Uncanny Landscapes and Material Mediums

THE WILDERNESS IS JUST BEYOND THE SHED

Never Afraid 9 - The Woods 

A rather uncanny start to March...

Firstly: Uncanny Landscapes

I'l be showing some of my Never Afraid paintings at The Centre for Creative Collaboration as part of the Uncanny Landscapes exhibition and conference.

The show opens on Monday 4th March when you can also hear me discuss these works as part of a series of artists talks the same evening.

4th-8th March 2013, The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street,, London, WC1X 9NG

with: Dr Mariela Cvetić, Niklas Fanelsa, Sophie Hoyle, Dr Rachel Sarah Jones, David Kendall, Phil Legard, Luke Pajak, Sarah Sparkes, Annie Stogdale & Roz Marsten, Lisa Tilder

Mon 4th March

2:00 PM – 5:00 PM Artist Talks
6:00 PM – 9:00 PM Exhibition Opening

Never Afraid 9 - Roman Road

Never Afraid. This maxim crops up a lot in my work and has it’s roots in an oral history, passed on to me by my mother and grandmother. I grew up in the suburbs, right on the messy edges, where the new build advanced into the ruins of an old stud farm with its patches of damp looking small holdings and rusting barns. The neat gardens ended abruptly at a line of ancient woodland; sheds were the last out-posts between the lawns and the undergrowth. To step off the trimmed edge of an immaculate lawn was to take a plunge into the darkness and tangle of the woods. Domestic comfort and safety was soon out of sight; here one could be ambushed by wild gangs of children, followed by lone, furtive looking adults or glimpse flesh moving mysteriously amongst the rhododendron bushes. 

Never Afraid 3 -still from a cursed movie I

As a child, this suburban ‘Heart of Darkness’ found its way into many of my dreams and later, as an adult, into my artwork. Over the past decade, as part of a body of work titled ‘Never Afraid’, I have been making a series of small, intense paintings about these transitional landscapes. The paintings are usually shown as part of an assemblage or installation. Their intimate scale engenders a solitude through which the viewer can participate in this private world. Painted with the maxim Never Afraid – a reference to talismans and incantations, such as the ‘Bless This House’ samplers which attempt to project the domestic space against the foreboding of omnipresent danger – these landscapes, both enticing and menacing, banal and fantastical serve as a reminder that the wilderness is only just beyond the shed 

Secondly:

‘The Medium is the Messenger’  

I'll be participating in a roundtable discussion hosted by *Birgitta Hosea at The Lethaby Gallery at Central Saint Martins

Wednesday 6th March 3-4pm

This is in conjunction with the exhibition: 'Making Knowledge: Researching at Central St Martins.

Birgitta has participated in two GHost exhibitions with her peformance 'Medium'. She has also given a talk about Victorian woman mediums and her own practice at Hostings 9.  Documentation of the work 'Medium' is currently on show in The Lethaby Gallery.

*Birgitta Hosea is a Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of MA Character Animation at Central Saint Martins.

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
Granary Square
N1C 4AA London
United Kingdom

GHost News - Reproductions and GHost Comrades

Two pieces of exciting news from my visual arts and research project GHost:

 Firstly Hostings 10 - A Haunted Reproduction...

After years tied to the University of London, GHost is now wandering the earth and may turn up anywhere!
First up we'll be at  Domobaal gallery - not too far from our old home - with a special Hostings for Sharon Kivland's wonderful exhibition Reproductions II

GHost presents: Hostings 10 - A Haunted Reproduction

February 16^th, 5.30 – 7.00pm

DOMOBAAL

3 JOHN STREET  LONDON WC1N 2ES 

T +442072429604 M +447801703871

DOMOBAAL.COM  

Between 5.30-7.00pm, in response to Sharon Kivland's exhibition, Sarah Sparkes of GHost invites Birgitta Hosea, Peter Suchin and Sarah Wood to interrogate ideas pertaining to 'haunting' in both Kivland's work and the gallery space itself. This evening's Hosting will initiate an apocryphal archiving of Reproductions II – an immaterial revenant to haunt the invited guests.

Birgitta Hosea is a digital artist, and Research Leader for Performance and Course Director of M.A. Character Animation at CSM. Her current work investigates photographic manipulation and theatricality in Victorian Spirit Photography and mediumistic performances.

