Makers Award

I am delighted to have received the Makers Award from ARTStap. My work is featured on the site and will be included in the next issue of the magazine.

About ARTStap: “The ARTStap magazine is published 3 times yearly, it supports and engages with the work of leading and emerging international practitioners within their respected fields. It is a crossover between a contemporary critical journal and a magazine. Each issue features the work of invited artists aswell as recipients of the ARTStap AWARDS [Online Makers AWARD, Title AWARD & Open Submission AWARD]. Most work is seen from the perspective of the artist themselves alongside texts focusing on contemporary art and its relation to a wider artistic, theoretical and social context. “

Myth Making – Narrative as Art

Urban Myths regarding mental health
“Do you believe in mental illness”
I am collecting thoughts on this question to incorporate them in an artwork.
If you would like to take part, simply post your thoughts here All posts are anonymous. The work is in two parts, comments on mental illness and a video. I need participants to post to the blog, and to read a sentence to video camera.

Blog posts: if you want to take part, simply post your thoughts.
Posts are anonymous, no need to enter name email etc., to take part.
Video:  close-up shot of your mouth and eyes reading one sentence that was posted on the blog. I will be arranging a video session, if you are interested please let me know and I will forward time and location to you. Should only take 15 minutes of your time.

Remember When

Remember When is a visual and oral personal storytelling project conceived by Artist Alice Burns. The work aims to catch a glimpse of life in Northern Ireland before 1968 and to identify what people in Northern Ireland had/have in common through personal narrative and the photograph. Workshops available for groups email Alice Burns  for more information. You can also take part by emailing a photograph and story.

How to get involved

Find a photograph taken in 1968 or before, using a photograph will evoke memories, a place to start your story. Don’t worry about facts; this is your story and your truth. I used a photograph of myself taken in 1964 to help me focus on that time in my life. Find a quiet place and focus on that time, you can write down your story, or make a voice recording which ever you feel comfortable with. If you are making a voice recording, please save this as an mp3 file. If you would like to arrange a storytelling project for your group email Alice.

Myth Making

Urban Myths regarding mental health

“Do you believe in mental illness”
I am collecting thoughts on this question to incorporate them in an artwork. If you would like to take part, simply post your thoughts here All posts are anonymous.

A Hackerspace for mythmaking

I was invited to take part in  Paul Guzzardo’s workshop a hackerspace for mythmaking, part of the Ulster Festival of Art and Design.  I decided to construct a work based on the ‘Open Graph’ and Facebook. Face to facebook, a street performance was born.

For a full recap of the workshop and events that took place out of it follow the link Hackerspace for Myth-Making: THE RECAP

This weePLACE installation is an iPOD scaled docudrama. The dramatic content
is A Hackerspace For Myth-Making. Hackerspace was a design workshop. It was directed by Paul Guzzardo of the Geddes Institute for Urban Studies, in partnership with PLACE and the Ulster Festival of Art and Design. Hackerspace
ran from March 19-22, 2012 at PLACE. The workshop objective was: Generate “on the street prototypes” that intersect with web based social media applications. The Workshop focused on FACEBOOK’s “frictionless sharing applications”, and the impact those applications will have on the urban ecology (us and the city). Now What’s in that Cabinet: The budding Ipod content includes interviews, some street theater, and a remix stew. The interviews were of Facebook’s Director of Product Development Carl Sjogreen, and Vidar Brekke a technology brand strategist. Both men discussed the “open graph”. That’s Facebook’s architecture for “frictionless sharing”. Simply put, the graph’s morphology turns the internet from an index of pages into an index of people. The implications are profound.
In search friendship (profound or not) University of Ulster artist Alice Burns assembled a trunk of props and set up shop on Fountain street. She then began toying with her crush of new FB friends. Ciara O’Malley documented it all.
There’s also a video short by Ray McNally and Ivor Hession. The video logs the “page index”. It’s a dizzying snapshot, a running log of the pre-open graph world. It marks where we came from. It’s a sort of starting point, a place we might soon call “nostalgic” John D’Arcy and Christian Cherene programed a meta-graph to remix the open graph. It was used for the closing installation. They us gave a backgroundforeground visualization of “the new index” being generated by the open graph. We’re the “prop-like” foreground. The background is the BRAND. The brand is the standout.

And finally John and Christian have given us this wee Ipod installation.

paul guzzardo april 12, 2012

Experimental Film Belfast

I will be showing my experimental film, “Unspoken” at Film Experimental Belfast and Vibrations, Downpatrick. “Unspoken” is an experimental film exploring the themes of memory and personal narrative. The narrative is taken from a letter to a first love recalling the relationship and the intensity of both the emotional and physical joy, pain and the unspoken answer to a question asked many years later. Film Experimental Belfast – NI screenings 2012. ( textfilms 2012) Date: Thursday 5th April 2012. “Vibrations”, Downpatrick – 28th May 2012

Solo Exhibition – Loci of Memory

Solo exhibition (Loci of Memory) in March 2012 at Ards Arts Center, in the Sunburst Gallery. Opening on 1st March for one month.
Loci of memory is concerned with the preservation of memory within spatial environments, enabling the retention, recovery and [re] telling of individual and collective memory. This work is concerned with the exploration of the personal Loci of Memory of the artist. Utilising process and form to explore internal fragments of individual memories. And realising these in an external form using the languages of sculpture, image and sound.

