Profiles
Simon Starling
Born in Epsom in 1967, Simon Starling studied photography and art at Maidstone College of Art, Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, and Glasgow School of Art. Since his first solo exhibition at the Showroom in London in 1995, his work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally.
Recent exhibitions include the Tate Britain Commission, Phantom Ride, (2013), Project for a Masquerade at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2011), THEREHERETHENTHERE (Works 1997–2009) at the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Paris (2009) and Cuttings (Supplement) at The Power Plant, Toronto (2008). He was awarded the Turner Prize in 2005 for Shedboatshed. A new film Black Drop, about the rare planetary phenomenon of the transit of Venus and its relationship to the beginnings of moving image technology, was commissioned by Modern Art Oxford and shown at the Radcliffe Observatory this year.
Using video, film, slide projections, photography and sculpture, Starling’s work reveals rich, unexpected and complex histories, brought to light through his forensic – if sometimes elliptical – unravelling of an image, object or event. His work often involves transforming one thing or substance into another, and his projects — which range from small artworks to large-scale installations to strange and interesting journeys — draw on ideas of nature, technology, and economics.
He is interested in the relationship between art and craft, revealing a fascination with the processes, materials, and techniques involved in producing both manufactured goods and traditional handmade crafts. The selection of work for his exhibition at Tate St Ives in 2011 emphasised his long-running interest in the relationship and interplay between culture and nature and his ongoing examination, excavation and transformation of the material world.
One Ton II 2005, for instance, makes explicit the huge amounts of energy used to produce tiny quantities of platinum: one ton of ore, mined from the South African open cast mine pictured in the images was needed to produce the five hand-made platinum prints that comprise the work.
Continuing this interest in mining, excavation and geology, Starling produced a new work for the exhibition in St Ives, drawing on recent research into the China Clay industry in Cornwall and emphasising the contemporary use of China Clay in the paper industry as a key component of fine papers.
The work comprises a stack of photographic prints and a text, as follows: Images of the huge open-cast china clay mines in North Cornwall are printed on paper that contains the very material the mine produces. The rough surface of the pictured landscape is paradoxically smoothed over by the kaolin (china clay) coating, which covers the coarse ground of the paper itself. Nowadays china clay is widely used in the paper industry as a coating on glossy papers. The work is presented as a stack of prints on the floor, reinforcing a sense of geological strata, of surface and depth.
Simon Starling was a Professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 2003 to 2013, where he led numerous study groups, workshops, and overseas field trips.
Images:
Simon Starling © Andrea Guermani at Fondazione Merz, Turin, 2011
Black Drop
2012
35 mm film transferred to HD
Duration: 27:42 minutes
Film still/Photo © Simon Starling
Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Glasgow
The Long Ton
2009
1 Chinese marble block, 1 CNC Carrara marble block, pulley system, clamps, rope, shackles
Chinese marble block: 90 x 120 x 50 cm
Carrara marble block: 59 x 74 x 31 cm
Installation view at neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2009/Photo © Jens Ziehe
Courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin
One Ton, II
(5 handmade platinum/palladium prints of the Anglo American Platinum Corporation mine at Potgieterus, South Africa, produced using as many platinum group metal salts as can be derived from one ton of ore)
2005
5 platinum/palladium prints framed in acrylic boxes
Prints 65 x 85 cm each
Frames 97,4 x 74,7 x 4 cm each
Courtesy of the artist and neugerriemschneider
Born in 1946, Hamish Fulton first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of a number of artists – including Richard Long and Gilbert & George – who were exploring new forms of sculpture and landscape art. A central characteristic of their practice was a direct physical engagement with landscape.
Fulton’s time as a student at St Martin’s College of Art in London (1966-68), and his journeys in South Dakota and Montana in 1969, encouraged him to think that art could be ‘how you view life’ and not tied necessarily to the production of objects. He began to make short walks, and then to make photographic works about the experience of walking. At this time, and subsequently, his practice was influenced by an unusually broad set of interests, including the subject of the environment and the culture of American Indians.
