Trellis artists information

Updated 21th November 2018

Contents Alison Turnbull ...... 1 Amanda Lwin...... 2 Anne Brodie ...... 3 David Rickard ...... 4 Dominic Dispirito...... 5 Elizabeth Murton ...... 5 Erika Tan ...... 7 Helena Hunter ...... 8 John Walter ...... 8 Julie Myers ...... 9 Lilah Fowler ...... 11 Lucy Harrison ...... 12 Melanie Manchot ...... 13 Neville Gabie ...... 14 Nye Thompson ...... 15 Victoria Burgher ...... 16

Alison Turnbull https://www.alison-turnbull.com/

To make her paintings, Turnbull translates printed maps, plans, diagrams, charts, into abstract compositions. These ‘readymade’ drawings might be star charts, architectural plans, or classificatory schemata used in the botanical , for example. Sometimes paintings are also made using the more universal form of the grid, or from mathematical sequences. These found sources, then, are already ‘abstractions’ – of natural phenomena, of space, or of buildings – and they often carry with them precise conceptual connotations. But while the found or ‘readymade’ graphic structure provides the springboard, as the picture develops and gains an independent aesthetic logic of its own, liberties can be taken with the source material, as the found and emergent pictorial systems bend towards each other.

Ed Krcma Cloud Diagram 2016

My most recent paintings have their origin in a composite astronomical image made using the Hubble Space Telescope, known as eXtreme Deep Field. For me, this found image has a strong relationship with painting; as a picture of time that is very densely constructed and, with its concentrated object quality, it can almost take on the status of an Old Master painting. Working from 162 Photoshop layers, each designed to mask specific parts of this super-dense image of the , the paintings derive from selected combinations of these layers - and the series continues to spin out in unpredictable ways.

I have, at the same time, been considering butterflies and moths - moving back and forth from the immensity of deep space to the much smaller world of highly coloured and infinitely varied insects.

"There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic".

Vladimir Nabokov writer and lepidopterist

Following on from a programme for BBC Radio 4, my book, PSYCHE Or, the butterfly – an expanded field guide, is published this month by Más Arte Más Acción, Bogotá, in association with Matt’s Gallery, London. It is an observational record, both literal and imaginary, of a butterfly expedition to the Pacific rainforest in Chocó, Colombia.

Sometimes painting isn’t the right vehicle for exploring a particular subject; and books –not books about my work, but books that are works in their own right– have become an important, if occasional, part of my work as an artist.

In recent years, I have also been commissioned to work with architecture in London, Milton Keynes, Glasgow and Carlisle - and am currently working on a project for Peterhouse Park in Cambridge.

Amanda Lwin https://placesandthings.org.uk/

A few thoughts

My practice looks at cities, landscapes and buildings and the way that these can inadvertently reflect our human intentions, memories and fallibilities. I grew up in nearby Beckton, and the riverine industrial landscape of the Lea Valley is deeply familiar. When does a city, which is made of bricks and mortar, transform into nostalgia, mythology or desire?

My initial thought is to use this time to develop my series ‘Capricious Cartography’: mapmaking that is more contingent, mutable and flexible than traditional printed cartography. Taking the form of handwoven nets, they draw on a tradition of mapmaking that is less about empirical measurement and more about understanding where we stand in the world: the map as cosmological diagram. The new Stratford campus is in the Lea Valley but also on the line of Bazalgette’s Northern Outfall Sewer. One thread to explore is the hydrology and geology, both natural and artificial, that run across this part of London.

Another thought is to explore a new iteration of Unreal Estates, a curatorial project, with academics from an economics or housing background. Unreal Estates is about a very particular part of the housing crisis – our idea of housing as an asset, and how this aesthetically affects our imagination of interior space.

Both projects, in their way, are about systems and our place within them. Both explore a sense that the Romantic idea of individual genius is being eclipsed by a different concept of human beings existing interdependently with each other and everything that surrounds us – and how this creates challenges for the way we understand the world.

Bio

Amanda Lwin is a British artist of Burmese descent, whose work charts the interfaces between landscapes, cities, buildings and people. Lwin grew up in Newham, London and graduated Architecture (Cambridge) and MArch (distinction) Urban Design (UCL). Initially she began her practice as a creative producer, engaging with psychogeographic narratives through music festivals and computer games. Since shifting towards contemporary art she has exhibited with commercial and public galleries in the UK and internationally. Her latest commission is a textile installation in Leadenhall Market for Sculpture in the City, a cultural initiative which puts contemporary sculpture into the heart of the City of London.

Her most recent curatorial project, Unreal Estates, commissions artists and writers to collaborate to produce new work relating to homes and domestic interiors in Dalston, Hackney. Presented in an exhibition in a real-life estate agency, as well as online on unreal-estates.org, the Arts Councilsupported project critiques the homogenisation of interior aesthetics, which correlates with a growing idea of as a tradable asset.

She currently lives and works in Hackney.

