Transmission : Speaking and Listening Publication

From 2001 -5 I was one of the co-editors of the publication and lecture series, Transmission : Speaking and Listening Volumes 3 - 5, which is a collaboration between Site Gallery and Sheffield Hallam University. Volumes 3- 5 took up the themes Daily Encounters, Provenance / Inscription and Ornament and Utility/ Responsibility, inviting artists, curators and speakers from other disciplines to respond. the resulting discussions formed the basis of the publications. The publications listed below can be bought from www.cornerhouse.org/books/

Volume 5: Daily Encounters
http://cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1977&page=0
Editors Emma Cocker, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph Lester
Volume 5, the last in this series of publications developed from lecture series, addresses the habits and rituals shaping our everyday lives, and their relation with art. When taken out of the context of the everyday and made into works of art, those practices that we perceive as natural or real appear as constructed fabrications. In exploring the theme of daily encounters , artists and writers address the ways in which art may provoke and antagonize patterns of behaviour and systems of belief that often remain unquestioned. The contributors consider how works of art appropriate and re-deliver the naturalized and the everyday as a series of fictions and, in so doing, reflect the mechanisms and frameworks constructing our lives. Contributors include: Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Becky Shaw, Ryan Gander, Neal Rock, Imogen Stidworthy Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, Nayan Kulkarni, Mike Marshall, Carey Young, Dave Beech Robert Milin, Doug Fishbone, Richard Wentworth, Hewitt and Jordan, Malcolm Miles, Amanda Beech and Chris Oakley.

Transmission: Speaking and Listening. Vol. 4 Provenance / Inscription (ISBN 1899926666)
http://cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1725&page=0
Co-editors Emma Cocker, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph Lester
This is the fourth volume published from the annual series of lectures organised by Sheffield Hallam University and Showroom Cinema, which features leading and emerging artists and other practitioners discussing their works in relation to a particular theme. This volume takes up two themes: Provenance, which generally means the place of origin, and here takes on rather more complex meanings in relation to art and art objects, and the market or value systems that contain them; and Inscription, which addresses the reading of works of art, when they are produced as texts or incorporate text within them. Also included is a symposium on Inscription. The Transmission series makes a significant contribution in mapping current debates about contemporary art. Contributors: Gabriel Gbadamosi, Christopher Landoni, Goshka Macuga, Elizabeth Price, Nigel Cooke, Julian Walker, Nick Stewart, Steve Edwards, Simon Morris, Victor Burgin, Mark Titchner, ArtLab, C. Cullinan and J. Richards, Lucy Harrison, Brigid McLeer, Vera Dieterich and Caroline Rooney, Jane Rendell, Sally O’Reilly, Pavel Büchler

Speaking and Listening Volume 3, Ornament and Utility/ Responsibility (ISBN 1899926518)
http://cornerhouse.org/books/info.aspx?ID=1604&page=0
Co-editors Emma Cocker, Sharon Kivland, Lesley Sanderson
Transmission: Speaking and Listening is an annual series of lectures organised by the Fine Art Department at Sheffield Hallam University, in collaboration with Site Gallery. Leading and emerging artists from the UK and abroad discuss their work in relation to a particular theme with an audience of students and the public. The discussions, with examples of the artists’ work and specially commissioned essays, are published each year and make a significant contribution to current debate about artistic practice. This volume, the third in the series, takes up two themes: Ornament and Utility, which addresses the question of aesthetic judgement and the use (or usefulness) of a work of art; and Responsibility, which considers the ideology of artistic production.Contributors: Jananne Al-Ani, David Bate, Kate Blacker, Kathrin Böhm, Pavel Büchler, Conroy / Sanderson, Mikey Cuddihy, Eggebert-and-Gould, Dan Hays, David Mabb, Monica Oechsler, Simon Periton, Paul Rooney, George Shaw, Sarah Staton, Jemima Stehli, Essays by Jeanne Randolph and David Thorp

I have had such plans before ...

Operating under a working title 'Not Yet There' my current research has emerged out of an ongoing archive of photographic images and short pieces of writing beginning in the 1990s. These visual and textual fragments relate to ongoing reflection and speculation about ideas connected to irresolution, failure and anti-climax; aimless wandering and spatial practices; restlessness and indecision; seriality and repetition; camouflage and formlessness; boredom, waiting and hesitation; as well as reflecting on the absurdity of encyclopaedic modes of definition and knowledge construction, and the difficulties of translation between textual, visual and cognitive modes of representation. The archive functions as part of a practice-based research methodology for the development of other writing about and as (art) practice; where an attempt is made to recover or recuperate a critical value for states of feeling or of the subjectively felt. The archive operates as a constant visual 'reminder' or residue of a thinking process where ideas emerge (at times unexpectedly) at the experiential interstice between self and the world; in the gap between what is 'real' and what is imagined, between the 'as is' and the 'as if'.

The archive has developed into a body of ongoing research that is concerned with, underpinned by or is at least drawn to particular recurrent ideas or concerns, certain theories and practices in relation to: wandering; waiting; hesitation; the notion of the fray; the endless quest; acts of following, getting lost or being led astray; repeated or Sisyphean tasks; failed attempts; deferred arrivals; indecision; the pleasure of unrewarded pursuit or search; the absurd or impossible obligation to a rule or arbitrary logic; the trace in a gesture of both criticality and compulsion; the desire for and fear of forgetting everything and starting all over again; foils and Macguffins; tangents and diversionary tactics; survival strategies and the potentiality of boredom; the partial and the provisional; the contingent and the unresolved; encyclopaedic systems that somehow slip out of sync; the idea of theory as a form of fiction, a way of telling tales; the lure and terror of the unknown; makeshift means for making sense of one’s place in the world;feeling overwhelmed, the experience of deflation and the event of anti-climax.

I suppose in many senses, my recent research and practice returns to some of the ideas that I was exploring during the 1990s, even as an undergraduate student. During this period (mid 1990s) my work focused on the difficulties felt in trying to translate feeling into a readable system of signs or langauge, and of both a desire and the failure to speak of the less definable elements of emotion and experience - desire, pain, boredom, restlessness. Early work such as 'Non-dictionary of Desire' employed anti-encyclopedic structures based on the random collision of text and image, whilst later work such as 'Desire to Know', presented small and urgent actions as a looped and endless cycle of failed searches and endless quests. I guess I was interested in trying to recuperate meaning for a particular language of desire or sensation or affect even, through performative works to camera - urgent searches for something which never find what they are looking for, and are forced to begin over and over, again and again.