Spectral Visitations

Thanks to our spectral visitors at Absent But Not Forgotten: 2 last Sunday - here is a link to the gallery of Polaroid images we shot on the night!

Absent But Not Forgotten: 2

On Halloween night we staged a one-night-event as part of my ongoing collaboration with artist, Jacob Whittaker. After days of rain, we had a clear night here in the hills of Carmarthenshire where the work was shown in a stone barn in a remote location - so thanks to those hardy souls who ventured out to join us!

We made new work for the event including a sound piece which built upon ambient sounds from the location and questions and silences recorded as part of a ghost-hunting EVP session. We also projected waveforms taken from sound readings along with screened and projected white noise.

The project has a strong inclusive element, and from the 50 word ghost stories submitted by participants in our first show earlier in the year we developed a film and sound work which was projected onto furniture. I'm very interested in the significance of personal objects and possessions - the way we project our personalities onto them and mediate our lives through them.

This time we asked our visitors to pose for us under a white sheet (ghost-in-a-sheet style) for a series of Polaroid images - everyone was most enthusiastic and inventive in their performance! I'll post some images when they are available. Meanwhile you can see more images and find out about the project here: www.absent-but-not-forgotten.co.uk 

Absent But Not Forgotten: 2

The second in my ongoing art project with Jacob Whittaker is happening tonight in Carmarthenshire. Following our show at The Last Gallery earlier in the year, we are having a one-night-only Hallowe'en event this evening, Absent But Not Forgotten: 2:

An installation combining projection and sound with textiles and furniture @7pm. Later...Sound performance from Jacob Whittaker with Halloween classics.  PLUS: We want you for our spectral collection – come and be photographed (under a sheet) for our Polaroid ghost gallery...

We'll be showing a new piece of work which is based on the 50 word ghost stories that were contributed through the website as part of the project. It's going to be spooky! www.absent-but-not-forgotten.co.uk 

If you are in the area - you are welcome to join us from 7pm...

Absent but not forgotten 2: Trailer from jacob whittaker on Vimeo.

Absent But Not Forgotten

Absent but not Forgotten from jacob whittaker on Vimeo.

A film made from footage of the opening event at The Last Gallery in Llangadog.

Fright Night at The Last

Photo: Installation shot by Louise Bird

Absent But Not Forgotten opened on Friday evening - it runs until 4 April - open at weekends. Thanks to Jake for the collaboration, Mick and Julie at The Last Gallery for the opportunity, Louise for the gin, the love and the brilliant photos, Kirsty for her abiding support and amazing cakes at the opening...thanks all for coming along too!

If you feel inclined we hope you might like to write us your ghost story or experience in 50 words at the message board of our website, here's a few fabulous contributions to get you thinking:

The television is full of dark men again. Circling, eyeless, mouths are stitched. One time I caught them doing a pentagram and I lost respect. I prise invisible hands from my neck and slap at the remote for Eastenders. If Peggy loses the vic tonight it will not auger well.

By Kirsten Hinks

She lay down to sleep. But the back boiler was burping rhythms into the night. Surrounded by socks and tops, she rolled into her duvet and hid her head. But skeletal trees scratched the window in time and forgotten friends danced ahead. Pass the ectoplasm on the left hand side.

By Dan Anthony

Sitting in the corner of the empty nursery, still here I listen. Tonight no starlight pierces the black rain clouds, but I still hear their static hiss. Mother in their bed, more unconscious than asleep, father downstairs sits with an unopened book in his lap not drinking his cold tea.

By David Kilvington

Absent But Not Forgotten

My collaborative show with Jacob Whittaker, Absent But Not Forgotten opens on Friday 19 March at 6pm at The Last Gallery, Llangadog, Carmarthenshire SA19 9BR. The show runs until 4 April - but is only open at weekends. You are welcome to join us at the opening if you're in this neck of the woods!

Here's a short documentary piece about the show.

Belief in the paranormal can be controversial; but there is a strong human desire to find pattern and meaning in the unexplained. Absent But Not Forgotten uses video and sound experiments, textiles and technical objects to evoke the world of ‘ghost hunting’. The project considers the associations, clichés and influences of TV and films on the phenomenon.

We're looking for a bit of interaction from you too - we'd like you to photograph or video the show if you visit - you can post to the website through our Flickr group Ghost Watch or send them to us mail@kathryndodd.com and we'll post them for you - tell us who to credit.

Also we'd love to hear your own stories and experiences - write us a story in 50 words or less and post to our message board - or add to this post and I'll transfer it. We will be developing the project and hope we can incorporate some of your stories.

http://www.absent-but-not-forgotten.co.uk/

Écoute le temps

Écoute le temps - Directed by Alanté Kavaïté - seen here

Part of the project I am working on for The Last Gallery in Llangadog, Absent But Not Forgotten, has been to watch lots of films and TV within the horror/ghost story genre. We have especially been interested in the way that the aesthetics and methods of the media has informed its own development - art-imitating-life-imitating-art. One of the films I have found particularly beautiful is a French thriller called Écoute le temps - the English Language distribution title is Fissures.

Following the murder of her clairvoyant mother, a young sound recordist returns to her home in the French countryside. She begins to unravel the mystery of the killer through realising she can intercept the voices of the past with her sound equipment. She creates an extraordinary web of threads and markers as she attempts to plot the locations of the sound and discover the truth.

Here is a links list to some of the things we have been watching.