Anne Brodie www.annebrodie.com

Background

My initial biological and material based background at the RCA (ceramics and glass) has informed a process driven, multi discipline arts practice. At college, I found the process of human interaction with the material more interesting than the object itself and I made a film instead. The criteria for the segregation of departments at college interested me, it was supposed to be easy to work across departments, in reality it was quite difficult.

My practice has evolved from an enquiry into the meeting point of materials towards a deeper inquiry into how boundaries define and separate us, the interface between psychological and physical environments; the balance and fluidity of the relationship and the place of boundary point. In particular, since pivotal artists residencies in the Antarctic and Arctic, I have been looking at the concept of relevant data at our interface from the very edges of extreme physical landscape and self.

'Something really does happen to most people who go into the North. The ''North,'' he explained, is often uncomfortable; there are dangers of strange mannerisms, there is a fear of getting lost; but there are also the challenges of creating, in isolation, a new understanding of things.’ Glen Gould.

The physical expanse of uninterrupted horizon, isolation and stillness removes our own boundaries, re-aligns our sense of self and shifts our perception of identity in the world. Seen as extraneous to scientific research, the effects are difficult to quantify, difficult to share and invisible when we return to our normal urban existence.

Chris Hadfield, the American Astronaut wrote about something similar when orbiting the earth.

“Being in space, you recognise the unanimity of our existence. The commonality." The reason his Space Oddity video was such a phenomenon, Hadfied says, is not that it told us something about space, but that it told us something about ourselves. We need to understand it and make it part of our increased self-awareness."

In the Arctic I found the emptiness and stillness talked about by Glen Gould and Chris Hadfield, only this time, the emptiness of the high Tundra was framed by the silver black pencil line of the Arctic Birch zone. I was living in an area sacred to the indigenous Sami, a with a deep understanding and connection to their environment and ancestors. Environmental scientists monitor the tree biomass inside the sacred area, collecting yearly tables of data. I wondered if I got close enough to the edge of the treeline, what it might already be telling me, if only I knew how to listen to what it was saying in the silence between the gaps of data being gathered already.

Biography

Anne is a visual artist with a cross disciplinary approach to her work, often working collaboratively with scientists and drawn to locational edgelands. After leaving the RCA (M.A Ceramics and Glass), she jointly won the international Bombay Sapphire Prize for design and involving the use of glass, with a short film, 'Roker Breakfast' in 2005.

Anne was awarded the British Antarctic Survey / Arts Council fellowship to Antarctica in 06/07, and has been the recipient of two Wellcome Trust Arts Awards for her projects ‘Exploring the Invisible’, and ‘Dead Mother’ (also jointly funded by the Arts Council in 2014).

Anne’s work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues which include the Scott Polar Museum, V&A Museum, the Royal Society of Antiquaries Burlington House, The of Great Britain, the Maison de La Européean Photographie, Paris, Reindeerland Film festival Iceland. Her most recent solo exhibition was at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London in 2015.

Anne was awarded artist’s residency in 2015 and 2016, by the University of Helsinki and the Finnish Bio Art society, to live and work at Kilpisjärvi Biological Research Station in the SubArctic and was a joint recipient of an Artists International Development award to Sapmi in 2016.

Anne will be showing new work, part of her Patagonia photographic series at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh in Dec 2018, and is currently focusing on her new project as co –founder of of Brink Projects Ltd, a cross discipline design business collaborating with scientists from BAS, UCL, and the Ordinance Survey.

David Rickard http://www.david-rickard.net/

Introduction

My work is concerned with the inherent material of our surrounding environment and the spatial relationships between people, places and architecture. Following a degree in architecture I went on to study art at the Accademia di Brera in Milan and Central Saint Martins in London.

Collaboration is an important part of my practice with projects often involving collaboration during both conception and realisation. The resulting works take form in a diverse range of media including; installation, performance, sculpture, film and .

Through contextual, process-based experiments I’m interested in expanding the viewer’s perception of their surrounding environment; be that the volume of air we breathe each day, the turning of the earth, or the relative global positions we occupy. Essentially, I’m trying to understand how have we have arrived at our current perception of the physical world and how far is our perception from what we call reality.

Areas of interest

Some key words / themes in relation to the UCL Trellis project include:

- Gravity

- Our understanding and perception of time (including Theory)

- Global connections/collaborations

- Material science

- Reuse and materials

Dominic Dispirito http://www.annkakultys.com/artists/dominic-dispirito/

I was very much interested and excited about the idea of making robotic paintings after hearing from you that there will be robotics researchers working in this project. Other than this I am also interested in hearing about any new and this will definitely set off ideas for me.

I think that now is a good time for me because I am really struggling financially and therefore having to work more days in paid work other than my art work. So working in this project with would not only give me financial assistance but would also give me time to focus on the work. Also, as you are aware, I’m really interested in how new technologies influence art. I’m not a researcher, I’m an artist.