At “22 or Hope Floats” is a two-part installation consisting of an embossed Triptych and a Music Box. My traumatic memory was translated into Braille. The embossed triptych represents this memory in a coded form. Braille was used to facilitate the composition of the musical work. Punched paper fed into a mechanical music box that is inside a plinth. The music is discordant, similar to how a traumatic memory may feel. In juxtaposition the music box also represents childhood memories and a sense of joy.

“Mrs Betty Watson”
Four vials of the cologne ‘4711’ contain the olfactory memory of my mother. The smell of the cologne exists like a hint in the space, a trace of my mother, tangible yet not tangible. This piece also represents the way in which we memorialise our mothers; it is placed and lit like a religious icon or relic.

“27 Life Events” This piece represents 27 major events in my life constructed in a language of knots. Each rope can only be read if the reader is in possession of the key to unlock the code. I constructed this language from three knots; different combinations of these three knots represent a letter of the alphabet.

“Family Snaps” 
This piece consists of 50 hand held slide viewers suspended from the celling at different levels; some of the images are accessible, others are not, representing the elusive nature of memory. Each viewer contains one of my family photographs. Memory is often elusive, and through family photographs we try to capture these moments and preserve them for the future.

At 22 or Hope Floats Music Box

27 Life Events

27 Life Events

At 22 or Hope Floats

Famil Snaps

Mrs Betty Watson

Family Snaps

Conference “Radius of Art”

Radius of Art conference at the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Berlin. We did two interventions, Kitchen table debate and Message Me. We also ran a speed presentation session, on the same format as a Petcha Kutcha. For videos of conference speakers follow the link  Videos On 8^th-9^th February 2012, the MA Art in Public students, staff and alumni Alice Burns, Ciara O’Malley, Julie Miller, Susanne Bosch and Fiona Whelan will attend the Conference “radius of art” Creative politicization of the public sphere Cultural potential forces for social transformation Heinrich Boell Foundation, Berlin Prominent participants of the conference with 250 invited delegates will be Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sarat Maharaj and David Haley. The MA Art in Public (Belfast) is invited to do two creative interventions and hosts a presentation session.Susanne Bosch will facilitate a workshop on ‘Evaluation criteria – How to measure art and culture projects’ and initiated a knowledge-sharing workshop with artists Alia Rayyan/Palestine and Fiona Whelan/Dublin on Practice as way to experience life: Artists engage in critical discussion about the primary issues that face their socially engaged practices’. The conference will further launch the book ‘Comparison of Public Art’ with contributions from Rainer W. Ernst KIEL (ed), Mirene Arsanios BEIRUT, Susanne Bosch BELFAST, Elfriede Mueller and Martin Schönfeld BERLIN, Marcus Graf ISTANBUL, Jürgen Bock LISBON, Tina Sherwell RAMALLAH Further information can be found on: Radius of Art: http://www.radius-of-art.de/conference/index-e.php MA Art in Public: http://masterartinpublic.wordpress.com Follow us also on Facebook

Loci of Memory

I am translating my personal narrative into 3D language for my exhibition Loci of Memory. Before it can be made as a sculpture I need to translate from the English Alphabet into knots used by the Incas in Quipu. My first sentence goes like this:

9 long knot
figure of eight knot
single knot plus 9 long knot
2 long knot
single knot plus 5 long knot
single knot plus 8 long knot
single knot plus 4 long knot

The second sentence goes like this
single knot plus 9 long knot
two single knots
figure of eight knot
single knot plus 8 long knot
two single knots
5 long knot
4 long knot
single knot plus 6 long knot
single knot plus 8 long knot
9 long knot
single knot plus 3 long knot
single knot plus 8 long knot
two single knots plus 5 long knot
single knot plus 9 long knot
3 long knot
8 long knot
single knot plus 5 long knot
single knot plus 5 long knot
single knot plus 2 long knot

Exhibition ‘No Jury No Prizes’

I was sent an invitation to take part in this, GIBSMIR Zurich.

The title “No Jury, No Prices” was taken from the constitution of the Society of independent Artists, that organized 1917 a non jury exhibition in NY. In the spirit of this free and open gesture to see and show art, we see an analogy to the Kunstszene ZÜRICH, that takes place this year in the Zollfreilager.

Under the title NO JURY NO PRIZES, we plan on one side to screen sentences related to their works by national and international artists. In an open call, we invite artists to write a short description of their work in a few sentences ( max 500 signs) directly to our GIBSMIR website. The gathering of this endless text about art will be screened onto monitors at the TreFFpunkt, Halle C at Kunstszene Zürich. At the same time, we will organize a GIBSMIR Karaoke. In our view, the motto there is NO JURY, NO PRIZES as well.