Peter Suchin is an artist and critic, contributing to Art Monthly, Frieze, The Guardian, and many other journals.

Sarah Sparkes is an artist, curator and researcher.  She leads the GHost project. Initiated in 2008, GHost provides a supporting platform enabling invited guests to visually and conceptually manifest and interrogate the idea of the ghost.

Sarah Wood is Senior Lecturer at The School of English, University of Kent. She is Managing Editor of The Oxford Literary Review and a founder of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

'GHost Hostings 10:  A Haunted Reproduction' will be part of a day of closing events on Saturday 16th February for Sharons Kivland's exhibition Reproductions II.  Places are limited and must be reserved in advance.  Please email the gallery if you wish to attend:  INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM

On the final afternoon of Sharon Kivland’s exhibition Reproductions II

We cordially invite you to an afternoon of select walking tours, discussions, book presentations and hauntings,

these events are all free however numbers are strictly limited and places must be reserved on a first come basis: 

please contact the gallery. INFO@DOMOBAAL.COM 

Secondly, a new call for two new Hostings GHost is moving in a new direction, the GHosts of the past can take us into the future as a unifying force - ghost comrades!!

GHost-dance: ghosts as cultural and political movement

GHost Hostings 11 and 12 a call for submissions

Call for papers, presentations, performance and dance for an interdisciplinary seminar and performance event – the so-called 'GHost Hostings'.   Hostings 11 and 12 take the GHost project's research in a new direction. 

Deadline for submissions – March 16th

The Hostings are supported by the Centre for Performance at CSM, University of the Arts.

Venue:  CSM, University of the Arts, Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London, N1C 4AA

Dates:        17th April, 6pm - 9pm – LVMH Lecture Theatre

                   21st May, 6pm – 9pm – Studio Theatre (dance and performance space)

“Standing on the hill where so many people were buried in a common grave, standing there in that cold darkness under the stars, I felt tears running down my face. I can’t describe what I felt.  I heard the voices of the long-dead ghost dancers crying out to us.”

(Leonard Crow Dog, during the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee, 1973).

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, self proclaimed prophet Wovoka, of the Paiute people, became the figure-head for the Ghost Dance - a religious movement adopted by a significant number of the Native American Nations. Central to this belief was a communal ritualised dance, inducing a trance state, in which it was believed the souls of the dead and living would be reunited and their land returned to them. In the 1970s the Ghost Dance was revived as part of the Red Power Movement, with the activists group AIM (American Indian Movement) at its forefront, fighting for Native American civil rights. The ghost in the Ghost Dance was a revitalising force for a people whose land and loved ones had been taken from them and who were facing cultural genocide.

The Spiritualist movement in nineteenth century U.S.A provided a forum in which women, whose role in society was very much surpressed, could give voice to their opinions in a public arena. Appeals for women’s emancipation and the abolition of slavery could be expressed under the guise of a ghost voice, allegedly channelled through the medium.

At the same time in Europe, in the opening sentences of Marx and Engle’s Communist Manifesto, “A Spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.” Communism could be said to have been conceptualised as a powerful ghostly presence, waiting to materialise and take shape within the living as a force for revolutionary change.

GHost is seeking proposals for thirty minute papers, performances, performative presentations, contemporary or traditional dance and ritual performance encompassing all disciplines and fields of interest.

Submissions may address, but not be restricted to, one or more of the following:

·Ghosts as a political or cultural voice within marginalised or disenfranchised communities.

·The embodying of ghosts within ritual and performance to instigate socio-cultural or political change.

·Ghosts as a healing and unifying presence within marginalised cultural groups or genders.

·The appropriation of the ghost-dance, and other forms of spirit–possession, within contemporary art.

·The ghost narrative as a political device within rhetoric, writing, film, visual art or popular culture (fiction and non-fiction).

Please send a (working) title and an abstract of approximately 300 - 400 words, a brief biography and, if applicable, a couple of photographs or links to film clips documenting your performance or dance.

Please send submissions to Sarah Sparkes and Aldworth Howard at:

ghost.hostings@gmail.com

www.ghosthostings.co.uk

www.host-a-ghost.blogspot.com