Bio

Dominic Dispirito, creates animations, paintings and sculptures that may on first glance appear simplistic, with a sketch-like rather than polished feel, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated representations of the British working class. The simplicity of line within Dispirito’s paintings – faces are commonly reduced to bold blocks of only a few bright colours – invites visitors to reflect on the nature of society, at both a personal and universal level.

Through his work, Dispirito is developing a unique aesthetic language, combining classical painting techniques with digital art. All of his works start with the use of iPhone apps. The drawings and animations composed in this digital space are then transformed into paintings which look to replicate the digital textures and colours of these studies born in the digital realm. Drawing from his working-class upbringing, as well as his personal battles with drug and alcohol addiction, Dispirito paints colourful and exuberant compositions that are uniquely recognisable.

Elizabeth Murton www.elizabethmurton.co.uk

Bibography Elizabeth Murton’s practice uses materials to explore ideas across disciplines. Often working in a large scale and repurposing textile processes such as weaving; the materials and construction are revealed.

Since graduating from Goldsmiths (2006), works have included Neuron 1 & 2 (2014), embroidered drawings exploring the shapes of multi-polar neurons created with ink and stitch. Works are often inspired by cross-disciplinary conversations such as Laboratory of Dark Matters (2017) with Dr Chamkaur Ghag (UCL) in East London and Cleveland UK and Arts Council Funded Between Materials and Mechanisms (2016) (University of Hertfordshire). Murton has worked with a range of community groups and in schools of in East London through charity Stitches in Time, as well as being an active studio member of Bow Arts for 5 years. Other participatory projects include Wellcome Trust funded sessions with adults and young people with additional needs (2016) and ideas-matter- sphere art-science pub discussions (2011-2012).

Select exhibitions and commissions include: Structure, Texture, Future, The Nunnery Gallery, London (2015); Common Bodies, East Street Arts, Leeds (2014); Art Language Location Festival, Cambridge University, Cambridge (2013); A Matter of Substance, APT Gallery, Deptford (2012); A Theory of Everything, Core Gallery (2011); Deptford X Gallery Plots (2010); Crafts Council Commission for Origin, Somerset House (2009); Rules and Regs Residency, Farnham (2007). Murton was awarded a-n The Artists Information Company Re:View Bursary (2013) and ArtsCouncil England Grants for the Arts Funding (2016).

Expression of Interest

This opportunity to work in East London with UCL researchers comes at a pivotal moment in my practice. After two large cross-disciplinary projects using textiles and ceramics, I can take this learning forward and specifically focus on the potential of weaving to explore cross-disciplinary ideas. Bringing together the weaving process with ideas of complexity and the agency of materials (from new ), would provide a framework to develop new dynamic cross-disciplinary artwork in partnership with UCL researchers.

I have broad interests which include physical sciences (following conversations on dark matter last year with UCL colleagues), engineering/technology (I spent time talking with a UCL PhD student in Quantum computing to develop work in 2011), human biology, environmental change, energy and the development of new materials (especially those that could be termed ‘textile’). I am open to discovering new areas of research too.

Weaving has a history of working across different disciplines – being an ancient human technology which is now still produced on simple looms and with advanced technology for a range of industries. The simple over/under rhythm which creates a grid of fabric, takes chaotic fibres from plants, animals and synthetics, and organises them into a grid system. The 0+1 punch cards used in the early Jacquard loom is said to have inspired computer programming. It has great potential to explore and communicate a range of ideas.

Artwork that have been inspired by disrupting grid/graph structure of woven cloth includes The Playing Frame (2006), Module (2009), Indevelopment (2008), Between Materials and Mechanisms (2016) and Connective Matters (2017). Specifically taking weaving off the frame or loom enables the creation of 3d works; exploring the relationship between material, structure, process and complexity. The context for this approach would be ideas surrounding new materialism. I started a reading group on new materialisms 2 years ago. New materialism is a broad term which has emerged across disciplines. To summarise briefly, it looks at complex ecologies, the nature of flux, the agency of materials and ‘non human’ aspects in the behaviours of systems - such as how a river flows or an election outcome; shifting the focus from an anthropocentric view of the world. For that reason it has emerged in areas such environmental studies, feminist thought as well as social and political science.

An approach involving textile process and materials are often more relatable and a good method to engage communities in art and science ideas. I have worked across East London with a range of communities including artists, older residents, school children and parents. It would be interesting to see how these communities could be part of the conversation in this project – and through their engagement have space to comment on and explore the research ideas.

This commission opportunity provides the necessary financial support to develop and produce new interesting and exciting artworks. This opportunity would enable me to extend and consolidate this way of working.

Erika Tan www.erikatan.net and www.sonicsoundings.com

Statement of interest:

In terms of Trellis and articulating my interests, I think primarily I would suggest my practice is one of responding to already existing ‘facts’ – usually historical and embedded in and constructed from cultural specifics. I have been working transnationally, and am interested in how geo-socio-political contingencies affect our understandings and engagement with ‘things’. As an artist I spend a lot of time looking for the ‘forgotten’ or ‘hidden’, and trying to find oblique connections between that that is considered of ‘minor’ importance to that understood as ‘mainstream’. This could be applied I think to various disciplines. I work a lot with moving image, but also installation. I’m interested in process and thinking through making. I’m currently embarking on some re-education and am particularly interested in working with materials (initially pewter, but also coir coconut fiber). I’m interested in museology and processes of knowledge construction, and how one might employ a decolonial approach to this. I’m also interested in collective making practices and the way in which multiple voices might shape and produce.