Fulton describes himself as a ‘walking artist’. In October 1973, having walked 1,022 miles in 47 days from Duncansby Head (near John O’Groats) to Lands End in Cornwall, he decided to ‘only make art resulting from the experience of individual walks’. Since then the act of walking has remained central to his practice. He has stated: ‘If I do not walk, I cannot make a work of art.’
For the past twenty years Fulton has also been devising group walks, with over thirty walks realised across the world. The first involved fourteen walkers at CCA Kitakyushi in Japan in 1994. He was commissioned to make three walks in the run-up to the opening of Turner Contemporary in April 2011; Walk 2 [illustrated below] involved 198 people walking seven times round the marine pool in Margate in March 2010.
Calls for political justice recur in Fulton’s work, corresponding to his commitment to individual and artistic freedom. As Fulton has stated: ‘A diversity of art walks can interconnect with a wide range of actions, disciplines, philosophies, environmental issues, the meditative and politics’. In 2011 he undertook Slowalk (in support of Ai Weiwei), a collective action realised at Tate Modern by 99 people walking in silent unison. In 2012 another slow walk was performed in a disused car park on a post-industrial site near the River Tyne as part of the Gateshead AV Festival ‘As Slow as Possible’.
Fulton has had solo exhibitions across the world, most recently at Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Brazil, following a series of walks in the Atacama desert, and at Maureen Paley in London. A major monographic exhibition opens at the end of October at CRAC in Sète in the Languedoc Roussillon region of France.
Image: Hamish Fulton, Kent Walk 2: Margate, 2010. Courtesy Turner Contemporary, © Dan Bass
Martin Clark has been Artistic Director at Tate St Ives since 2007, leading on the development and delivery of the exhibitions and displays programme, as well as the wider public programme including Interpretation and Learning. Previously he was Curator of Exhibitions at Arnolfini, Bristol (2005-7), and Curator and Exhibitions Tutor at Kent Institute of Art and Design (now University College of the Creative Arts) (2002-5).
He graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University, before going on to complete the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Over the past 10 years he has curated and organised over 40 exhibitions and projects, including solo shows by Simon Starling, Dexter Dalwood, Lily van der Stokker, Albert Oehlen, Carol Bove, Heimo Zobernig, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Adam Chodzko, Deimantas Narkevičius and Lucy McKenzie, as well as a number of group exhibitions, including Candyland Zoo, The Hollows of Glamour, This storm is what we call progress, Pale Carnage, and The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art. He was co-curator, with Alex Farquaharson, of Aquatopia, The imaginary of the ocean deep.
He has edited numerous publications and catalogues and written widely on contemporary art and artists.
Martin Clark leaves Tate St Ives in September 2013 to become Director of the Bergen Kunsthall. He will however return to Cornwall for The Cornwall Workshop.
Teresa Gleadowe is a curator, writer and editor with extensive experience in the contemporary visual arts in the UK and internationally.
She worked as an Exhibition Officer and then as Assistant Director of the Visual Arts Department of the British Council from 1977 to 1989 before being appointed Head of Information at the Tate Gallery in 1989. In 1992 she joined the academic staff of the Royal College of Art to develop the first UK-based MA in curating, jointly initiated by the Royal College of Art and the Arts Council. She directed this two-year, full-time programme, Curating Contemporary Art, for fourteen years until the summer of 2006, when she left the college to work freelance.
From 2006 to 2012 she was Research Consultant and Series Editor for the Exhibition Histories series published by Afterall. She has also taught on curatorial programmes at California College of the Arts, San Francisco; de Appel, Amsterdam; the London Consortium MA Film Curating; the MA Curating at Chelsea College of Art and Design; and on the Curatorial Intensive run by Independent Curators International in New York in July 2011. She has co-convened two conferences with Kitty Scott for the Banff International Curatorial Institute and a symposium, ‘On Remoteness’ in March 2013.
