ARTISTS TALKING

# 16 [25 August 2008]

Last day of THE UNDERCROFT today. 2-5.30pm

Tomorrow we have four days before the gallery is needed for another event. All hands on deck.

From the 20th of September Vincent Mauger has a huge new sculptural installation at the Espace d’exposition des Instants Chavres, Brasserie Bouchoule, 2 rue Emile Zola, 33100 Montreuil, Paris. 

Gavin Peacock will be showing his stereoscopic cloud films at the Permanent Gallery, Bedford Place, Brighton BN1 2PT 12-24th September www.themanfromicon.com

The Incommensurable Banner by swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn is the next exhibition at Fabrica. It is part of the forthcoming Brighton Photo Biennial and starts on 3rd October until 16th November. www.bpb.org.uk

Holed Up in the Grey Area, 31 Queens Rd, Brighton BN13XA is a selection of my photographs showing the vain attempts by high street banks to plug gaps left in their buidings by the ad hoc removal of redundant ATMs. 3-19th October. www.thegrey-area.blogspot.com/

# 15 [22 August 2008]

Fabrica, as an ex church, lends itself well to sound and music events. So we took the opportunity to keep THE UNDERCROFT open each Thursday until eight and invite acoustic performers in to perform for the last hour. A break in the  routine for the volunteer invigilators who have to keep an eye on the gallery all day. It brought in different groups of people to experience the work and was a chance for accidental viewers, out for a summer evening strole around the centre of Brighton to wander into something that they might not expect. All doors were open, the sounds and sight of a focussed audience drew people in.

Even for me the events felt like something unpredicted. Low key encounters you come across on sultry evenings deep in the orchard after the harvest has been brought in. Kirsten Norrie with Capt H. Morgan on acccordian played out three very moving and disconcerting breathing and groaning rituals on the floor under the sculpture. Max Sweatman and her partner Bill duelled with their hurdy gurdies,  beautiful instruments which originate in rural France so it felt fitting with the sculpture. Barbara Keal invited fellow members of her choir along to watch her make and perform with her acoustic pots. That Barbara is eight and a half months pregnant visually balanced some of the larger pots and added to the dramatic tension. Vitamin B12 used the hour to set up, sound check their ad hoc instruments, then left. I really enjoyed all of them.

# 14 [19 August 2008]

The physical and mental space that Fabrica occupies is an important resource in Brighton city centre. Even though I live round the corner it has taken me a long time to realise how critical this is.  Having somewhere central that is dry, warm and stimulating is crucial to my cultural life, particularly if it is also somewhere that it is possible to put on events that in the short term wouldn’t be seen as commercial viable.
The Undercroft exhibtion has made it possible to put on four talks by four sculptors each of which have been attended by about thirty interested people. The discussions, before and afterwards, in Fabrica and in the pub were socially as important as the talks.

Vincent Mauger gave his thoughts that lay behind THE UNDERCROFT and where it sits along side his other work. David Parfitt explained how he proposed to intoduce the concept of the gift into his role as animateur during the exhibition and showed us his model, Little Fabrica, that enabled everyone to apprecate the satisfaction of creating large scale sculptures, without large scale construction problems. Jo Lathwood illustrated the process involved and showed work from her three month ‘Coup de Pouce’ residency at the L’H du Siege in Valenciennes. Gavin Peacock told how his Flat Pack idea had spawned sculptures, Mail Art, 3D film and glider building.

sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/432285
creative-process.com/

sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/423070
www.jolathwood.co.uk

www.themanfromicon.com/

# 13 [11 July 2008]

At last, we have finished the construction of THE UNDERCROFT. It is open to view, until 25th August. It looks as impressive as was hoped and everyone seems to enjoy it’s splendor. A magic mountain and a leafy glade in one huge sculpture, filling the gallery with abstracted shadows and the smell of wood. 

It took seven of us two weeks. Building it went pretty much according to our precarious schedule but it was incredibly physically hard work. One week later I am still completely knackered, a husk of my former self, and I was doing the easy work. 

We split the work into three teams. One with Vincent; drawing and cutting each piece, the second constructing, destroying and reconstructing our full size working maquette, the third team, up and down scaffolding piecing together the final sculpture. An assembly line in Fabrica’s nave, a large place that became a small, cramped world of it’s own whilst everyone worked away, jeux sans frontier style. 

What amazed me, and continues to intrigue me, is that Vincent kept all the complexities of the design and structural considerations in his head. It may look like CAD but Vincent did, literally, make a freehand drawing, not with a computer but with wood. Taking each identical sheet as it came, he decided what shape it should be cut to and then hours, even days later, he was able to remember exactly where the piece went in the temporary model and the final sculpture. Through this process, slowly a beautiful structure emerged. Sheets of wood going in one end, big sculpture coming out the other. Making THE UNDERCROFT was a group exercise in trusting a vision.

THE UNDERCROFT, an in situ sculpture by Vincent Mauger is at Fabrica, 40 Duke St Brighton BN1 1AG. 5 July-25 August. Wed-Sat 11.30-5.30 Sun and Bank Holiday 2-5.30

# 12 [19 June 2008]

Vincent has sent plans for the structure and instructions as to how he would like to build it. These images look fantastic but the next fortnight will be a knackering slog, guaranteed.