Bio:

Erika Tan’s practice (artist and curator) is primarily research-led and manifests in multiple formats (moving image, publications, curatorial and participatory projects). Recent research has focused on the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artefacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects. Future projects point towards the digitization of collective cultural memory and cloud architecture through the prism of ruins, hauntings, and mnemonic collapse. Her work has been exhibited, collected and commissioned internationally including: The Diaspora Pavilion, (Venice Biennale 2017); Artist and Empire (Tate Touring, National Gallery Singapore 2016/7); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You (NUS Museum, Singapore 2014); There Is No Road (LABoral, Spain 2010); Thermocline of Art (ZKM, Germany 2007); Around The World in Eighty Days (South London Gallery / ICA 2007); The Singapore Biennale (2006); Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, London). Recent curatorial projects: Sonic Soundings/Venice Trajectories http://www.sonicsoundings.com. Erika is a lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art (London) and a founding member of Asia-Art-Activism. She has been awarded the Stanley Picker Fellow in Fine Art 2018-2020.

Helena Hunter http://www.helenahunter.net/

Helena Hunter lives in Hackney, London, UK. She works with methods of fictioning and performativity as critical, creative and speculative tools in her art practice. Combining visual-poetic text, film, performance and sculptural assemblage her practice seeks to reimagine cultural narratives in relation to objects and forms of materiality.

Her ongoing project The Institute of Speculative Subjectivities investigates the perceived ‘silence’ or gap in forms of language and representation that occur within human-non-human relations. This work blends languages of science with art, poetry and fiction to reimagine material agency and forms of ecological knowing. This has resulted in a series of artworks with minerals, algae and organisms in a range of settings: from environmental site-based work to natural historical museum collections.

In 2017 Helena created a sculptural work Beneath the Signal and Noise in relation to Silvertown in London, drawing on histories and materials from the area. This work was displayed in the Silver Building as part of the group show Silver Sehnsucht that was recently reviewed in Third Text. Beneath the Signal and Noise is currently being exhibited as part of the permanent collections display in mima (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art). Also with mima Helena created Geofictions a series of workshops engaging with the local community and disused steelworks in Redcar, Teeside. These workshops involved co-creating site-based sculptural works and speculative writings in relation to found materials in the area. The resulting objects, films, collages and writings were presented at mima as part of Tania Bruguera’s Office of Useful Art in the project space gallery.

Helena has created artworks with University College London Museums and Collections, The Natural History Museum and was selected for The Horniman Museum Residency in 2018 where she will be working with extinct and endangered birds in the collection. Her socially engaged community projects and public art include projects with mima and The Dalane Festival of Culture in Southern Rogaland, Norway. She has collaborated with a range of scientists at University College London and more recently with Earth Scientists at Royal Holloway University of London as part of the Centre for Geohumanities creative commissions. She has a collaborative practice Matterlurgy, with artist Mark Peter Wright.

Helena’s areas of interest include the materiality of ‘things’, how objects tell stories and how art can activate multiple narratives and perspectives. She is therefore drawn specifically to the Institute of Making Big and the materials library. The object-based learning laboratory in the Culture Lab along with the educational programmes in making, media, conservation & heritage and the conservation facilities also link with her practice and interest in working with museums and collections. Her work consistently engages with issues of global environmental change, therefore the EPSRC research themes that link directly with her practice include: Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) and Global Uncertainties.

Helena is also interested in exploring any areas dealing with AI, VR and computer sciences

John Walter http://www.johnwalter.net/ Dr John Walter is an artist, curator and academic who lives and works in London. He works across a diverse range of media that include painting, moving image and installation. He studied at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art Oxford, The Slade School of Fine Art UCL and The University of Westminster. He was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship at The British School at Rome in 2006 and was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012.

He won the 2016 Hayward Curatorial Open for Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. His work is held by a number of public collections including The Arts Council Collection, The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

I undertook doctoral research into Alien Sex Club in the context of architecture, investigating how the representation of HIV could be innovated from a predominantly post-minimalist aesthetic to a maximalist one using spatial design. This reflected a spike in new infections among gay men in the West around 2015 due to cultural risk factors such as Chemsex, which has since changed due to the availability of PrEP (Pre-Exposure prophylaxis). My Wellcome funded collaboration with Dr Alison Rodgers as part of Alien Sex Club lead me to discover Prof Greg Towers’ capsid research and I have been in collaboration with him since 2016. Our project, CAPSID, transposes Greg’s research about viral replication in the capsid of HIV and its interaction with the host cell onto my painterly interests. My work does not illustrate the science but uses the language and narratives generated by the science to bring about art that is capable of talking about the science in a humorous, fun and carnivalesque way.

