installment of ArtEvict.

Read more posts by Richard Taylor here.

/////

Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.