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 you are talking about collaboration and what that means to you…
Our First writer and artist is
Thea Luckcock
Instagram: @bumblenups
cargocollective/thealuckcock
Article/Essay Title
Me & Patrick
COLLABORATIONS
A few weeks ago I saw a call-out for two artists to collaborate. Easy enough. The only twist was that they had to have a twenty-year age gap. Naturally, the first person that came to mind was my friend Patrick – a 76-year-old retired solicitor-turned-artist. We had met at Islington mill’s art academy program in Salford a few years prior and found ourselves at times the only one in the studio space. Our strange humour, penchant for performance, and willingness to try new things brought us together. I have a distant memory of a video. groaning noises accompanying the twisted clay forms that littered the table from the plaster workshop he had given the previous week. Figures made from old tights and bent metal wire covered in plaster. The noises he was making in the video were disturbing. I tell him to look into Butoh performance, a Japanese dance of the grotesque. He is experimenting with his phone a lot. It’s this phone that keeps us going when the academy ends, I go to Vietnam where my brother’s based and I end up living there for a couple of years. This mainly consists of looking after kids, going to cafes, and half-abandoning my art practice. During that time Patrick participates in a group of artists over 50, has a short time in the hospital but keeps using his phone to film funny little videos. When I came back and got in touch about the collaborative residency, we have several video calls and chat over Instagram for a couple of days, furiously snowballing ideas for the application. It’s interesting discovering more about each other in a tight space of time. I enjoy being able to talk to someone on my wavelength again. We apply, we get shortlisted… then, unfortunately, don’t get in. But the conversations we’d had planted seeds in our heads that were already growing. The next time we meet, we are looking around Islington mill, working out what to do as a performance together for one of their open days (nights). We share some wine that evening and he treats me to some tapas, I feel really happy. Besides understanding that art is never made in a vacuum, I’ve come to understand that the bare bones of making an artistic relationship work usually just come down to sharing some food and drink together in a place where words can be spoken freely.
Thea Luckcock
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ARTIST and Writer
Paige Archer
Website - paigearcherart.com
Advertisment Zine
Abstract
This zine was a collaboration with a BA photography student. We had never met before, it was very spontaneous. We both were interested in the same topic being advertisements. It was so refreshing to see someone have a different approach/medium to my own interests.
Full article/essay
Advertisement Zine This zine was completely spontaneous and was a shared collaboration with a BA photography student, Jack Nicholas. We both found a common interest in the realm of advertising and specifically visuals within advertising. It was very interesting to see a different interpretation and perspective of my own interests within my fine art practice. It has definitely opened my eyes up to the world of zines and potentially carry this throughout my practice in the future.
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Artist name
Sheree Murphy
Instagram account
Article/Essay Title
Hollywood Asylum
Abstract
A collaboration can exist in many forms not just in the present or physical sense, which is where my story begins.
Hollywood Asylum, Film Stills Series is inspired by a true story, told by a witness of a crime of passion. A murder that took place in a hotel in 1958. There are 4 people involved, the bar manager, the murderer, the female, and the witness.
Hollywood Asylum, Film Stills Series is inspired by a true story, told by a witness of a crime of passion. A murder that took place in a hotel in 1958. There are 4 people involved, the bar manager, the murderer, the female and the witness. What followed this crime was the collision of various institutions that are in place to reform, shape our thoughts, ideas and behaviours for the betterment of society, but this is not always the case. All of us at some point in our lives will cross the threshold of an institution either through choice, necessity or by demand.
The photographic film stills represent the fine line between each institution and the individuals enrolled, registered, signed up, admitted or enforced there. Being a soldier, prisoner, a hollywood star and a patient. And its impact upon our behaviours, decision making, identity and ability to contribute to society. In the 1930s and 40’s Hollywood was seen as the Golden Age of film stars and glamour. But the darker side to the industry has slowly come to light. As a child star Judy Garland talks about how the film studios demanded she’d take “pep pills” to suppress her appetite and keep up her energy. Then, at the end of each shooting day, the film studios would supply the child stars with sleeping tablets.
The connections of drug use can be seen in the military who used ‘Blue 88’ pills for soldiers in the Second World War to calm and induce sleep who experienced battle fatigue. To the prison service who according to a report, ‘Coming clean, combating drug use in prisons’ by Max Chambers, his research showed that £100m drugs are smuggled into prisons every year. It is suggested that for someone to become institutionalised, they gradually become less able to think and act independently, because of having lived for a long time under the rules of an institution.
To conclude this is a body of work that has only just started, it is the seed to exploring the grip, and hold of society’s ever changing legacy of the impact of institutions upon our lives and souls.
Written by Sheree Murphy 2021
https://thisisdefinatelynot.art/
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Artist, Beth Barlow
Instagram account
Article/Essay Title
Knit A Year
Abstract
One miserable lonely New Years’ eve I decided to begin to knit my moods. Each day I would knit 10 stitches in a colour that suited my mood. It was useful and I thought others might find value in the process too so I put out an invite for others to join me. Several years later people from across the world joined me through a community website and we staged a series of exhibitions of our combined strands. Attached to each strand are labels that tell the story of the contributor’s year. Some strands came in small jiffy bags and tell of a start that was curtailed others came in several boxes. One tells of a ladi’s battle and triumph over cancer, snarled bits giving way to smooth optimistically coloured yarn another of a knitted stash given back after its elderly owner decided not to die. There were so many stitches and so many stories. Combined enterprise which brought us together as friends and support. Something so simple became something wonderfully rich and complex.
A tiny glimpse at the project is archived here