By maximalism I do not just mean the opposite of minimalism, although my work is visually excessive. My ongoing research into the definition of maximalism increasingly reflects the science of Complex Adaptive Systems. My exhibitions correspond to the maxims “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” and “more is different”. I want to further investigate how economics, DNA, computer algorithms, Artificial Intelligence and ecology can impact on thinking about artistic practice. I believe that aesthetics have a role to play in helping clarify and represent such science.

Recent exhibitions include: CAPSID (CGP London and HOME Manchester, 2018); Somewhere in Between (Wellcome Collection, London 2018); Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness (The Mac Belfast, DCA Dundee, Bury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017-18); Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender and Identity (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, 2017); Alien Sex Capsule (Artlink, Hull 2017); The Zany Capsid (Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham 2017); Essex Road III (Tintype Gallery, London 2016); Alien Sex Club (Ambika P3 London and Camp and Furnace Liverpool 2015); Courtship Disorder (White Cubicle Toilet Gallery, London 2015); Turn My Oyster Up (Whitstable Bienniale, 2014).

A Monograph CAPSID has been published this year by HOME to accompany his exhibition of the same name.

Julie Myers www.juliemyers.org.uk

Areas of interest and possible collaboration. As an artist I am interested in themes of: memory, shared experience, family histories, tradition, stories, political narratives and knowledge exchange. When I think about areas of interest and the possibility of future collaboration, I reflect upon some of my past work that raised further questions that may open up new ways of extending my practice.

Song Vessel (2013) - http://www.juliemyers.org.uk/song.vessels

Developed through a series of workshops and singing events at three East London locations: Jagonari Women’s Educational Resource Centre, Whitechapel, Howards Road Community Centre, Stoke Newington; Idea Store, Whitechapel. This project explored the significance of song in children’s early years by making audio recordings of parents’ and grandparents' voices for their children to listen to at any point in the future. As the project progressed I became increasingly interested in the idea of song as an intrinsic part of wellbeing. At the invitation of ‘Vital Arts’ I visited music therapists at The Royal London (Barts) Hospital in Mile End, London. I took part in music workshops and witnessed the difference that they made for patients, but what happens when the musicians move on, and the visitors leave ? Can smart technologies encode a song into an object - so that, for example, a child can listen to a parent's voice when they are no longer there ? Could new technology be used to apply this concept in public spaces?

Voices in The Forest - http://www.julie.myers.org.uk/voices.in.the.forest

As artist in residence at The Banff Centre, Canada, I worked with local primary school children to create an audio walk for the forest. The children’s stories had very particular connectedness to the surrounding landscape. They knew where bears might feed in winter; which elk to keep away from; and how wolves moved from place to place. One day a child brought along a First Nations ‘Listening Cone’ and insisted that we place it against the tree trunk and listen. I imagined an old wives tale, until I met Professor Dave Dunn, UC Santa Cruz, who spoke about his acoustic research and the vibrations trees send out to other trees when they are diseased. Can current technology enable us to listen to nature ? What can we learn from the rituals, objects and artefacts of pre-Christian belief systems? (V&A)

Also, as part of a school project my daughter took part in an Arduino workshop. About the same time my mother-in-law started a knitting course. They exchanged stories for hours about their discoveries and their respective new fabrics. Can development in intelligent fabrics embed stories from one generation to the other ? Could a tapestry contain a hundred aural histories ?

Trained initially as a sculptor, moving into filmmaking and later digital technology, my interest in locative technology was affirmed when I received an Interact Fellowship, Arts Council of England, (2007). My artistic practice involves working in diverse contexts and communities. This demands an openness to the unknown and naturally nurtures enquiry and questioning. I would welcome the opportunity to raise some of these questions within a collaborative setting with those from different disciplines.

I am ideally after is to work (although not exclusively) with someone interested in making a emotional object, in developing a material that can express an emotion though a combination of phsyical material and sound - a responsive objects /fabric that can embed or give off a sound or activate a sound. Could even be just a vibration of hum.

Current Projects include:

Live From The Parish Hall - Totland. A series of thematic performance lectures. Inspired by the format of the Victorian popular science lectures the series presents current social and environmental concerns through the stories and experiences of local people, including, costal erosion, explained by a child’s fossil collection, light pollution illustrated by a walk with an astronomer, changes in local wildlife habitat displayed as a pin hole camera project . . . Hosted by local residents the talks combine video, photographs, personal artefacts, archive material, music and refreshments. The inaugural event: LIGHT will be presented and broadcast live from the Parish Hall In May 2019. Commissioned by Lift the Lid on Island Culture and Artswork. Funded by Arts Council England.

Total budget 30,000.00 GBP https://www.iwcp.co.uk/news/17210845.new-film-theatre-and-art-projects-to-lift-the-lid-on-isle-of- wight-culture/

Clubhouse is a film that documents a year long project in Queen’s Park Estate, Bedford. Through a series of workshops: script writing; camera sessions; sound recording; special effects; costume and prop making we explored ideas of engagement and collaboration. The film combines: observational documents of everyday life; staged scenes of performance to the camera; and footage from the children’s own cameras.

