Forwarded message from Jim Dixon <[log in to unmask]>:
HERITAGE AND ARTISTIC MEDIA: NEW WAYS OF SEEING
The University of the West of England in conjunction with University of Bristol, Department of
Archaeology and Anthropology and English Heritage are organizing a symposium at UWE on
Saturday 3 November to discuss the different ways in which heritage, archaeology and
contemporary art can come together, with a focus on commercial sector applications of the ideas
discussed.
The timetable for the day is as follows:
09.30-10.00 Registration and coffee
10.00-10.30 Introduction
Constructing Place: When Artists and Archaeologists Meet
John Schofield , English Heritage
10.30-11.30 On the road again: art in the commercial highways sector
Andrea Bradley, Atkins Heritage and Matthew Walter, artist
11.30-12.30 The Thames Gateway Project: Contemporary art and the changing landscape
Simon Callery, artist
12.30-13.15 Lunch
13.15-14.15 Echoes and Reverberations: a sonic archive of Cold War sites
Louise K Wilson, artist
14.15-15.15 Changing Rooms: Leave-Home-Stay and the fine art of DIY as
archaeological process
Christine Finn, University of Bradford/UCCA
15.15-15.30 Coffee
15.30-16.30 An Archaeological/Ethnographic Approach to Public Art
James R Dixon, UWE/UoB
Although numbers will be extremely limited, spaces are available for this event, which is offered
free of charge to anyone interested in discussing and researching these areas of potential overlap
and integration.
To reserve a free place at this symposium, please contact the symposium administrator Jodie
Lucas-Jones by email at [log in to unmask]
For more information on speakers/papers contact James Dixon at [log in to unmask]
Constructing place: when artists and archaeologists meet
John Schofield, English Heritage
Art and archaeological practice are closer than some might think. Some artists work with
archaeological material, and will interpret archaeological sites through a diversity of approaches
and media. For some archaeologists, landscape art and sculpture is (or can quickly become)
archaeology. Even the processes overlap: archaeological fieldwork as performance; the production
of artistic works as the creation of archaeological records – through ‘incavation’, as well as
excavation. By way of a general introduction to the symposium, these areas of overlap will be
assessed with specific reference to some artists and archaeologists working with places of recent
conflict.
On the road again – art and heritage in the commercial sector
Andrea Bradley, Atkins Heritage and Matthew Walter, artist
Although not the very first UK motorway, the M1 is arguably the defining icon of the motorway
age, and is already nearing its fiftieth birthday. The M1 and its structures have become historic
monuments in their own right. Artist Matthew Walter’s photographic study of the changing M1
landscape during current widening between J6a and 10 (commissioned from the HA through
Balfour Beatty - Skanska – Atkins) throws the familiar road into unfamiliar relief. His photographs
illustrate the interaction between road and landscape, the multiple experiences of the road. The
landscape appears fluid, altering continuously. Temporary landscapes and spaces spring up, lunar
craters and peaks evolve from miniature mountain ranges of gravel and displaced earth, irregular
organic mounds and scars contrast with the nuts and bolts of road construction, the disciplined
rows of concrete tubing, traffic cones and steel girders. And in his night shots, the road provides
the definitive illustration of the 24-hour culture of motorways. There is never true darkness, and
highway illumination colludes with moonlight for the road to take on an entirely new character.
Striking images in multi colours, light and dark, still and active, show what distinguishes the road,
makes it unique, and reveals its true character: dramatic, sometimes foreboding, the embodiment
of tensions between historic optimism and present day frustration. Above all the images reflect
Matthew’s experience of the road, a new experience, making us realise that we have only
incompletely understood the real M1 until now.
Echoes and Reverberations: a sonic archive of Cold War sites
Louise K. Wilson, artist
This talk will focus on the process of researching and making time-based artworks in response to
the acoustic signatures of particular spaces. An ongoing project is informed by a desire to enter
and make recordings inside closed and difficult to access Cold War sites, abandoned or still active.
In 2005 for example I was able to negotiate entry to AWE (Atomic Weapon Establishment)
Aldermaston in order to make an audio recording of a working centrifuge, formerly in use at AWRE
Orfordness.
Of particular interest to me is the presence of reflected sound (echoes and reverberations), which
is more pronounced in the absence of machinery, people and so on. I am accumulating an archive
of convolution reverb samples of Cold War sites, which I consider to be, in a sense, archaeological
artefacts. I will outline work made at Orford Ness in Suffolk and Nurrungar (South Australia) and
touch on the practice of Jacob Kirkegaard and other relevant sound/ music artists
The Thames Gateway Project: Contemporary art and the changing landscape
Simon Callery, artist
It appears that the tradition of British landscape-based painting has served as a guardian to a
notion of landscape as enduring – a fixed point in an ever changing world. In reality landscapes
are constantly changing in order to accommodate our changing needs and demands. I will be
discussing how an experience of landscape in change can act as a persuasive catalyst for a shift in
the ambitions and intentions of contemporary art making.
The discussion will be located within the context of my collaborative work with archaeologists
from the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford on the Segsbury Project and my current
work with Oxford Archaeology on the Thames Gateway Project AHRC research fellowship. My
continuing presence on a number of excavation sites has offered me a unique insight into
landscape and an opportunity to seek a form of response to the changing landscape through
contemporary art.
Changing Rooms: Leave-Home-Stay and the fine art of DIY as archaeological process.
Christine Finn, University of Bradford/University College for Creative Arts
This presentation will chart the artistic and archaeological processes involved in the installation
piece, Leave-Home-Stay. In 2006, I began the act of leaving my family home in Kent. It rapidly
became an arena of transformation in which the Victorian property changed from a repository of
personal memory into a public space, bristling with mnemonic, for Architecture Week. It is now a
lived-in studio and a place of forage for my Fine Art MA.
http://www.solentcentre.org.uk/architectureweek/leavehomestay
An Archaeological/Ethnographic Approach to Public Art
James R Dixon – UWE/UoB
The focus of this paper is the public art scheme running as part of the Cabot Circus development
at Broadmead in central Bristol.
It will describe two parallel approaches to studying this scheme. The first, based on approaches to
fieldwork and analysis derived from Science and Technology Studies and Media Studies looks to
trace different concepts of how Broadmead is perceived through the commissioning process,
through individual art pieces and events and through public reaction to these.
The second, running alongside this, is an archaeological study of Broadmead, focusing on the
materiality of the place and literal description of the things making up the Broadmead that
features equally yet differently in the developers’ plans, as the inspiration for artworks, and as a
lived landscape.
I hope to demonstrate that studying art in this way, from the particular viewpoint of an
anthropological archaeology, and moreover using research methods which replicate, through both
theory and method, the ‘on-the-ground’ politics of contemporary urban regeneration, a synthesis
of artistic and archaeological thinking can be located that has the potential to be of great import
for the future development of urban spaces.
http://amd.uwe.ac.uk/index.asp?pageid=1315
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