Welcome to issue 31 that tackles the theme of collaborations.
Is an art collaboration a single art piece or a project completed by multiple artists, all contributing to the same art piece? Or is it, multiple pieces by multiple people brought together by one person? Can curation be classed as a collaboration? Can we call it a collaboration if it's working with nature or animals? These are the questions we asked you to answer. Collaboration is a great way to shake up your art practice. If you are in a creative black hole, find yourself procrastinating in your lonely studio, or have writer's block then collaboration might be just what you need.
Although not everyone is positive about collaborating with others in the example of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, many critics didn't like them working together, even though it helped each artist in their individual practices. While Dada is a perfect example of collaboration that worked well, with a mix of performance, art, and spoken word. Dadaists believed that the value of art lay not in the work produced but in the act of making and collaborating with others to create new visions of the world.
Here is how you tackled the subject and showed how you have collaborated.
Artist: Stafford/Hauser
Instagram: @staffja2
Description: This collaboration is between me, in New York, and Hauser in Basel, Switzerland. I sent Hauser jpegs of photos of paintings of mine that she chose to use. She printed those, cut them up, placed the pieces outside in Basel, and photographed the result
“SH/JS 29” - A piece of my painting, Natural History 14, outside in Basel, near the Rhine..
Artist: Lucy Ratcliff and Milly Aburrow
Instagram:
Milly Aburrow - @portfolio.milly
Lucy Ratcliff - @lou.ce
Description: Lucy and myself decided to collaborate due to both of our garments/sculptures presenting a sweet taste of confectionery. The visuals portray Lucy Ratcliff's fashion collection 'Sweet Tooth' combined with two of my cake sculptures. This amalgamation of pink and the greenery within the photoshoot, shot by Teo Panov (@panovteo) and featuring Romy Valentine (@blowromy) produced an 'Alice in Wonderland' fairytale of which we are both very proud of. We are endlessly grateful to everyone involved.
Artist: Pink and grAy (Sylvia Causer and Andrea Freeman)
Instagram: @Sylviaandandrea
Artist statement: We Pink and grAy (Sylvia Causer and Andrea Freeman) are a Live Art/Performance Art Duo based in the North of England.We met whilst studying for M.A. Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and discovered that we hold shared ideas and concerns. We have worked together professionally since 2014, soon producing a Manifesto which informs all of our work. We describe ourselves as two mature women doing daft things, seeking to explore deep social issues often through humour.
We perform, make films, take still photographs, exhibit, undertake residencies to develop new work and generally, have fun. We have performed at the Baltic in Gateshead, the Tetley in Leeds, Manchester Art Gallery, Liverpool Library and numerous sites in Sheffield including Sheffield Cathedral, DINA venue, Exchange Place Studios and the Millennium Gallery. We have performed at several sites for Bradford Summer Unlocked 2021, and shown a new film at the Saltaire Arts Trail 2022.
Artist: Pete Clarke, Liverpool and Georg Gartz, Cologne
Instagram: @petestudio4
@gegacologne
Description: “The Rheingrafenstein”
Collaborative Paintings -acrylic on canvas each 100 x 100 cm
Pete Clarke, Liverpool and Georg Gartz, Cologne have been collaborating on projects since 1998, making paintings, drawings and printmaking together in their European Studios and in Exhibitions and Residences in the UK and Germany for example 'Turner's Travels' Ebernberg and 'Neuland' Recklinghausen and Liverpool European City of Culture. Their project attempts to challenge questions of authorship and individuality in a European Context.
Artist: stu sontier (acquisitive-eye) + a.i.gardening
Instagram: @a.i.gardening // @stusontierphoto
Artist statement: “Incendie” is a collaboration between a.i.gardening and stu sontier (acquisitive-eye). The artists met online through the hicetnunc cleanNFT platform and are engaged in a series of wide-ranging conversations on topics ranging from photography and art to entropy, particle physics, aging and ethics. All revolve around the imperative themes of climate grief, waste-culture and sustainable ways of living.
The artists live on opposite sides of the planet and had been constrained to virtual collaboration. An opportunity for in-person meeting occurred in 2022, where the ability to be hands-on with each other's physical work led to unexpected synergy of thought and motion. Over the space of two evenings, with the intensity of proximity, 4 collaborative works ensued, centred around the core idea of destruction and rebuilding, with several originals being physically disassembled and reconstructed anew using tape, glue and other salvaged materials. The trust in each other's process and a letting go of attachment to a finished idea all meant that, as well as the completed work, ideas generated within the collaboration could be taken away to inform future individual work.
Artist: RhysReeceRees
Instagram: @mckenny.art
Title: Ask ...The Road
Polling booth and ballot box set up in front garden in Roath, Cardiff as part of Made in Roath arts festival.
