‘The value of property’ is a collaborative project between Anna Harley, myself in conjunction with Spike Island Print Studio and the UWE Impact printmaking conference. The project explores, through fine art printmaking, the feelings around home ownership in Bristol

It will be a series of Fine art prints will be produced to simulate and subvert the ‘For Sale’ and ‘To Let’ and ‘Sale Through Auction’ placards that are placed outside private homes.

The images will explore the hopes, dreams and anxieties people have in relation to their property; issues that are central to ordinary people in the current economic climate of falling house prices, the threat of redundancy and home repossession.

The prints will be the same size as the placard and will be produced from materials and
substrates found inside private homes, such as linoleum, wooden floors, rugs and wallpapers. Using print processes of intaglio, relief and silk screen, the materials of the house will be echoed in both process and end result. The visual language of stencil graffitti and flyposting will be integrated in the process, as this seems to be one of the last bastions of honest protest in the eyes of the people.

We intend to interview people on the street and home owners in the area; the latter may be asked to display the print/placards outside their properties. Our aim is to create a visual link between the inhabitants and the audience on the street, evoking thoughts and feeling around what a home means, what it is worth and how much it costs in emotional terms.

Spike Island and Ross Ford introduce Hidden Impact:
HIDDEN IMPACT: prints in the city
12th – 19th September 2009

Artists living, working, exhibiting or studying in Bristol will install prints in unexpected locations in central Bristol. From the wine vaults of Avery’s wine lodge to Brandon Hill overlooking the city, HIDDEN IMPACT will take you to places you may not have visited.

Shops, stores and cafés on and near Park Street from the FOPP record store at the bottom by the Council House to Howies clothing store at the top near the Royal West of England Academy will be displaying prints. Towers of books will be found in the Cathedral, there will be etchings at Temple Meads Station and bicycles with print will tour the area. You may have to search for the work or it could be self-evident.

Many forms of prints will be shown including the use of commercial placards, recycled materials, leaves, bus tickets, wine labels and digital screens. Traditional print methods such as lino cut, etching and silk-screen will also be seen.

Indoors and out all the venues will be marked on a map. Just make your own route and have fun spotting the work when you’re out and about. A map marking the venues and all the print exhibitions in the city will be available. Information and a map will be on Spike Print and IMPACT 6 websites from August.

HIDDEN IMPACT : Prints in the City is an artist-led project co-ordinated by Spike Print Studio, Bristol in conjunction with IMPACT 6 International printmaking conference organised by the University of the West of England.

www.spikeprintstudio.org/impact
www.impact.uwe.ac.uk

contact: hiddenimpact@spikeprintstudio.org

Burkhas and Stilletos has now been renamed to ‘Whitechapel Women”

‘Whitechapel women’ takes ways of seeing a step further exploring the cultural gaze and is a print-based art practice research project. The East London Whitechapel area has been a place of repeated influx of immigrants over centuries and is starting to show a degree of social unease as in other 21st century European cities. Whitechapel is an area where professions and ethnic boundaries seems to repeatedly cross over, thereby providing fertile ground for my PhD studies called ‘An honourable practice: printmaking and social engagement’. The project aims to look at four groups of women; artists, Muslim women in veils, professional women employed in the finance industry and prostitutes by employing the image to investigate the women’s perceptions of not only themselves but ‘the others’.

The visual outcomes, a series of visceral prints , are to be form the impetus for a series of interviews, calling on Kesters’s and Linde’s texts on art as dialogue, while testing the use of art integrating Maggie O’Neill’s method of ‘ethno-mimesis’ order to develop further research methods for art-based investigations. The project will be presented midway in questioning how combining image –making and methodologies outside an art practice can enhance an understanding of the ‘social body’ in a wider cultural and social context. Current approaches pivot around the concerns of audience, location and iconography, but have yet to establish to what degree the interdisciplinary cross-over between social science and fine art can be effectively integrated. Therefore, social science researchers will be invited to participate.
Finally, ‘Whitechapel Women’ asks in what ways the image can explore meanings, and engage unknown audiences to became participants forming new understandings in a culturally fragmented community?

I asked the curator, Elisabeth Wikenhed if she could notice if the audience- i.e. - the observers had become participants. This was out intention- to make this show somewhat in to an echo of the Baroque era’s idea the total art work, stimulating as-many senses as possible. That way- touching the form of sculptures and the sound of the crickets in the video could offer the blind an experience. Deaf could see. If tired and old, one could sit in ‘Cezanne’s ‘armchair. Ideally, there would have been the smell and taste of coffee, even the scent of old fashioned peonies. All senses answering to not only look closer- but feel closer.
Elisabeth wrote that she could notice that people are slowing down and that they sit to rest , for a while. We did then , create a room for many. I am starting to believe that the image could also be a theatre. magical usefulness has become a delicate spectacle, a theatre in whispers. Also- this- is a way forward.

2004 I met Atsu-san and Inaba-san in Osaka. These two wonderful peopple had started the puzzleproject, which is a continous, collaborative endevaour. I was intrigued and decided to bring it- somehow to London. 2008 it was made possible, with a superb team of MA students, espacially Beatriz and Sasha who I taught at London Metropolitan University, as well as Sean ( LCC student) and Chantal. It turned out to be a positive experience, and something to build on.

The text on Brent’s council’s website reads as follows

Puzzle Project UK

‘The artists involved in the Puzzle Project represent a fresh new initiative that originated from Osaka, Japan. The project explores and experiments with the interplay of image and text. Each of the artists articulates a word, which they associate to the project or to their own individual work. The pieces show connections and disconnections whilst simultaneously continuing to belong to one single puzzle piece. The project by nature is meant to reflect the way in which people interact in urban centres, where boundaries between strangers and friends blur and we build a new city and our own personal narratives.

The completed Puzzle is a large-scale artwork, made up of 120 individual smaller pieces from each artist. It is based on the original Japanese concept of sixty artists creating their own puzzle pieces, whilst being unaware of the contents of the other participants’ work. The UK project involves artists from Japan, the UK, Sweden, Mexico, Hungary and other countries. Members of the local community have also created their own puzzle pieces which will be part of the final artwork. Funded by Awards for All, Brent Council and Brent Artists Resource and curated by Beatriz Hernandez and Lorenzo Belenguer’

For more information, See www.puzzleprojectuk
Text from: com www.brentartistsresource.org.uk