Mark Z. Danielewski - Cover of House of Leaves

This idea about the house as a container for its own histories has been an abiding theme for me in recent years, I was deeply effected by the book House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000). It is a hugely ambitious book which uses footnotes, type and design to reinforce the plots within. It is a kind of physical version of hyperlinked text. The use of a number of narrators creates a claustrophobic, neurotically tense story. This book was picked up in a similar way to The Blair Witch Project (1999) by Internet promotion and rumours of its alleged authenticity.

Absent But Not Forgotten

This is the publicity image for my forthcoming show Absent But Not Forgotten a collaboration with Jacob Whittaker at The Last Gallery in Llangadog, it opens on Friday 19 March.

This is what it's about: "Belief in the paranormal can be controversial; but there is a strong human desire to find pattern and meaning in the unexplained. This multimedia exhibition uses video and sound experiments, textiles and technical objects to evoke the world of ‘ghost hunting’. The project visits the territory between belief and parody to explore the technological, psychological and aesthetically self-referent influence of TV and films on the phenomenon.

The Last Gallery is a contemporary art space showing work by artists from across the UK. Housed in a former Victorian cobblers shop in the village of Llangadog in west Wales, the building retains its original features. The gallery is un-manned, so visitors can experience the artworks completely alone..."

I'm busy finishing the works for the show as well as working with Jake on the technical elements - that's his expertise.

“The idea for this project came about on a drive from west Wales to Bristol. I was working with the idea that I wanted to use an old armchair that Jake had previously given me to make a kind of ghostly telephone/chair hybrid object. At this point Jake began to relate the tale of his Grandfather, Bernard, an inventor who had experimented with EVP techniques to make a telephone to speak with the dead. Just to seal the deal, we spent some of the journey driving on the M4 motorway alongside the black hearse used by Ghostwatch Wales.” Kathryn

“Aspects of the exhibition are loosely based on some of my Grandfather's research into EVP. As an electrical engineer and inventor he was convinced he could make a telephone that would communicate with 'the other side'. Oddly enough, he, like me, had a barn full of semi-working and broken Hifi and TV - interesting that we both share a fascination with what might be found in the broken, silent or noisy portions of recorded media.” Jacob

Buy One Get One Free

Exhibition poster - seen here

I went to a symposium today at West Wales School of the Arts about artist collaborations. Organised by Contextual Studies duo Helen Lindsay and Marilyn Allen (a dynamic duo in their own right!) the day featured presentations from Tracey Warr, Anthony Shapland from Cardiff's g39, Sean Edwards from WARP and Secondeditions

It was a good day, looking at the ways in which visual artists collaborate and some of the issues that are brought to light when they do. Tracey Warr gave an excellent introductory talk sweeping through art historical collaborations from Modernist groups and pairings to contemporary work. She talked about artists she has worked with, collaborating essentially as a curator/writer and the nature of equality in such scenarios. She highlighted the different dimensions of collaboration, the many varied ways in which people come together to make art and the peaks and pitfalls that can be encountered. Warr has published a series of conversations about collaboration - ‘On Collaboration: Interviews with Heather Ackroyd & Dan Harvey and Phelim McDermott’, Doubt Guardian. In press. 2008.

I have collaborated with other artists and technicians on various occasions and have run into many of the difficult territories discussed. Ideas of ownership, attribution, financial allocation, divergent ideals to name a few. I have also benefited tremendously from the generous and productive aspects of sharing with and learning from other practitioners. It's always a sensitive negotiation and requires a lot of grown up skills to bring the best out of the situation. I was personally a little relieved to find that other artists' collaborations are as individual, particular and potentially contentious as those I have engaged with - phew! I'm normal!

I like the idea Tracey Warr discussed of The Third Mind that can be created through the process of collaborating. A kind of reflexive entity that lets the work find a less ego-bound outcome; an autonomy outside the grasp of the individuals involved.

We heard from Anthony Shapland about the genesis of the hugely influential artists run gallery, g39, its unfolding story and current developments, including WARP, the resource service headed up by practising artist Sean Edwards. The network-style ethos of the project was celebrated at their 10 year celebration exhibition If You Build It They Will Come in 2008.

There were a few interesting suggestions as to why artists working currently have embraced this mode of practice. Perhaps a reaction to a current lack of any genuine political agency; or a compensation for the loss of communism and socialism; even an obfuscation to political action, a muddying of incisive action. My own feeling is that it mirrors the paradigm shifts in all other areas of our lives towards network orientated systems rather than hierarchies - the Internet being a primary expression of that idea. It is perhaps an inevitable outcome of Roland Barthes ideas in Death of the Author. The flip-side - the birth of the reader/viewer becomes a further collaboration, the participating audience. Marcel Duchamp in his 1957 lecture The Creative Act says: "All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

I am engaged in two collaborations at the moment - a forthcoming show with Jacob Whittaker, Absent But Not Forgotten opening in March at The Last Gallery in Llangadog. In May I will show a piece at Rhôd at New Mill, Drefelin on which I will have collaborated on construction and technical issues with Bristol based Marcus FitzGibbon. Two very different types of collaboration. Jacob and I have worked conceptually on the show together from the beginning bringing elements to the project as a whole, the result is conjoined. Marcus is helping me realise my own concept through his construction skills, we've worked together many many times and have an aesthetic shorthand which allows things to emerge quite fluently, he will help me bring my idea into reality and inevitably bring some of his own aesthetic to the project.

I like working with other people, I like the way it forces me to let go control of my entrenched ideas. When it works well the expansive sense of realisation is sublime.

Here's a video clip about the collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat in 1986 - collaboration or Oedipal face-off...? Fascinating.