27 artists, 30 artworks, 15 sites, 96 pages featuring site-specific artworks across the city of Swansea from Locws International 2000 & 2002
Davide Bertocchi
| Enrica Borghi
| Angharad Pearce Jones
| Brigitte Jurack
| Annie Lovejoy
| Alice Maher
| Paul & Paula
| Anthony Shapland
| Catriona Stanton
| Grace Weir
| Daphne Wright
Eric Angels
| Iwan Bala
| Maud Cotter
| Dorothy Cross
| Tim Davies
| Peter Finnemore
| Rose Frain
| Hughes Germain
| David Hastie
| Karen Ingham
| Philip Napier
| Tina O’connell
| Benoit Sire
| Lois Williams
| Craig Wood
Colour images of all artworks, texts by Tim Davies, David Hastie, Felicia Hughes-Freeland & Emma Safe
£9.95 + Postage & package
Orders availble by email: locws (at) locwsinternational (dot) com
ISBN 0-9545291-0-3
Posts Tagged ‘Locws International 2002’
Locws International 2000 & 2002 Catalogue
30 October 2002
Daphne Wright
The Bulls
Swansea Museum
Daphne Wright’s work ‘The Bulls’ was inspired by the trophy head of a buffalo shot on safari which is in the Victorian collection of Swansea Museum. Wright has photographed domestic bulls which are kept for reproduction purposes on small farms. Usually only one bull of this kind is kept on each farm and it is afforded a certain status, often being paraded and displayed and usually given a pet name. The artist has photographed only the heads and eyes of these ‘pets’, capturing the underlying menace of an animal that is fundamentally unpredictable and untrustworthy.
In making these works, Wright has used an obsolete printing method. The resulting prints resemble many of the black & white photographs in the museum’s collection. Although the objects in the Victorian collection seem benignly presented and displayed, many of the exhibits and curiosities have an underlying sense of unease. ‘The Bulls’ are hung in the stairwell of Swansea Museum in a way that alludes to the presentation of the hunting trophies from the collection.
Wright’s work can be read not just in the context of the museum but also within the wider context of agriculture and the debates associated with it at the present time.
28 September 2002
Grace Weir
The Darkness and The Light / The Clearing / Distance AB
Swansea Observatory
Grace Weir has installed a series of video-based works based on her interest in astrophysics among the workings of Swansea Observatory. She was interested in siting the work in Swansea Observatory from when she first saw the tower on the beach. ‘The way the staircase for the observatory is in a separate tower to the actual rooms of the observatory meant crossing from one tower to another across these small bridges at a great height above the sea and sand. Already you encounter the vastness of space as the sea stretches out to the horizon before entering the small dark observatory to use the telescope’. Grace Weir 2002
Grace Weir’s work coincides with certain writings of Gilles Deleuze that shatter, deconstruct and atomise conventional ideas of reality in order to locate a volatile flux; a moment where the centre ceases to hold, things set to transforming each other and new meaning is imminent. This moment is brief – a flash – before memory, reason and custom begin to close down to smother the anxiety implicit in any such sublime epiphany.
28 September 2002
Catriona Stanton
Hiraeth
Central Library
Catriona Stanton encountered responses of mirth and a myriad of personal anecdotes when the topic of the Welsh Love Spoon was raised on the streets of Swansea but, for her as a visitor to the city, encountering a Welsh Love Spoon for the first time engendered deep affection. ‘What better means into the hearts of the Welsh than through the Love Spoon’. Catriona Stanton 2002
The custom of giving a hand carved spoon laden with symbols of love dates from as early as the 16th Century. This tradition evolved out of domestic crafts associated with living on the land. The custom developed as the more elaborate the design would signify the strength of the love betrothed. Today, Love Spoons are more often than not in mass exodus from Wales as a tourist commodity. Catriona Stanton’s work at Swansea Central Library, ‘Hiraeth’, meaning a deep deep longing for home in Welsh, is an attempt to bring the the Welsh Love Spoon back into the hands and hearts of the Welsh.
28 September 2002
Anthony Shapland
Passage
The Guildhall
The work of Anthony Shapland momentarily slows an accelerated world. He uses images that dwell on periods of inaction, encouraging the viewer to notice the often overlooked details and minutiae of our surrounds. Although the footage is lifted directly from everyday events, or perhaps precisely because of this, his work elevates the images to a magical level. In an empty corridor deep in a public building – a non-place, an in-between place, a place of limbo – heavy wooden double doors open occasionally to the movements of employees passing from office to office. In a market, at the time of day when it is neither open or completely closed, cleaners move through the empty building to prepare for the next day and the well trodden paths between the stalls are still. A man passes time in the market waiting for an unknown appointment, looking at his watch, lost in his thoughts amidst the bustle of shoppers.
The developed world functions at an accelerated rate, and will thrive as long as it can keep its pace. It makes the act of focussing on moments of inaction all the more spellbinding. Shapland’s video works indicate that we have become used to the medium being a fast changing window on the world; though within the work, as if staring out of the window, real time inertia ticks by cultivating a portentous sense that something must be about to happen. The imagination becomes overactive as if the works force the viewer to fill in the gaps – even the smallest activity momentarily relieves us of this responsibility.
“Using two very different public buildings as my starting point; one is the centre of commerce and the other the civic centre, different but co-dependent buildings within the city. While each thrives under its own workload both have times and places where little happens, when the buildings rest; the work for Locws2 looks at these periods of inactivity at both spaces. I have selected those transitional points when one thing becomes the other, focusing on that unnamed point in between the two”. Anthony Shapland 2002
28 September 2002
Paul & Paula
The Drifting Document
Swansea Museum
‘Drifting’ is the practice of the arbitrary navigation of a city in the pursuit of anarchy, play and poetry. The aim, to reclaim the city for subjective experience and pure pleasure. Dressed by top fashion designer, Hugo Boss; Paul & Paula become lost and intoxicated by the city of Swansea, slowly rubbing away the veneer of civilisation in order to expose the ‘poetry of the everyday’
The ‘situations’ encountered/manufactured were ‘documented’ by Paul on a hand held 5 X 4 field camera on Polaroid type 55 film and by Paula on a Nikon digital ‘coolpix’, with movie clip
The result of this interventionist strategy is a subjective snapshot of the city over a 24hr period providing a contemporary enigmatic document of Swansea generated from a series of performative escapades. The ‘drift’ was over a 24 hr period from 6pm, 23rd Aug. 2002 and was carried out by Teresa Dillon and Paul Jeff
28 September 2002
Alice Maher
Mnemosyne
Swansea Museum
Alice Maher was intrigued by a Victorian painting hanging in Swansea Museum called ‘The Death of Sarah Dillwyn’. It is a group portrait of all the living members of the child’s family ranged around her bed at the very moment of her death. The artist’s effort to ‘freeze the moment’ was particularly poignant and set Maher off on a similar quest, but toward an entirely different type of art work – a large scale sculpture that investigates the form of ‘bed’ and the meaning of ‘memory’ through the action of freezing.
‘‘MNEMOSYNE’ is a frozen object which hums quietly in the middle of the main gallery at Swansea Museum while layers of frost creep over the surface to chill the air with associated ideas’.
Alice Maher 2002
Further work by Alice Maher can be see at www.alicemaher.com
28 September 2002
Annie Lovejoy
Reverberations
The Helwick Lightship / 26 Castle Street / The River Tawe
Site responsive works which have developed through the enthusiasm & participation of local people. “reverberation – a re-echoing of sound, a reflecting of light etc., subjection to the action of a reverbatory furnace, something reverberated”.
Annie Lovejoy’s work on board Light Vessel No. 91 (The Helwick Lightship) has developed through a close working relationship with Fred Evans, who works on the ship. She presents three soundscapes installed in the ship’s air vents . ‘Letters to Denote the State of the Weather’ – based on the ships logging system, translated into Welsh & read by: Steve Darling, Tim Davies, Elen Morris, Karl Morris, Heather Pearce, Nia Roberts, Linda Shickell & Steve Williams; ‘Conversations with Fred’ and ‘Radio’ – the recording of radio communication from the Helwick by Swansea Amateur Radio Society, who were invited by Annie to participate in a global International Lighthouse Day Event.
In ‘Up the River Tawe’ Annie Lovejoy presents a performance on the River Tawe in association with harp player Nia Jenkins. ‘The idea of asking a Welsh harpist to play to people on a boat trip up the River Tawe was driven by a deep rooted curiosity, a love of music and Wales, the country where I was born. Unbeknown to me, was the reality of this river, which takes us on a journey through time, a pertinent landscape revealing the histories and present day realities of the Lower Swansea Valley. A land once poisoned by industry, now reclaimed by the community of Swansea’. Annie Lovejoy 2002
Further work by Annie Lovejoy can be seen at www.herenorthere.org/locws/
28 September 2002
Brigitte Jurack
Junge mit Jacke
The River Tawe Bridge
Brigitte Jurack’s work is placed upon the remnants of Swansea (New Cut) Bridge which used to carry the Vale of Neath railway from the east into Victoria Station, where Swansea Leisure centre stands now. The bridge was built in 1863 and dismantled by 1965. The columns which stand in the middle of the River Tawe are remnants and signifiers of a past industrial and thriving city.
Alongside the solitary hooded figure perched on the edge of one of the support columns Jurack has installed a colourful parachute-like fabric over the second column, sprawling like fallen bunting, evoking the day after the party.
“The notion of the elsewhere, of the uncertainty in relation to time, space and function, which this particular architectural situation evokes is simultaneously expressed by young boys at the castle square, twiddling with their skateboard for hours, days, years: enactments of daydreaming each in their solitude world: the board”. Brigitte Jurack 2002
28 September 2002
Angharad Pearce Jones
Fashion forever goes round and round; skill once lost is lost forever
The Maritime & Industrial Museum
‘When an industrial legacy has already been immortalised as it has been in The Abbey Woollen Mill at The Maritime & Industrial Museum, it is unusual for it to die a second death as will the mill when the museum closes to become the National Maritime Museum of Wales’.
‘As an industry, weaving laid the foundations for the industrial revolution, and the binary system that navigates the patterns in the weave are the blueprints of the world’s first computers, leading to the technological revolution. The work which is suspended above the machinery with The Abbey Woollen Mill ironically refers to the era, the 1970’s, when the mill was first brought to the museum, challenging the cyclical notion of history, frivolously repeated in fashions for clothing and interior design and lacking in the continuity of skills’. Angharad Pearce Jones 2002
28 September 2002