She is Chair of Nottingham Contemporary, a member of the Advisory Board of Peer, a member of the ICA’s Artists Advisory Committee, a specialist adviser to The John Lyon’s Charity and a member of AICA and ICOM. She is also Chair of CAST (the Cornubian Arts & Science Trust), a new charity based in Helston, Cornwall, created in 2012.
Teresa Gleadowe initiated, developed and convened The Falmouth Convention held at University College Falmouth in May 2010, The Cornwall Workshop at Kestle Barton in October 2011 and The Penzance Convention in May 2012.
Ellen Mara De Wachter is an independent curator and writer based in London. She studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick (1995-8) and took an MA in History of Art and Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths (2002-3) before working for the artist Isaac Julien. From 2005 to 2007 she studied on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. She joined the Zabludowicz Collection as Curator of exhibitions, commissions and projects in 2007 and worked there until this summer, when she left to work freelance. De Wachter is currently the Curator of Public Collection Development at the Contemporary Art Society, where she is responsible for CAS’s acquisitions scheme for ten museums across the UK during 2013-14.
In her role at the Zabludowicz Collection, De Wachter specialised in working with emerging artists to develop their practice through discussion, curating and writing. In 2012 she initiated the Collection’s Invites programme, which offers unrepresented artists based in the UK their first solo show.
She curated numerous exhibitions for the Zabludowicz Collection and her writing has been published in exhibition catalogues and magazines including Frieze, Artforum.com and Flash Art, as well as on her blog, The Pictured Word. She has lectured at the Royal College of Art, Brighton University, Newcastle University and Teesside University.
Ellen Mara De Wachter will write a blog for The Cornwall Workshop and will provide writing and editing sessions for workshop participants.
Phil Rushworth
Phil Rushworth is an independent curator and producer based in Falmouth, Cornwall. She was a participant in the first Cornwall Workshop in 2011.
She has a special interest in widening the enjoyment of contemporary art to non-typical visual arts audiences, particularly in rural areas, usually through the use of humour, pop-culture and interdisciplinary working. In 2011 she co-directed 24hr Comic Etc., a series of 24-hour art challenges across North and Mid Cornwall. During the past 12 months she has developed and curated the pilot year of Confluence, a new public art programme for Falmouth University and the University of Exeter at the Penryn Campus.
Phil provided organisational support for The Cornwall Workshop 2013.
Eleven participants were selected from the open submission (Dom Allen and Nick Davies each attended three days of the Workshop): Dom Allen, Simon Bayliss, Anna Best, Naomi Frears, Nick Davies, Bryony Gillard, Jesse Leroy Smith, Simon Morrissey, Beth Richards, Rachel Rose Smith and Oliver Sutherland.
Dom Allen
Dom Allen lives in Cornwall:
My practice is grounded in the act of creating machines and systems that exhibit some sort of autonomous, unpredictable or anthropomorphic behaviour. These machines may be mechanical, electronic, software-based or a combination of all three. They are constructed using the following rules:
No decoration.
Improvised rather than designed.
Salvaged materials.
Obsolete over current.
Hardware over software
Thematically my work is based around our complex relationship with technology – specifically the politics of control & ownership, glitches and data corruption as metaphors for creativity and human language. My current projects include: hand built / hacked analogue video technology, wearable, embedded and haptic technologies.
Simon Bayliss
Simon Bayliss describes himself as an emerging artist and critic based in Devon. He writes for the Plymouth-based arts journal Nom de Strip, which covers the South West, and for the contemporary art magazine this is tomorrow, and works for KARST, an exhibition space in Plymouth. Bayliss features in Verfhond’s latest international biennial survey A Thousand Living Painters, and has been shortlisted for the Thames & Hudson publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow. SS Blue Jacket, a multi-generational group exhibition curated by Simon Bayliss and Lucy Stein, opens at KARST on 31 October 2013.