Preparing the publicity I’ve been having strange flashbacks to Dominique De Beir’s exhibition last summer. It finished with a weekend of demolition. An eager group ripping down her cardboard construction, the wreckage left for public examination for the final two days of the show. Photographs show me leaning on a broom, smugly surveying the destruction, a distinct hint of megalomaniac German Romantic Hero looking over a mountain landscape. Once you get this matrix into your head it’s hard to remove. Vincent’s earlier drawings and his recent studies for The UNDERCROFT are beginning to remind me of Casper David Freidrich’s painting of Icebergs. The end of last years summer exhibition morphing into the start of this years.

www.allposters.fr/-sp/The-Wanderer-Above-the-Sea-o...

www.allposters.com/-sp/The-Polar-Sea-1824-Posters_...

# 11 [6 June 2008]

For the duration of THE UNDERCROFT exhibition David Parfitt will be animateur in residence. David is a stimulating figure, provoking warm-hearted discussions and providing heaps of obscure information in his wake. As part of his sculptural practice he would like to introduce the writings of anthropologist Marcel Mauss specifically The Gift and Heuretics by Greg Ulmer into the exhibition. It was David that suggested that THE UNDERCROFT be seen as a glade, a clearing in the wood and that his work place be a campfire by the rock at the mouth of a cave. His residency will add another, lateral and enjoyable element to the show. He has already started writing a blog documenting the course of the residency.

http://sites.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/si...

# 10 [30 May 2008]

At the moment Vincent Mauger has an exhibition at the Frac in Carquefou on the outskirts of Nantes. I can’t quite figure out whether a Frac is the gallery or the regional arts organisation, most likely both. An institution with a home base.

Vincent presents a whole collection of new pieces. When he is on a roll, Vincent really churns out top quality work. His focus on the single point of enquiry is teaching me a lot. It makes me very aware of my own scattergun approach to art work and living, the very opposite of the cool and calculated approach deemed successful in the commercial world.

The Frac link is www.fracdespaysdelaloire.com/

Also interesting on the same site are the International Workshops residencies held for a couple of months each summer since 1986. They seem to have finished for now but the studios and what they were offering sound like just the tonic needed.

# 9 [25 April 2008]

Probably because of stress or administrative convenience it is all too easy to hold onto an exhibition, keep the plan close to your chest or within a small clique, bouncing one or two obvious ideas backwards and forwards but not getting much further than that. So in the past week I have made two presentations about THE UNDERCROFT. I wanted to hear different angles and views about Vincent’s work, to give a wider group of people a chance to swill the whole thing around, throw in their ideas before the programme is decided and the brochure written. Once the publicity goes to the printers, even with the new communication technologies, an exhibition tends to be set unerringly on course. That’s it! An immovable, and unalterable, cultural feast.

Preparing the powerpoint made me realise how disciplined, how focussed Vincent is in his practice and how much work he has done as a result. I had been thinking that Vincent was influenced by those sketchy, green hill far away scenes that lie behind the crucifixion in classical renaissance paintings or the contemporary version, the unsubtle backgrounds used to give computer gamers their slim foothold on reality. Now I realise that he is wresting with modern materials and media to create a similar illusion of depth and space. I suppose that is stating the obvious to sculptors.

I spent the week deliberately avoiding using the words Explored and Investigated.

Unexpectedly, I did come across the enclosed image; one of a series of prints produced by Vincent last year. It sums up for me, using the most basic of 2D materials, what Vincent’s work, and THE UNDERCROFT is about. 

# 8 [7 April 2008]

Over the past few day I have been nipping into Fabrica to discuss the logistics of The Undercroft exhibition. Shockingly, rather than the usual hum of admin and low level art discussions, everyone was fervently talking about past crimes and criminality. Partly this is because the exhibition that starts this weekend concerns forensic science but also because all offices run along at quite a tepid, mundane level and that crime is exciting and gets the collective adrenalin going.

Even if we were driven to distraction by it at the time, fifteen years later it feels somehow refreshing to hear an argument about the relative merits of the differing evidences used against Rose West.

Let the imagination loose on the facts. More Crime Exhibitions Now.

'Indelible: every contact leaves a trace' starts this Saturday, 12th April and runs until 18th May.

http://www.fabrica.org.uk

# 7 [27 March 2008]

The designs for the sculpture have a church architecture feel to them. The whole project will be quite a complicated piece of engineering, whilst discussing these complexities Mathew Miller announced that it was most definitely an undercroft. He just plucked the word from the ether, didn’t blink. Great sounding, very juicy rich, very medieval English, very not a contemporary art exhibition but what did it mean? An arch vaulted basement underneath a church. A precise description of Vincents drawings and a perfect title for this exhibition. The perfectest, just there, just like that. What a relief. These things normally get chucked around for weeks, getting progressively worse and more drab. The printer, or rather John, the guy that designs the publicity usually having to make a desperate, deadline necessitated decision. For me a good title for an exhibition, a band, a novel is almost as important as the work itself. It is a cue from which other things can be bounced off. A succulent word or phrase also helps me with writing and talking about the exhibition. You don’t want something you have to cringe behind, you want to play with something you can enjoy. THE UNDERCROFT. THE UNDERCROFT, hurrah.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercroft