Signal Film and Media. Barrow-in-Furness.
Experiments included brewing ‘sea tea’, taking rubbings from driftwood, making art traps, using sound pipes to mimic the wind, filming themselves hiding, pressing natural and man-made objects into foam, jumping down sand dunes, using gymnastic ribbons to capture the wind and sneaking polaroid photos of their adventures under their Headmasters windscreen wiper when they got back to school.
Barrows outer edges, its geology, and the students varying outlooks have held this project ‘in place’. Local tidal crossing points, issues with permission and access, slow careful conversations, the weather, trails and errors, objects washed up on the beach, chats about transformation, have all influenced this project.
Ideas about identity, locality, stepping over boundaries, access, and our relationship with nature became undercurrents within the project, shaping how the group would finally build an exhibition about their escapades on the coast.
Avoiding traditional art making skills also helped the younger artists nosedive into the environments they encountered. They influenced, steered, co-authored or maybe team-built the artworks
Artworks include an interactive karaoke booth, sea tea, a film of people hiding in the landscape, gymnastic ribbon text works, hematite paintings, walking stick sculptures, public realm sound interventions and collected paraphernalia from the group’s wanderings and experiments.
Central to the exhibition is a new set of sculptures by Jack Brown.
Bringing together two elements; driftwood and fake nails, Jack has concocted new objects that bring to mind ideas of slow estuarial migration, fast moments of transformation, self image, adornment, other worldliness, forever plastics and fleeting relationships.
During our first trip out to Roan Head we all used gymnastic ribbons to make artworks with the wind and get an idea of how we might work in the landscape. As the project progressed we found our own individual mini themes; identity, history, time, nature and us, access and transport. You’ll find traces of these themes in the text on the ribbons.
WALKING STICKS, METAL APERTURES, UPTURNED BRANCHES.
At the start of our very first meeting, each young person was measured up for their own walking stick. Jack cut each stick to size and they were used during each excursion along Barrow’s coast. The branches were found on a wander, combined they allude to growth, roots, walking and our relationship with nature.
see link to wed page for more images and info – link here