Anna Best
Anna Best has a process-based practice founded on an investigation into the local and particular, into narrative structures and the complicated process of making art with other people. Her work covers a range of media – publishing books, broadsheets and websites, and film and video as well as the ephemeral format of live events. She has collaborated with a number of artists including composer Paul Whitty on Vauxhall Pleasure (2004 and 2009) and curated events such as Road for the Future (2012). Projects have been made with Artlands North Kent, the Barbican Gallery, Danielle Arnaud, the Photographers’ Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and Tate Modern. Anna has taught at Goldsmith’s, Oxford Brookes, Central St Martins and Brighton University.
Naomi Frears
Naomi Frears is a visual artist based in the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives. Her practice is primarily concerned with drawing, painting and printmaking, although she is currently in the early stages of a project working with moving image and sound.
Nick Davies
Nick Davies is an artist, printer, and curator based in Exeter, Devon. His work spans a range of media and is often socially engaged and collaborative. It uses a critical yet humorous eye to approach topics around the way we view creativity, intelligence, value, and ‘the public’. The results often balance on the boundaries between art, performance, design, economics, and ecology.
Nick also curates two projects that use the printing process of risography. Duplicate Editions curates affordable risograph editions by emerging artists and Loophole Supplements commissions place-based zines distributed freely around Wales and the South West.
the-tuber.co.uk
loopholesupplements.org
duplicateeditions.co.uk
Bryony Gillard
Bryony Gillard is an artist and curator currently based in Bristol and Arnhem in the Netherlands. Situated somewhere between performance, sound, text and object, Bryony’s practice uses points of commonality, social norms or leisure activities as devices to explore relationships between artworks, narratives and experience.
Bryony is a director of Detroit, a new artist-led initiative investigating artistic research and residency in Bristol, and she was also a key member of a number of other critically engaged artist-led initiatives in the South West, including Project Space 11 and Come to Ours (Plymouth 2009-2012). She supports her practice by working as an assistant curator/curator with institutions such as Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Plymouth Art Centre and Arnolfini, Bristol. Bryony was recently accepted to the Dutch Art Institute and will study on the Master of Fine Arts programme until 2015.
Jesse Leroy Smith
Jesse Leroy Smith lives in Cornwall:
I grew up in suburban London, playing with a motley gang of boys and girls of all ages on estates and in Epping Forest. Many weekends my brother Lucian and I would stay with our Nanna, shopping in Brixton market and going to the Catholic Church. After studying painting at Norwich and the Royal Academy I had studios in East London, walking every day on Whipps Cross Common with my Battersea home dogs. Since moving to Penzance in 2000 with two young children, Cornwall has been an ideal place to make diverse art projects and curate sprawling shows and events in abandoned warehouses or public galleries.
Simon Morrissey
Simon Morrissey is Director of WORKS|PROJECTS, the commercial gallery he established in Bristol in November 2008, which represents a distinctive stable of British artists including Andy Holden, Heather & Ivan Morison and Richard Woods.
Simon is also co-Director of Foreground, the commissioning organisation he founded with Tabitha Clayson in 2007. Foreground realise temporary and permanent commissions in the South West of England, many in their home town of Frome, Somerset, that explore the relationship between art and its diverse settings and publics.
worksprojects.co.uk
foregroundprojects.org.uk
Beth Richards
Beth Richards is an artist based in Cornwall. She studied for a BA in Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London, followed by an MRes in Performance at Plymouth University. Her practice explores what it is to be a performer, and ideas of macho and the absurd, by engaging with sited, personal and fictive histories. She has recently participated in projects including: Understand Better at Biquini Wax, Mexico City; a fellowship to attend the SOMA, Mexico City summer residency; Cornwall Autonomous Zone’s Square Eyes at the Market Studios, Dublin and The Exchange, Penzance; Groaners at Videofag, Toronto; and To Arrive Where We Started as part of What We Have Done, What We Are About To Do at the CCA, Glasgow.
