The basement space, below ground level, had a buried feeling. In the semi-darkness the noises of the world outside were subdued, heightened the senses. I became aware of a hole in one of the walls, close to floor level. An old fireplace? Certainly a conduit of some kind and leading to the upper levels of the house, possibly beyond, to the outside world.
Despite my advancing years, I still cling naively to the belief that some things must sit outside of our accepted economic system, and that other ways must be found to ensure that everybody can afford to live. After all, the system that we have lived under for a long time now has never seemed to work.
Considering my two favourite childhood books were about Italy and opera respectively, travelling to Italy to study 19th century guitar was not a surprising move.
Residents of South Leeds may remember Silvia Liebig from her time spent here in 2019, just before the outbreak of the pandemic. As part of East Streets Arts long running Artist House 45 residency project (2015-19), that also included Lloyd&Wilson, She was a resident of the house during 2019.
The unusual texture of printed plastic, slightly warped due to AI filling in gaps, allow onlookers to discern between works cast in pewter and jesmonite. These ‘copies’ of works usually guarded behind glass evoke cultural memory yet leave viewers with a sense of remembrance just out of reach
…my process is a hit and run technique, I can be anywhere and I might see something that grabs my attention, a shape a form that is different so like a photographer I want to capture that moment but instead of it being two dimensional it’s in the three dimensional realm.
2023 was, for me, a tale of two birthdays. It was the year that I turned fifty-one and resigned from my job of nineteen years with the Henry Moore Institute. It also represented thirty-four years, to the day, since I took on my first proper job, beyond a paper round, with Sainsbury’s.
After an expensive education in ballet, another cataclysmic shift in the ever failing world economy sent the fictional character of Fatima towards a dispiriting life of drudgery, in a career that she did not train for and most likely did not want.
Art often points out the direction of travel; for imagination is the precursor of discovery. Without imagination there would be no discovery, and without discovery no progress.
And, as if responding to Crazy Eddie’s demands, muscles twitch and groan, eyes and mouth open simultaneously ushering forth a guttural roar: a roar expressing physical pain, or the existential howl of a recombinant form returning to sentience from that place beyond life that we know as death?
Since the Decompressed Time Frames installation and performance in April this year, we have been quietly developing the performance possibilities of the work and trying to address the issue of archiving the impossible.
Whilst I always understood that Jacob’s Ladder would be a labour of love for both myself, as BasementArtsProject: the commissioning organisation, and for sculptor Keith Ackerman, I knew that it would definitely take longer than the one-hundred days of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019. But we never imagined the three year odyssey that it would become thanks to the C***d pandemic lockdowns.
Having worked as a Police Forensic Artist, McDonagh’s current practice is not too far removed from a world in which the gaps in reality are filled in by imagination. She has moved her attention from the world of reconstructing human identities for the purpose of identification, to the reconstruction of abandoned human habitation through architecture and found objects.
For the last few months I have been in discussion with artist Paul Digby about his latest sculpture project ‘Looking To The Future: Emily’, and talking about BasementArtsProject’s position as co-creator on it.
Never again will we have the luxury, of being able to treat the various aspects of life on this planet as separate elements distinct from one another, and the existence of such elements as having no bearing on anything else around it.
Beneath the surface of the locked down world the oxygen is running low. The tiny life support capsules sustaining our presence in the airless vacuum of millions of hard-drives, can only sustain three dimensional life for so long. It is time to head for the surface, but not too rapidly.
So how do we get past the problem of perception, access and desire. Life is about dialogue, that is how we learn. We educate ourselves through experience, we find the edge of our zone of comfort and understanding and we push past it, through to what lies beyond.
So, 2023 is still a thing; by which I mean Leeds2023. Despite the fact that Brexit put paid to any opportunity for UK cities to present their wares on a European stage, Leeds has committed itself to ensuring that 2023 remains an important year for the city in terms of culture; despite the funding and exposure being cut off by political dispute.
