ARTISTS TALKING

Living in a rural location can foster a strong DIY culture. Artists often have to innovate to survive and create their own supportive structure for contemporary practice. As exemplified in our first review of ‘Morel’ June events, published in the August issue, this artist-led network is a great example of this energy having initiated a programme of site-responsive work across an entire region.

On the windswept Lizard Peninsula the ‘Happidrome’ project reanimated the site of an ex-World War Two radar station. Elizabeth Masterton was inspired by patriotic rhetoric and the ‘sprit of the Blitz’ attitude of former service personnel. She installed a bicycle in the darkest corner of a bunker, wired it up to a motor and more than 400 incandescent bulbs. The cyclist’s exertion was rewarded as the bulbs ignited the triumphantly comforting message: “There’ll always be an England”.

Upsetting notions of environmental sensitivity with the full support of English nature, Alison Sharkey bandaged and painted a dying tree to imitate ‘dazzle’ camouflage. She went on to build a replica of the ancient Dry Tree Menhir ₁ and sheathed the original in garish purple and flouro-yellow silk.

This iconoclastic spirit reappeared in the show ‘Selected Bibliography’ at the independent Morrab Library in Penzance, where Alexandra Zierle and Paul Carter used performance to enact an isolated and self-absorbed compulsion to digest knowledge. The couple picked sheets of paper from a leather-bound desk and pressed them to their inked-up lips, all the while enunciating silent words, their gestures shifting from something rhythmic to the edge of violence.

Steven Paige, whose ‘How-to’ kits rely on public participation, created The Library, deconstructing the collection and catalogue as expressions of political or personal bias. Paige generated his own bureaucracy, then empowered the participant to adapt it to his/her needs, by creating their ideal library.

‘Dot dot dash’, a show at Portcurno Telegraph Museum, was less successful. This was the site of the first undersea cables connecting up the British Empire and is marketed as the home of the “Victorian Internet”. Vast underground tunnels house the collection of telegraphy machines and would have provided an ideal context for work such as Jacqueline Knight’s super-8 film installation, To Me To You, which relays alternating images of bat and ball as a conversation in Morse. But it appeared as if the work had been relegated to the Education Room, an uncompromising white space, thus decontextualising what could have been an inspiring site-specific show.

There were no such restrictions at ‘gostopgo’, a four-week residential challenge for artists to create work together in a disused school, leading to a public exhibition each weekend. The first installation, a forest of pastel-hued gibbets, nooses and netball hoops was like Kafka let loose in Toyland. As if speaking of an ominous black disc suspended from the ceiling, artist Chris Miller described the show as “a punctuation mark” and stressed the importance of the process of collaboration that preceded it.

Further highlights of ‘More’ included Alexis Zelda Stevens’ Encounter. Based at W15a, Redruth, it comprised a video of dance projected onto assemblage. The viewer was integrated into the installation, as multiple perspectives of the artist’s body were fragmented across the wall and her 3-D collage. Stevens welcomed the conversations that developed from exhibiting in an intimate artist’s space. By contrast Patrick Lowry played with the notion of unwelcome intervention in the institution by building the completely convincing life-size replica Escalator at the local government offices in Truro.

‘More’ developed as a series of artist-led exhibitions, but its effectiveness for the artists themselves has been radical, allowing for cross-fertilisation of ideas across a wide geographical area. There have been calls for the level of critical debate in Cornwall to be raised, in an attempt to stem the migration of artists to urban centres. However, critical debate will not develop as an abstract dialogue, but in conjunction with living practice, where artists can challenge, support and inspire one another.

www.morecornwall.org

₁ A standing stone. See www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/243/dry_tree_menhir.html for details