In 2019 the local community will apply to the local housing association for funding to create an art space in an old disused garage. The final section of our Clubhouse film will document this transformative process.

Commissioned by Bedford Creative Arts. Funded by Bedford Borough Council, Arts Council England, bpha, Peoples Health Trust. Total budget 70,000.00 GBP

I have an emerging interest in making smart objects and materials.

Perhaps a responsive object/fabric that contains a sound or even just a vibration of hum that evokes a personal memory or feeling.

From the various links you sent me I think an individual or group working in the area of future engineering and manufacture, or someone involved in the Insitute of Making would be very interesting to talk to.

I think my experience of working with various community groups and individuals (see biog) could offer a unique way of communicating complex ideas and process's through storytelling (film/sound/workshops/events).

Lilah Fowler www.lilahfowler.com

Lilah Fowler’s work examines the interconnected areas of architecture, urban design and science; this research has a specific focus on looking at how landscape and technology are impossibly interwoven - a state that she refers to as 'nth nature’. Her responsive installations display an intricate back and forth between digital and analogue realms, being comprised of modular design, sculpture, textiles, film, found objects and sound. In the past Fowler has worked in collaboration with mathematicians, architects, computer programmers, quantum physicists and geochemists to produce her public art works and exhibitions. The core feature of her research is an exploration of the intricate translations and exchanges between the actual and the virtual, from plastic to pixel and how the digital and physical collide. For images and further information visit her website: www.lilahfowler.com

Lucy Harrison http://www.lucy-harrison.co.uk/

I would be interested in Trellis as I have often found collaborations to be the most successful of my projects, specifically my recent work Not a Split Second with Dr George Legg from Kings College London, which allowed me to research and develop ideas alongside his existing long term research into the effects of terrorist incidents on cities.

In terms of the subject areas mentioned, I am very interested in oral history as mentioned in the London Memory Archive, and have carried out several projects recording oral histories of east London over the past few years, some of which are now held in archives, others have been included in films, installations and text works. Public history, and the politics of recorded history, are key themes in my work.

I am also interested in urban spaces and how people’s lives and daily activities have an impact on public spaces, particularly in London where I have lived for 20 years. The Urban Room, and Global Future Cities Co-Labs would therefore be areas I could engage with.

These are my existing interests and it could be that a more fruitful and surprising exchange could be with one of the other areas that I have not yet included in previous projects.

Biography

Lucy Harrison is an artist based in London, working predominantly on public commissions and projects. Her work investigates the subjective nature of experience, and connections between memory, location and architecture, taking the form of installations, films, audio and various forms of printed and published material. Her projects are often collaborative and involve the participation of people who live or work in the places where they take place, exploring the how the history of a place often resonates in the present day in often unconscious ways.

Her work often involves collecting oral histories and archive material, to be used in films, installations and books along with her own film and photography. Her projects often involve events, walks and conversations. In recent projects Lucy has produced mobile phone app walking tours and worked more explicitly with historical material, creating new online and physical archives of interviews, photographs and other items.

Lucy is currently developing two projects in Waltham Forest, one which will trace the boundary lines of now-demolished houses in a park in Leytonstone, and the other exploring self-built sheds and shacks across the borough, in the past and the present day.

In 2017 she developed a project exploring the 1996 Docklands IRA bomb, in collaboration with Dr George Legg, funded by King’s College London and Arts Council England, culminating in a film, publication and collection of archive material presented at Republic Gallery in London’s Docklands.

Having set up Rendezvous Projects Community Interest Company with four other directors in 2015, she developed two projects in Waltham Forest where she is based; one around the re-opening of Lea Bridge station (funded by Waltham Forest Council) and the other the continuation of WE, investigating the Warner Estate, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England. She is now developing a major new project Lightboxes & Lettering with the CIC, exploring the printing industry in east London.

In 2016 Lucy was Artist in Residence at Hackney Museum and Archives for the duration of their WW1 poster exhibition and worked on a commission for Brookgate and Hill called The Works, investigating work, industry and daily routine in the area near Cambridge station.

Other projects include Good Company (2014) which explored Ilford Town Centre and how people relate to its past and present, and Home on High (2014) a film installation made with residents of the Brownfield Estate in Poplar and installed in the former home of the father and son who featured in the film. In 2013 she worked on Carnaby Echoes, a major commission for Shaftesbury PLC, curated by Futurecity, which investigated some of the less well known musical heritage of the Carnaby Street area, including early jazz clubs and a ska reggae club which despite being highly influential in the 1960s was not always given the mainstream coverage it deserved. The project culminated in a series of films available online, a mobile phone app, and plaques marking out 15 buildings on the Carnaby estate.