Beth is also involved with artist-led projects in the South West such as Project Space 11 and Come to Ours (Plymouth 2009-12).
Rachel Rose Smith
Rachel is in the third year of an AHRC-funded doctoral research project entitled ‘Connecting St Ives c.1948-60: Common ground and international exchange’ with Tate Britain and the University of York. Co-supervised by Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) and Michael White (University of York), her research aims to develop an understanding of art associated with St Ives by placing it within the context of international connectivity and co-participation. As part of her project, Rachel is also working towards an exhibition to be held at Tate St Ives next summer.
Oliver Sutherland
Born in Cornwall, Oliver Sutherland is a recent graduate of the Royal College of Art and currently lives and works between London, Bristol and Cornwall. Sited somewhere between virtual and physical, Sutherland’s practice examines the more esoteric languages of digital culture and digital processes. Boundaries between the creator or contributor and the tool or device are problematised using software and hardware. Content, tools and the user are seen not as independent forces but rather as a mass that continually shapes itself, propagating new elements.
Recent exhibitions include; Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship, Carroll/Fletcher, 2013; Chimera Q.T.E, Cell Projects, 2013; Hashfail , Open File, Grand Union, Birmingham, 2012; Sound Spill, an ongoing project by Haroon Mirza, Thom O’Nions and Richard Sides, Seventeen Gallery, 2012; Primo Anniversario, bubblebyte.org and The Sunday Painter, 2012; and Trade Routes, Part I, PiArts, Istanbul, 2011.
Participants in the first Cornwall Workshop emphasised the value of working with international colleagues, to extend the range of art practices and exhibition models discussed, increase international connectedness and provide opportunities for networking. A small number of international participants were again invited to participate in the Workshop, with the support of their own institutions and of overseas cultural agencies. The following curators accepted the invitation to participate:
Pedro de Llano
Pedro de Llano is an art historian and curator based in Santiago de Compostela. He is the coordinator of the Máster en Arte, Museología y Crítica Contemporáneas at the University of Santiago de Compostela and has been a visiting professor in other educational programmes, such as the MPAC (Oporto), PEI (Barcelona), and Otis Art Institute (Los Angeles).
His writing has been published in art magazines such as Exit Express (Madrid), Carta (Madrid), Afterall Online (London) and Texte zur Kunst (Berlin), and in La Vanguardia newspaper (Barcelona). He has published texts about artists including Tino Sehgal, Fernando José Pereira, Hans Schabus, John Knight, Sergio Prego, Maria Eichhorn, Stephen Prina and Mauro Cerqueira.
He curated the exhibition The Museum as Medium in collaboration with Pablo Fanego, at MARCO, Vigo and Koldo Mitxelena, San Sebastián (2008). In Search of the Miraculous: Thirty Years Later, focusing on Bas Jan Ader’s posthumous project, was presented at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela in 2010, and The Black Whale, about the sinking of the Prestige oil tanker in 2002, was shown at MARCO in Vigo in 2012. This year he has curated a project with Loretta Fahrenholz and Reena Spaulings at Bacelos Gallery in Madrid.
Pedro de Llano is currently preparing a book about Bas Jan Ader and collaborating with Dan Graham, Mauro Cerqueira and André Sousa on an exhibition of work by this New York conceptual artist to be held at the alternative space Uma Certa Falta de Coerência, in Oporto, during the autumn of 2013.
Sean Lynch
Sean Lynch is an Irish artist. Endeavouring to track down and investigate how histories are constructed and disseminated, Lynch investigates idiosyncratic moments from the past, perhaps almost forgotten, but which have left a trail of objects, events or narratives. He brings disparate threads of research together in photographic and slide projection installations, prefabricated or found artefacts and small-scale publications.
Lynch studied fine art at the Stadelschule, Frankfurt am Main. In recent years his work has been exhibited at Camden Arts Centre, London, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, along with solo exhibitions at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin and Modern Art Oxford. He is also author and editor of several publications.
