Video Interviews from Folkestone Triennial 2014: Lookout

10/09/14

Folkestone Triennial: Lookout

30 August – 2 November 2014

For the third edition of this bustling summer exhibition, curator Lewis Biggs has invited a selection of internationally renowned and local artists to produce 21 new art works in response to specific sites across town. Indoors and out, they rejuvenate existing locations and create new community spaces. From Baroque-style lighthouse-beach huts to camping bases jutting out from the highest point of the tallest hotel in town; from the soundtrack of a sobbing woman to a plexiglass and neon hop garden. This is a festival where no stone has been left unturned.

Studio International went on a coastal tour and managed to speak to a number of those involved, both artists and organisers.

To watch the video interviews, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/folkestone-triennial-lewis-biggs-alastair-upton-artists-interviews

Alastair Upton is Chief Executive of The Creative Foundation, an independent visionary arts charity, seeking to rejuvenate Folkestone through creative activity. As well as restoring more than 90 buildings in the Creative Quarter and building the Quarterhouse arts venue, they are also the people behind the Triennial and its lasting legacy of permanent art works around town. Upton speaks to us about the changes he has seen in Folkestone, thanks to the Foundation, and about how community projects and art works, such as the creation of Payers Park, leave their mark.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/alastair-upton-creative-foundation-folkestone-triennial-interview

Lewis Biggs is this year’s Curator, invited to join the Triennial after 11 years as Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Liverpool Biennial. He was also Director of Tate Liverpool from 1990-2000. Biggs speaks to us about the challenges of working with “real life” and how he sees his role as curator.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/lewis-biggs-curator-folkestone-triennial-interview

Fresh from his incredible journey with Nowhereisland, Alex Hartley speaks to us from his lookout atop the Grand Burstin Hotel. With a vigil being held for the duration of the Triennial, we were lucky enough to experience the view on a wonderfully sunny day. 

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/alex-hartley-vigil-folkestone-triennial-interview

Jyll Bradley, a native of Folkestone, has returned to the town to create a wonderful homage to the Kentish hop gardens with which she grew up. Her work invites viewers to walk among the strings and green plexiglass and neon poles and to enjoy three very different views across town. Constructed on the site of the old gasworks, the circular form also makes reference to the gasometer that once stood in this place.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/jyll-bradley-green-light-for-mr-folkestone-triennial-interview

Pablo Bronstein, whose Sketches for Regency Living graced the walls of the ICA this summer, has brought to life a sculpture based on the ideas of 18th century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. A grey beach hut, next to an empty container, with a non-functioning lighthouse extending above – Bronstein explains to us why he hates beach huts and all things about them.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/pablo-bronstein-beach-hut-folkestone-triennial-interview

Emma Hart’s work is full of anxiety. Located in an empty domestic space on Tontine Street, it fills the rooms with outlines of glasses, remnants of a party, and video screens which scream out, both in desolation and invitation. Hart feels under pressure but takes the time to talk to us about how this manifests.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/emma-hart-folkestone-triennial-interview

rootoftwo’s work also responds to anxiety, but by measuring social media and people’s response to and production of fear on the Internet. Five whithervanes, at locations across town, spin and light up in different colours according to the messages they are picking up. The artists explain to us how the system works and how visitors – and even those across the globe – can interact and have an impact on the whithervanes’ activity.

http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/rootoftwo-whithervanes-folkestone-triennial-interview

To watch all of the video interviews as one show, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/folkestone-triennial-lewis-biggs-alastair-upton-artists-interviews

Past, Present, Future: Photography in Berlin

As published in issue 15 of State/F22 (Sept/Oct 2014)

Finding Vivian Maier. A Film by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel

As published in issue 15 of State/F22 magazine (Sept/Oct 2014)

Preview: In the City at Lion and Lamb

As published in issue 15 of State magazine (Sept/Oct 2014)

Profile: Lubomirov Easton and Deptford Enclave

As published in State issue 15 (Sept/Oct 2014)

Artist Profile: Aileen Kelly

08/09/14

Artist Profile: Aileen Kelly

Aileen Kelly’s works are processual. Everything is in a state of becoming – or maybe unbecoming. Her found objects – appropriated and adapted, displaced and dismantled, stratified and suspended. One mattress with its covering peeled off, coated in a shabby, careworn felt; another exploded with its springs on show, a jack-in-the-box, a ribcage, somehow exposed, raw and vulnerable, yet strong and offering support – stripped down to discover what is inside: the essence and the essential.

Her Sculpture Drawings are like blueprints: tentative structures made out of fabric-wrapped posts in fragile, midway states. Neither one thing nor the other, they quiver and quaver, resting like a lean-to, reaching like a sapling. Frames or portals, leading from the past to the future, circumventing the present. They carry a sense of the familiar, yet are uncannily dissociated. Memorials to something lost, but to what? Feminine somehow, both in their fabrication and tentative presence, their silence and unimposing stance. They offer mere suggestions, nothing is concrete, but every gesture is made with intent.

Kelly’s Stitch Drawings speak in the same tone. Reincarnating images of trauma, stitched on to cloth or paper, showing tangled threads, fractured lines and obliterated identities. Some are projected up large on to white walls, shadowing down upon us, heavy yet weightless. Incomplete outlines, their souls might seem to drain away into the void. Worked up from specific media images, they could, nonetheless, be any child, any parent, any loved one. ‘Do I have the right?’ Kelly muses, visibly concerned at her trespassing into someone else’s private realm, private grief. But, as a mother, she grieves for the loss of others, memorialising one, memorialising many.