Lucy Harrison graduated from the Royal College of Art’s Printmaking MA in 1999. She taught on the BA Fine Art course at University for the Creative Arts from 2000 until 2013, and on Central St Martin’s BA Fine Art course from 2013-2016. She now works in community and museum contexts such as on the Older People’s programme at the Geffrye Museum, as well as at Aldgate Press, a lithography printers and workers’ co-operative in Bow.

Melanie Manchot www.melaniemanchot.net/

Melanie Manchot is a London-based visual artist working with photography, film/video as a performative and participatory practice. Her projects respond to specific sites and public spaces or particular communities to explore individual and collective identities. Location-based research and reconstruction are recurring methods/strategies, informing both content and visual frameworks that guide the production of projects. Moving image works, both single screen and multi-channel installations operate on the threshold of documentary and staged events and form a sustained enquiry into how fact, fiction, narrative and observation offer strategies for speaking about identity and our shifting place in an increasingly mediated world.

Recent solo exhibitions include Museum MAC VAL, Paris (2018/2019); White Light Black Snow, Parafin, London (2018); Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne (2016), fig-2 at the ICA, London (2015), Galerie M, Bochum (2015), Toronto Photography Festival (2012), Nuit Blanche, Paris (2011) and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2010).

Work is included in important collections including Government Art Collection, UK; Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten, Marl, Germany; Arts Council Collection; FMAC, Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain, Paris and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

In 2017 Melanie Manchot was shortlisted for the Jarman Award.

Current areas of interest, research and development:

Two areas of work will be the focus of development for the practice over the coming year/s, one concerned with an ongoing commitment to working in response to mountain communities the other an ambitious feature film project that explores addiction and recovery as processes of fundamental re-configuration of subjectivity and identity.

1. Mountainworks: Snow/Ice/Mountains/White

For the past 9 years and indefinitely into the future I have been making work in one alpine village, Engelberg, engaging with its community, landscapes and socio-economic infrastructures. The work investigates the hidden labour that is necessary to make the mountain industries function and explores ideas around maintenance, care and support for precarious environments in our care.

Over the coming winter I will be working with snow and ice as archetypes of ‘endangered materiality’ in a number of locations. I will be on a residency in Austria for 3 weeks in January developing a set of new works with teams of mountainworkers. For example, I will be engaging with teams responsible for the production of snow and explore whether we can produce black snow.

I will also be back in the village of Engelberg, continuing a set of photographic works that belong to the open-ended series White Light Black Snow. Later in spring, I will be on a two week trip to the high Caucasus in Georgia, going off into very far away regions…

Possible collaboration with any researcher interested in above areas of investigation from their respective discipline.

2. The feature film: STEPHEN This will be the most ambitious new work that I will develop over the coming couple of years. The film is based on a previous video installation ‘Twelve’ for which I worked with twelve people in recent recovery from long-term addictions.

STEPHEN tells the story of Ste Giddings working on maintaining stable recovery while embarking on an emotionally taxing challenge, to 'become' the fictional character of an obsessive gambler in a movie production. This film-within-the-film is a genre crime movie, inspired by a famous Mitchell and Kenyon film, held in the BFI archive: Arrest of Goudie, 1901, the first ever crime-reconstruction and the first film produced in Liverpool, Ste's home-town and this film's location.

The work explores notions of identity, the transformative power of creativity, the role of cameras in constructing auto-fictions as well as the psychology of addictions in our contemporary societies. I am especially interested in rising levels of screen-addiction, the ensuing conditions of loneliness and separation and how young people are affected by changing forms of intimacy.

Areas of research collaboration might include researchers in neuroscience, in literature studies, film studies… someone researching ideas around narrative/self storying/auto-fictions. Researchers interested in addiction/recovery - the psychology of addiction.

Neville Gabie https://www.nevillegabie.com/

Much of my practice has been built around a collaborative process, working with academics in very different fields of research, with developers, curators, other artists and perhaps above all, with the wider public. It is dialogue across disciplines, a desire to engage with, share, learn, experiment and take creative risk, which drives my curiosity. That has taken me to Halley research station in Antarctica as artist in residence with the British Antarctic Survey, to work with climate change scientists at Bristol University, to initiate my own project working with archeologists and other artists on an excavation of a former football ground in Bradford, and to spend 2 years as artist in residence for the Olympic Delivery Authority during the build of the London Olympic Park in Stratford – the future location of UCL East.

The brief- as outlined for Trellis- is exactly the opportunity I, as an artist would relish. It is a blank sheet of paper with no answers yet, but some exciting and challenging people to collaborate with, in the very rich context of East London.

I am currently at the very early stages of a project working on the once lost, now remerging language of the Algonquin First Nation people in Massachusetts. Through that process, what has become increasingly clear is the direct link between language and cultural identity. To cherish your language is to hold onto your cultural identity and sense of self worth. Equally language is the gateway through which the values of a culture is determined and expressed. The way we speak about people, place, gender, the natural and spiritual world, reveals much about our heritage and understanding of the world.

