HOUSE 2015 ARTIST BRIEF HOUSE Is Brighton & Hove’S Annual Visual Arts Event Concerned with the Commissioning of New Work in Partnership with Brighton Festival

HOUSE 2015 ARTIST BRIEF HOUSE is Brighton & Hove’s annual visual arts event concerned with the commissioning of new work in partnership with Brighton Festival. HOUSE utilises domestic and unusual spaces and acts as coordinator of visual arts for Brighton Festival.

HOUSE 2015 invites outline proposals from artists based in the South East region, including London, for a series of commissions to be realised in May 2015.

The brief is open to works in any medium, to be located across the city and making a connection with the location (locations are given, but with an added option to select a city site, speciﬁc to the project). Proposals are sought which make a point of connection with a major new work by Nathan Coley, Invited Artist for HOUSE 2015. The theme of Edge & Shift provides a catalyst to explore political shifts and attitudes and more universal ideas around the monumental and the absent, portraiture and representation, space and occupation.

There is a commissioning budget to allow the creation of up to three projects, within a recommended maximum £4,000 per commission, to include artist fee, materials, labour, expenses, installation and technical costs.

HOUSE 2015

Supported by:

HOUSE 2015 Partners

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Context 3 Project Management and Site Details 4 Budget, Commissioning Terms & Timescales 5 Selection Process 6 Submission Requirements

1 Introduction HOUSE is a dynamic visual arts event, which was established in Brighton in 2009 to invite a wider audience to engage, understand and enjoy contemporary visual arts in Brighton and Hove during Brighton Festival, and offer exceptional commissioning opportunities for a major national artist as well as a number of critically engaged, regional artists.

HOUSE curates an annual programme of new site-speciﬁc commissions in unusual, largely non-gallery settings across the city, including domestic spaces and the public realm, and serves as a unique visual arts ‘offer’ within the city. Each year, an internationally renowned artist is co-commissioned with HOUSE partner Brighton Festival to create a new work. They are invited to provide a thematic context for HOUSE and support the creation of a series of selected commissions from artists based in South East England who are actively exploring and pushing new boundaries within their practice.

A supporting programme of artists’ talks, programmed ﬁlm and community workshops are delivered to provide a contextual and critical backdrop for the commissions.

HOUSE works closely in partnership with the city’s key cultural providers, both in the delivery and presentation of the event. In addition to its main commissioning partnership with Brighton Festival, local arts organisations Lighthouse and Photoworks act as commissioning partners, contributing across the presentation and public programmes.

HOUSE is curated by Celia Davies, Director, Photoworks.

In 2014, HOUSE invited Yinka Shonibare MBE to make a signiﬁcant new work: The British Library. Through an open-call, four further commissions were selected from artists based in the region: Leah Gordon, Tobias Revell, Ester Svensson & Rosanna Martin and Phillip Hall-Patch.

For further information visit: www.housefestival.org

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 2 2 Context Each year HOUSE has an overarching theme inspired by the ideas found in the work of its invited artist. For 2015, HOUSE and its core commissioning partner, Brighton Festival, have invited Nathan Coley to create a new sculptural work to be sited in the Regency Town House in Brunswick Square, Hove.

For Coley buildings are empty vessels given signiﬁcance through their social history. Coley’s new sculptural work takes as its point of departure a landmark English seaside building on the day it was bombed. Marking a moment in international history, the event has come to be symbolic of the greater political shifts and attitudes that emerged as a result. The work is not approached in the speciﬁcs of the event itself, but more as a locater with which to explore more universal ideas of unrest, the monumental and absence, edge and shift, portraiture and representation, space and occupation in post modern society.

Coley is interested in how we relate to public space and architecture and what we believe. He often uses architecture as a readymade, as a means to take from and replace in the world. His work is sensitive to its context and concerned with the process of historic interpretation and the aftermath of politically charged situations: politicization of place, the politics of space, belief systems.

For HOUSE 2015 we are asking artists to make a point of connection with the theme explored in Coley’s new commission. Edge & Shift in this context may be understood in relation to politics and change not only in its subject but also in its physicality, in sculptural terms. Combined, the duality of the theme conceptually explores wider understandings of absence and loss, portraiture and representation, space and occupation.

Within this new work Coley is making formal sculptural objects with materials that endure, that occupy new spaces, that reference history and architecture and have a powerful materiality in themselves. Within his new work Coley is subtly exploring dynamics between destruction and renovation, acts of terror versus love, dissention and cohesion, history moving backwards in order to move forwards.