Since 2006, along with Michele Horrigan, he has been involved in organising Askeaton Contemporary Arts, commissioning, producing and exhibiting contemporary art in the locale of a small town in County Limerick, Ireland.
seanlynchinfo.com
askeatonarts.com
seanlynchinfo.com/documents/ACircular2-WDSL.pdf.
Agnieszka Pindera
Agnieszka Pindera is a freelance curator based in Warsaw, Poland. She was a curator at the Centre of Contemporary Art (CoCA)in Toruń from 2008 to 2011 and from 2012/13 was co-curator (with Victoria Ivanova) of the artist-in-residence programme at ICF IZOLYATSIA, Platform for Cultural Initiatives, in Donetsk, Ukraine. This summer she was co-curator with Daniel Muzyczuk of Konrad Smoleński’s exhibition Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More in the Polish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Exhibition projects include: The Past Is a Foreign Country (with Aleksandra Kononiuk), CoCA, Toruń, 2010; The Melancholy of Resistance, Works from the Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (with Daniel Muzyczuk), CoCA, Toruń; Tag! Base! Hide & Seek (with Joanna van der Zanden), CoCA, Toruń, 2010; BWA, Tarnów, 2011; Berlegustopol (with Michał Woliński), Piktogram, Warsaw, 2011; Sugar in the Air (with Daniel Muzyczuk), for the Extraction: Projection programme at The Exchange, Penzance, in association with The Penzance Convention, 2012; Everyone Is Marco Polo, ZOO Gdańsk-Oliwa, 2012; and How One Becomes What One Is (with Marika Zamojska), BWA, Tarnów, 2013. She was the editor of the Practical Guide for Artists, 2012, and is a member of AICA.
Paola Santoscoy
Paola Santoscoy is a curator and writer on contemporary art based in Mexico City. She holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and is currently Director of the Museo Experimental el Eco in Mexico City (UNAM).
She has curated exhibitions in various exhibition spaces in Mexico City, including La Panadería (2000-2001), Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (2001-2003) and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (2004-2007). In 2005, together with Willy Kautz and Sebastián Romo, she intiated the 111 project (one day, one artist, one work). Exhibition projects include: Todo va a estar bien (2004); Jesús Rafael Soto, Visión en Movimiento (co-curated with Tatiana Cuevas, 2005); Come closer (2005); Outside In, Robin Minard (2006).
She has worked on curatorial projects and essays for international institutions such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, Germany), Fundación Proa (Buenos Aires, Argentina), GAMeC (Bergamo, Italy) and Piano Nobile (Geneva, Switzerland) and regularly contributes to contemporary art publications. In 2007 and 2008, she was curator of the Solo Projects section at Arco contemporary art fair in Madrid, Spain.
In 2010 she curated the exhibition The Nature of Things for the first Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Colorado, and in 2011 she was adjunct curator for the 8th Mercosul Biennial Essays in Geopoetics at Porto Alegre, Brazil. Recent curatorial projects include: Xilitla, a project by Melanie Smith and Rafael Ortega, (2010-2011), Visitas, Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (2012), Intemperie, Pablo Vargas Lugo (2012) and La Carga, Carmela Gross(2012).
Samuel Saelemakers
Samuel Saelemakers has been Assistant Curator at Witte de With since 2012. He holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Antwerp and an MA in Art Philosophy and Aesthetics from Université Paris IV-Sorbonne.
Saelemakers is currently working on Moderation(s), a long-term hybrid project by Heman Chong, unfolding between Witte de With, Rotterdam and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong. Earlier this year he co-organized an international research symposium on Speculative Art Histories, in collaboration with Erasmus University’s Centre for Art and Philosophy. Prior to joining Witte de With he was research assistant to the curator Jean-Hubert Martin and project assistant at SAM Art Projects, Paris.
Additional guests
Artists, curators and writers from the region were invited to join the Hamish Fulton walks on 19 and 20 October, and offered opportunities to participate in social events during the course of the Workshop.