Artist statement: Ask ... is a collaborative socially engaged project developed by artists Debbie Rees and Julian McKenny. The piece asks participants to select the basic human need they feel the greatest lack of in their lives, based on the nine fundamental human needs envisioned by eco-economist Manfred Max Neef. Taking the form of a polling booth it has appeared in several locations including a front garden in Cardiff (Ask ...The Road) and a Working Men's Club in Port Talbot (Ask ...The Club). The attached graph shows the results of four locations with Affection being the greatest lack in a rural area and Understanding and Creation being the lack most felt in urban areas. More on this project as well as other collaborative works can be see at www.vegetableagenda.co.uk
Artist: Richard Kitchen & Dylan Thompson @navigatorsart
Instagram: @richardkitchenart
Title: Lalalala 3, - This derives from vocal sounds echoing in a passageway.
Artist statement: This work resulted from recording sounds in spaces for a community research project called “StreetLifeYork”. The aim was to produce a sound portrait of the particular street being researched. Composer Dylan Thompson and I used spectrograms to produce some sound art but then took it a stage further by manipulating the images into new forms. We intend to work further on these by exploring how to turn the new images back into new and expanded sounds and develop an extended composition. This work is a collaboration not only between the artists but also between them, the project researchers, and the urban environment itself.
Artist: Alexandra Sivov, Clare Davidson and Jyoti Bharwani
Instagram: @alexandrasivov9603
@claredavidsonart
@paintspaces_gallery
Title: On My Way To You
DESCRIPTION
Each individual artist created its own layer using paint, collage and print. Then we posted the precious work to the next artist until all the layers have been applied and the result surprising.
Artist statement
Jyoti Bharwani, Alex Sivov and Clare Davidson are three artists who work across different media: painting, printing and collage. The three women met during their MA (fine art) at City and Guilds of London Art School, and have since been working together on a collaborative project, To Layer Upon Layer, supported by PaintSpaces Gallery, London.
In this series of works, 3 female artists build up joint images by placing a layer or marks on top of another artist's work. Each piece has been worked on by each artist in succession and in the process they have created new works, that merge different artistic practices and languages. The process has led to surprises and encouraged a playful approach whilst making. Not being able to control the final output has by necessity forced them to let go, a vital element of the creative process.
Artist: Mari Rose Pritchard & Julie Upmeyer
Instagram:
@marirosepritchard
@julieupmeyer
Title: Void Fraction - lives and works in
DESCRIPTION
Artists in close conversation with limestone dust, while feeling the weight of 300 million years
Artist statement: On their very first visit to a limestone quarry, two artists encountered a by-product of the quarrying process: limestone powder an aqueous, semi-solid and almost rock-like state. Poured in a liquid state, it formed an opaque milky pool - piled high, it became towering white mountains. They were transfixed by its other-worldliness and embarked on an ongoing, four-way conversation between the artists, the material and space (weather that be the gallery, the studio or the quarry landscape itself).
Artist: Lynne Chapman
Instagram: @lynnepencil
Artist statement: I am a textile artist, primarily creating 3-dimensional forms at present. Since 2018 I have been incorporating waste plastics into much of my work, using it to express my frustrations about society’s inappropriate use of plastic.
‘Yes, it’s Plastic, But…’ is a recent collaboration with linguists at the University of Sheffield, researching issues around plastic reuse.
By analysing the way in which we talk about plastic, researchers discovered that a word we use most frequently is ‘but’. This is because so many of us have conflicted feelings about plastic’s place in modern society and our powers to prevent it from destroying our environment.
I hand-embroidered 50 sentences from the research which included the word ‘but’ onto translucent 'ribbons' (made from plasticised scrim, plastic net and voile), then stitched these into the form of two linked headdresses. One structure uses phrases taken from conversations between members of the general public, the other is language used by manufacturers, retailers and recyclers. The whirling, twisting nature of the work reflects the complexity of the issues and their interconnectivity, and aims to convey our feelings of confusion and frustration. The conversations flow between the headdresses because we are intrinsically linked – industry cannot move forward without our support and we require a shift in manufacturing and retail before we can make real changes.
The headdresses are designed to be suspended on a pulley, which can be lowered into the heads of the viewer. They are accompanied by a soundscape, woven from all the embroidered phrases, spoken by different voices.
Artist: Tina Salvidge and Emma McAndrew D'Souza
Title: Time Wasters
DESCRIPTION
Still from a short video 'Time Wasters' 2 minutes, 17 seconds
Instagram: @eeeeeemmamd // @salvidgetina4
Artist statement: We have been sharing an investigation of ancient and recent archaeology, probing the value and display of “things”. We draw connections between buried crockery and forgotten phones, mining the earth ourselves to make with foraged clay. From different generations and living on different sides of the country, technology both connects and divides us.