HOUSE actively encourages proposals from artists working in different media and/or across a range of media . In the co-commission with HOUSE/ Photoworks there is an opportunity to support work incorporating lens based media.

Nathan Coley Nathan Coley was born in 1967 in Glasgow and studied at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2007 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. His work is represented in many international public and private collections. He currently lives and works in Glasgow.

Nathan Coley's work explores discrepancies existing within the built world of architecture and the city as actually experienced. He raises this issue by dismantling or reconstructing situations, buildings and areas in different ways. He is interested in the idea of “public” space, and his practice explores the ways in which architecture becomes invested—and reinvested—with meaning. Across a range of media Coley investigates what the built environment reveals about the people it surrounds and how the social and individual response to it is in turn culturally conditioned. Often using the readymade as a means to take from and re-place in the world, Coley addresses the ritual forms we use to articulate our beliefs—from hand-held placards and erected signs to religious sanctuaries. Whether highlighting in illuminated letters the testimony of a New Yorker or recalling the World Trade Center attacks, or the Lockerbie Trial, his work frequently turns the speciﬁc into the

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 3 universal, thereby testing its function as a form of social representation. Importantly, a recurring interest for Coley is the ‘dust’ created after major politically linked events.

Work such as There Will Be No Miracles Here (2006) and Lamp of Sacriﬁce (2004), a scale model of all the religious buildings in the city of Edinburgh, focus on a detail, word, or story as a missing link, around which the work is developed.

“It’s to do with the whole idea of public man and private man, how we as users of the built environment are controlled or liberated by the space that’s made. I’m more interested in the space between buildings than the buildings themselves. That’s not neutral space.”

Nathan Coley: A Place Beyond Belief 2012

Nathan Coley: Unnamed (Vancouver) 2012

3 Project Management/Site details Through a process of open-call submission and interview, the regional artists projects will be selected by the Commissioning Panel comprising:

G Nathan Coley, Invited Artist G Judy Stevens and Chris Lord HOUSE Directors G Celia Davies Curatorial Advisor HOUSE 2015 and Director at Photoworks G Laura Ducceschi Creative Producer Brighton Dome and Festival

Possible locations include: G The Regency Town House Basement G Ditchling Museum + Art Gallery G Wood-yard Clifton Street G Preston Manor

Artists are also invited to suggest their own out-door site speciﬁc location, where applicable. In some cases, there may be potential for artists to work with the HOUSE team to locate suitable spaces once projects are selected.

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 5 The Regency Town House Basement The Regency Town House Basement Annexe at No.10 is a vast space laid out for the needs of the working environment and incorporates some spartan living accommodation for the servants. No.10 is extraordinary, as surprisingly little has been changed since it was built. The original layout is intact and many features have remained undisturbed, including the wine cellar; the two walk-in meat safes used for hanging the meat and game; the coal and beer cellars and even many of the original wooden built-in storage cupboards. http://rth.org.uk/local-history/brunswick-town/tour-of-house/servant-quarters

David Batchelor: White Parapillar, 2006 (left), Dog Day (Nº8), 2010 (right). RTH Housekeeper’s room, HOUSE 2012.

Irene Mensah and Jane Fox: Mutter Matter. RTH Kitchen, HOUSE 2011.

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 6 Wood-yard Clifton Street The currently disused Victorian wood-yard building is believed to have started life as a milking parlour when the area around what is now Brighton station was still countryside. In 1816, when Clifton Street was developed, the building was incorporated into the terrace and became a workshop producing doors and windows for the houses being constructed. It is also believed to have been used at some point as a community wash-room. The building is now empty, awaiting restoration as a home. It’s doubled-doored, cobbled entrance, opening off the residential street, resembles a Dickensian ﬁlm set.

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 7 Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft In 1985, when they were 78 and 76 years old respectively, Joanna and Hilary Bourne bought the former school in the village of Ditchling and opened Ditchling Museum. They sold their houses to save the village school site from being bought by developers. They grew up in Ditchling and knew many of the artists who lived there – they were especially close to the calligrapher Edward Johnston. Joanna was a writer and Hilary was a weaver, whose commissions included Charlton Heston’s costume in Ben-Hur and fabric for the Royal Festival Hall.

The museum holds an internationally important collection of work by the artists and craftspeople who were drawn to the village, including the sculptor, wood engraver, type- designer and letter-cutter Eric Gill, the calligrapher Edward Johnston (responsible for the famous Johnston typeface used for London Underground), the painter David Jones, the printer Hilary Pepler and the weaver Ethel Mairet. http://www.ditchlingmuseumartcraft.org.uk/

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 8 Preston Manor Listed in the Doomsday book of 1086, Preston Manor had by 1800, became the hub of a vast estate incorporating much of what is now Brighton and Hove. In 1932, the Stanford family, who had owned the Manor since the Regency period, bequeathed the estate to Brighton Council, as there was no male heir to inherit it.

The house has a long history of ghostly phenomena and supernatural experiences. The family were particularly troubled by sightings of the lady in white, while a lady in grey apparently ascended and descended the main staircase disappearing into nowhere. Several guests staying in the South-West bedroom apparently reported seeing disembodied hands on the bedposts, and hearing ‘weird and uncanny noises… issuing from the big dress cupboard’ http://www.brighton-hove-rpml.org.uk/Museums/prestonmanor/Pages/home.aspx

Ingrid Plum: Thicker Than Blood. Unravelling the Manor House, HOUSE 2010.

Caitlin Heffernan:Cape. Unravelling the Manor House, HOUSE 2010.

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 9 4 Budget, Commissioning Terms & Timescales An approximate sum of £4,000 (VAT inclusive) is available for each commission, to include artist fee, materials, labour, expenses and installation. Up to a maximum of three projects may be commissioned, whereby the total budget would be divided across all commissions. However, fewer projects may be funded according to proposals received and selected.

Payments will be agreed with the artists and staged to reﬂect work undertaken, to include an upfront payment on contractual agreement, and ﬁnal completion payment on successful delivery of all the agreed outputs.

The timescale for delivery of the commissions is approximately three months to include installation. The artist appointments are scheduled for early February 2015 and the installation must be in place by end April 2015. The Festival opens on 2nd May and runs through to 24th May 2015.

Artists will be requested to give an artist’s talk or workshop during the Festival in May as part of the HOUSE public events programme (as part of the artist fee).

In addition, the artist is requested to provide, or permit usage of an image of the commissioned work to be reproduced as a limited edition print (20% of proﬁts being returned to the artist) on a variety of merchandising items and for publicity purposes.

As commissioners of (the work) HOUSE will receive 25% retention fee on sale of the work and each edition thereafter worldwide, both during the festival and for a ﬁve-year period after the festival ends. The retention fee is understood to be the total sale price less the productions costs to make the work.

Copyright and ownership of the work produced for the commission remains at all times with the Artist. The Artist will grant HOUSE permission to reproduce any imagery created during the commission by photography, video, audio, digital or any media for publicity of promotional purposes connected with the commission.

All artists will be expected hold their own Public Liability Insurance.

Commission Timeline 23 January Deadline for artist outline proposals 2 February Artist presentations / interviews Week of 2 February Artists appointed and contracts agreed February (mid) Artist meetings / site visits x 2 27 February Artist design proposal fully developed and site conﬁrmed From early March Site agreements and production commences Late April Installation of works (2 week window) 2 May HOUSE 2015 opens

© House Festival Limited Company registered number: 07891030 Charity registered number: 1147339 10 5 Selection Process Assessment of submissions will be set against the following criteria: G Quality of creative response to Artist Brief in context of HOUSE 2015 theme G Project idea appropriately scaled to available resources G Quality of previous work G Evidence of/demonstration of ability to work to deadline and budget G Short listed artists will be invited to present their proposals at interview to the Commissioning Panel. G The successful artists will be selected via their response to the Artist Brief and presentation interview.

6 Submission Requirements The submission deadline for outline proposals is: Friday 23 January 2015

Interviews for short listed artists: Monday 2 February 2015 Application forms can be downloaded from www.housefestival.org Please adhere to the strict word count They should be submitted by email to [email protected] no later than 6pm, Friday 23 January 2015 Artists will be notiﬁed of the safe receipt of their submission.

The Application Form includes:

1 Statement of why you are interested in the commission opportunity (max 100 words) 2 Your commission proposal, outlining your initial concept and describing ways the artwork will meet the overall aims of the commission brief and relates to your artistic practice (max 300 words) 3 Proposed site if known (max 25 words) 4 Outline Budget working within an approximate £4k budget

Additional attachments may include: G 1 page CV G Up to 3 relevant examples of your work G 1 page sketch/ image to illustrate your proposal concept (optional)