Saving every remnant, Kelly has recently turned to collage and printmaking, recycling scraps and cut offs, once again breathing new life into other people’s waste materials. For her, nothing is without worth. Everything offers a haunting reminder of the transience of existence, a subtle metaphor for the fragility of structures upon which we rely. Everything will have its turn once again in the greater process known as life.

Artist's website: aileenkelly.co.uk 

Images:

All © the artist

Let Down  

2014   

180cm x 105cm  

Upholstered wood in pinstripe fabric, fabric lengths

Watch
2012
150cm x 200cm

Fabric wall drawing with black pinstripe cloth

(i) 

2013   

40cm x 30cm  

Linen, pinstripe fabric, cotton stitch

Interview with Edward Burtynsky

04/09/14

Interview with Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky: Watermark

Edward Burtynsky (b.1955) is a Canadian photographer and filmmaker, known for his large-format photography of natural and industrial landscapes and the crossover points between humankind and nature. His latest project, focusing on water in all its aspects, has led to an exhibition, a book, and a feature documentary film.

Anna McNay: How was it for you, as a photographer, working in collaboration with two other people – co-director Jennifer Baichwal and producer Nicholas de Pencier – to make the film? Clearly you’re behind the still photography, but were you responsible for the moving imagery as well?

Edward Burtynsky: When I started the Water project, for the first two years, it was very much just me and one other assistant, because I was trying to block out the central ideas and figure them out visually. I worked through the stills, and once I had maybe 60-70% of the themes confirmed, with visuals to support them, we came in with the film crews and started to expand on that. I was only directly responsible for maybe 5-10 minutes of the film footage with my own camerawork. Largely, it was Nick [de Pencier], who is a cameraman as well as a producer. I would show him an image that I’d picked and ask him to work with the technologies to bring that image into film. I wasn’t behind the actual camera, but I was choosing the subject matter and the frames and then having the camera take them.

AMc: Jennifer [Baichwal] has spoken about the need to be in a place in an authentic way and to convey that authenticity. How do you go about ensuring this when you’re carrying a large amount of equipment and presumably don’t always speak the language?

EB: We ran into some real obstacles in India, trying to get some high vantage points for the Kumbh Mela festival. There were 30 million people there on one day and we wanted to really try and get that sense of what 30 million people trying to bathe in one spot looked like. We wanted to get up high but they were afraid of all our technology. We had remote helicopters and a 50 foot pole. They wouldn’t let us use the tools that we wanted or put them in the places that we wanted, so it was a real struggle. Generally, however, we tend to be there long enough so that those who we’re engaging with almost forget that we’re there. You’re just there, rolling. Eventually they forget you’re there and they say something or do something. You wouldn’t get that with traditional film. The new medium of digital video has opened up the potential to really be there with the subject until the camera disappears.

To read the rest of this interview, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2014/09/watermark/

Interview with Laura Jean Healey

29/08/14

Interview with Laura Jean Healey 

Laura Jean Healey is an artist-filmmaker who works with holographic film to produce haunting and powerful pieces, where the presence of the actor is strongly felt in the room with the audience. The Siren (2012), shot underwater in one sequence, is perhaps the most striking of all of her works to date.

Anna McNay: We met at the beginning of the year when your film, The Siren (2012), was being exhibited in the Winter Pride Art Exhibition. I then came to experience it to its full effect at the Musion Das Hologram studios. How did you come to be working in this way? What led you to Musion?

Laura Jean Healey: I originally contacted Musion late 2008. I had an idea about creating an installation, using life-like projections that would only exist within the plane of a large – floor to ceiling – mirror. A friend recommended looking into the Victorian theatre trick, Pepper’s Ghost. At the time, Musion was offering a free course introducing students to their digital reworking of Pepper’s Ghost and allowing them to experiment with their EX3 camera to create small holographic art projects. During the course, I became friends with the course leader (and now art director), Oliver Gingrich. It was Oliver who introduced my work to the directors of the company.

I then got another film job and went to work as a camera trainee on the feature film Gulliver’s Travels, where I got to work extensively with the Panavision Genesis, the camera that Musion favour for high profile projects. I had kept in touch with Oliver and was asked back to assist on a music shoot. Will-I-Am and Cheryl Cole had just released their single, 3 Words, and were supposed to be performing at a German music awards ceremony. Unfortunately, Will-I-Am was going to be touring with the Black Eyed Peas when the event was due to take place, so we filmed him performing his half of the duet and then he was projected on to the stage, next to Cole, who performed live at the event. The shoot went well and I was asked to work on several international projects, including the holographic film installation – in which a Ballerina turns into a crystal swan and then explodes into butterflies – for the Yota after show party for the premiere of Mikhailovsky’s Swan Lake at the London Coliseum; filming Portuguese music artists for the holographic stage at the Optimus Alive Festival 2010; consulting on the very first holographic opera, Telesio, for the Italian composer Franco Battiato; and assisting on the Burberry Body installation, directed by Mario Testino, at London Fashion Week 2011.

Since then, I have been working on my own projects and funding my practice by working in the film industry as a camera technician.

To read the rest of this interview, please go to:  http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2014/08/the-siren/