London, particularly the East End, has become home to waves of migration, a city now boasting over 300 languages spoken on its streets. It is a melting pot, diverse and rich with its mix of culture and tradition. But how do people hold onto a sense of self, of cultural identity and of language with all the pressures to conform and adapt? Are we in danger of losing languages just as we are of plant and animal species globally and what are the implications of losing that range of sound and meaning? Or is the cost of creating a cohesive society with shared values worth the price? Is language a barrier for social mobility and the ability to access technology and educational opportunity?

In relation to Trellis and UCL East I would very much like to consider the impact of globalization and urbanization in relation to language perhaps working with academics of the Future Living Institute. Does it matter if we lose languages and if so, to whom? Does globalization and the growth of large urban conurbations inevitably mean leaving behind our historic roots and what is the impact on our cultural identify and wellbeing? What are those languages, which are falling into disuse and how is that reflected in the wellbeing of those ? How do we ‘archive’ lost language? I don’t know any of those answers but as someone who arrived in the UK as a teenager from a quite different culture and religion, these are questions that are both universal and personal.

Nye Thompson www.nyethompson.co.uk www.backdoored.io

Artist statement

My work involves the creation of artist-software-systems in order to explore the impact of new technology paradigms. I’m particularly interested in the relationship between the embodied and the virtual; our evolving sense of what it is to be human and the social/psychological impact of living in a world of connected objects and nascent AIs.

I use sculptural installation and online channels as means of presenting and recording these explorations.

Since the beginning of 2016 I have been documenting the global phenomenon of self-surveillance through my work “Backdoored” which collects and archives images taken by bots through unsecured security cameras. This work explores the underpinning anxieties and privacy implications, as well as notions of agency and authorship.

My latest work “The Seeker” is an exploration of the emerging machine gaze. “The Seeker” is a machine entity which travels the world virtually, and describes for us what it sees. Named for Ptah- Seker, the artist/technologist god of the Ancient Egyptians, who generated the world by speaking the words to describe it, this project will look at how the action of describing the world might establish a whole new worldview for machines and humans alike.

“Nye Thompson attempts to reveal to us the visual nature of the physical and virtual internet. In this journey she shows us beautiful things.

I see her as rather like a contemporary , the 1970’s TV marine biologist. She is showing us glimpses of quite extraordinary networks, structures, debris and possibilities that somehow we know exist but ordinarily we have no access to.

Thompson is an important member of a new generation of artists who are opening up ideas and concepts, which are transforming our society. The role of the artist in issues affecting free speech connected with the digital age is quite daunting. Institutions want to harvest our data but when we want access to that data, artists and activists start going to prison from Ai Wei Wei to Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.

Thompson reminds us that the past and the future is about controlling imagery. The artist’s role in the mediation of that imagery is now more than ever contested. ”

Bob & Roberta Smith, artist, Royal Academician, trustee for the National Campaign for the Arts, and a Patron of the National Society for Education in Art and Design.

Biography

My childhood was spent in the quiet, isolated Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth. Growing up I headed straight to London and have lived there ever since. My first degree was in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, where many of my classmates went onto become YBA superstars. I took a different path and started working with computers. When the Web was invented in the early 90s I was in the first wave of creatives to get involved. I worked for many years in web technologies, specialising in Human Computer Interaction, software design and ‘big data’.

Victoria Burgher www.victoriaburgher.com

Biography

I am an East London-based, multi-disciplinary artist with an MA in Art & Politics from Goldsmiths College, University of London. My politically engaged practice ranges from sculptural installations and site-specific interventions to collaborative public ventures. I am interested in art’s ability to tell stories and challenge histories – a sense of place and identity are engrained in this.

My work is largely sculptural, underpinned by thorough contextual research and sensitive response – to spaces, situations, objects and contexts. Taking a site or situation as a starting point, I use materials and processes, often laboriously repeated, to translate and embody the voices emanating from it. I’m drawn to ‘poor’ materials and immersive outcomes. I have long been interested in the conceptual use of materials to address how the extraction and exploitation of natural resources and human labour have fuelled the forced migration of people around the world. I have been using colonial commodities as a way of exploring the under-reported story of Britain’s imperial wealth generation – molten sugar to cast objects related to the triangular slave trade, for example.

For this project I would be interested in exploring how current global resource extraction combined with climate change is creating a huge movement of people around the world. A potential collaboration with academics working on the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) research and policy partnership could be very fruitful for pursuing this area of research. It may provide an opportunity to consult or involve refugee populations living in the boroughs of the campus who originate from areas of climate migration.

However, I am also very interested in an academic exploration of the ethics and responsibility I have in tackling these issues as an artist – how far is it my story to tell and where could it start becoming appropriation of others’ histories and exploitation of their hardship, for example? I enjoy working collaboratively and this opportunity to research in partnership with an academic has incredible potential for expanding the focus of my practice and its audience. Access to the research and financial resources offered would give me the time and headspace to pursue these new lines of enquiry with focus and commitment.

I live in Hackney and have a studio in Waltham Forest.