COLLECTIVE AND THE CITY

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Columbo CollectiveRoyal Scottish AcademyJohn Kinross Scholarship

Autumn 2012Collective and the City

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5 Introduction6 Ade Adesina8 Georgina Bolton10 Celyn Bricker12 Harry Casey14 William Darrell16 Sylvie Law18 Katie Ward20 Acknowledgements

Contents

Introduction

During the course of our stint in Florence the collective explored of the city, taking a number of its sites as inspiration for the work and research produced.

The collective began as a practical arrangement which evolved into a full blown hive of activity feeding of each other’s inspirations and background. By experiencing a new city as individuals and a group we had a heightened experience compared to a lone sojourn.

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Ade Adesina

My work is a visual commentary around the ideas of ecology and our ever-changing world. I am fascinated by how the human footprint is affecting our planet.Our world is full of wonderful landscapes and I wish to highlight the continual dam-age caused through such as deforestation, the politics of energy consumption and how endangered wild species. I am a traditional printmaker; I work with mostly linoc-ut and etching, combining my African cultural roots with my British culture, producing work that makes people reflect about themselves and their histories.

My practice is influenced by my experiences of travel and the imagery that I en-counter. Recently I spent time in Florence immersing myself in Italian culture and collecting a variety of imagery to use in my next body of work. I enjoy researching and visualising the differences between countries both historically and culturally. My ideas come for the new places I’ve visited and I source information from television documentaries.

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Georgina Bolton

By treating drawing as three-dimensional ‘terrain’ my practice undulates between place as much as it does between dimension. It is often fluid, compositionally and materially changeable as I nurture an environmentally orientated aesthetic inspired by the organic and urban geometries of my everyday surroundings.

Working in print, photography and sculptural installation I morph imagery and ideas across medium boundaries, exploring a spatially diverse abstract dialogue. I have always been interested in the cyclical process of collapsing and re-instating dimen-sion. By injecting the familiar with a hint of obscurity I playfully alter familiar scenes, ‘re-generating’ landscapes and functional objects and ‘reinventing’ them using sculptural methods. My photographic work also floats between mediums as I flatten the once architecturally tangible into the illusionistic, once recognisable landscapes slipping into the realm of the ‘hyper-real.’ Natural light patterns are also of huge influ-ence; golden glints on the tops of buildings, a sweeping light ray bouncing across a street side railing or a glistening scaffold tower, all provoking me to think about the symbiotic relationship between architectural structures and the ever-changing natural environment they inhabit.

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Celyn Bricker

My time in Florence has been largely focused on the production of a single, large scale collaborative artwork. I have been working closely with members of the immi-grant community here, and in collaboration we have been producing an artwork that took as its starting point Lorenzo Ghilberti’s Gates of Paradise. The project involves 40 different people each contributing a section to the new ‘gates’ which, when com-plete, will have the same dimensions and form as the original, though with radically different content. Each contributor to the artwork is producing a representation of a single idea: how they imagined Italy before they arrived. It is the combination of these 40 different viewpoints that, when combined, form the artwork.

Many of those migrating to Italy (and to Europe generally) often do so in the belief that, if not a gate to ‘paradise’, that the life available to them here will offer a sig-nificant social andeconomic improvement to the countries they have left. Sadly the reality can be rather different. The hostility that immigrant populations encounter across Europe is almost universally driven by ignorance: ignorance not only of the cultures and countries that people have left, but more particularly by an ignorance of their reasons for leaving in the first place. My project in Florence has been motivated by the hope that - in some small way - the voice given to the communities with whom I am working can do something to diminish that short-sightedness.

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Harry Casey

The narrator visits an old acquaintance from Florence, who is suffering from a form of post traumatic stress. As they observe the various layers of the city they unravel a new reality. Behind the formal estrangements of the film lays a real anxiety about the condition of the city. The film is not primarily interested in the cinema par se or in the city per se but in the relationship or conjunction between the two as it has been played out in a wide range of geographical and historical contexts and, particularly, as it may help us to apprehend and respond to large social and cultural processes.

The film obtains its title from Giovanni Villani 14th century book ‘Nuova Cronica’ or New Chronicles, which lays out a history of the origins of his own city of Florence. In his Cronica, Villani described in detail the many building projects of the city, ordi-nances, commerce and trade, education, religious facilities and disasters such as floods. By returning to the narrative of the titles inspiration, we can find new forms of mapping the city. The film maps particular parts of the city, creating strange and unfamiliar pathways, which form new images of the urban environment.

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William Darrell

Inspiration came from unexpected places in Florence. A strange giant bubble emerged from the river. After retrieving this I found that this was a clear Perspex sphere, part of a street lamp which with a bit of a modification became a functioning diving suit.

I have conviction in the value of my own naivety. I think there are many great ad-venture in this unknown. Too much thought can be detrimental. I like to act with a measured lack of self-awareness and a freshly sparked imagination, working out the inevitable problems as I go. It is with this excitement and bewildered initiative that I define my artistic medium.

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Sylvie Law

As an artist, my practice looks at the duality between external and internal space. My work uses site-specific performance, sound and spatial installation to create intangi-ble worlds that are triggered through the physical presence of the viewer. The work is designed as a unique sensory experience, allowing the public to become a part of the work itself.

Italy holds some of Europe’s most influential sacred architecture. During my time in Florence, I set out to create dialogues within these spaces, using my voice to cap-ture their resonance and atmosphere. My focus was not only to reveal their historical importance but also their psychological impact as buildings. As part of this journey I travelled and visited various sites across Italy, including the old Baptisteries. These ancient octagonal forms have been the basis of human ritual for centuries and are some of the oldest structures still standing today. Once inside, I projected outwards, allowing my voice to travel around the space and bounce back to me. This created an interactive and one-to-one exchange between the presence of my voice and the external presence of the building. These vocal imprints led to create a series of recordings that now present the opportunity to engage with these architectural sites through the human voice, taking you into an intangible and ephemeral world.

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Katie Ward

Exploring mixed media, construction and printmaking I aim to evoke tension in view-ers, creating a place of reflection. Using manipulation of scale, material and austere colour, I reveal the power of atmosphere and personal lived experience through methods of both chance and deliberation, applying a gestural immediacy as a platform for poetic interpretation and free association. I am fascinated by the layer-ing of colour, form, texture and materials as a process dictating depth and energy, enhanced by an evocation of landscape. The immensity of nature acts as a catalyst, lacing my pieces with an abstract and figurative tension.

Throughout my two month Scholarship, I observed and intuitively responded to my new surrounding environment to build a sustained body of research. From observa-tional documentation, and intense experience of environmental colour, I have made a series of works that capture a gestural immediacy juxtaposed with polished construc-tion. My mixed media paintings, emerging from my extensive studies of Florence, are an exploration of colour, shape, composition, weight, motif, surface and narrative that are a projection of my interpretation of place. Using a collage of found material from the streets of Florence as a foundation for my pieces to evolve from, I am reinforcing my personal experience and connection with place to convey a projection of Flor-ence.

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Acknowledgements

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Exploring mixed media, construction and printmaking I aim to evoke tension in view-ers, creating a place of reflection. Using manipulation of scale, material and austere colour, I reveal the power of atmosphere and personal lived experience through methods of both chance and deliberation, applying a gestural immediacy as a platform for poetic interpretation and free association. I am fascinated by the layer-ing of colour, form, texture and materials as a process dictating depth and energy, enhanced by an evocation of landscape. The immensity of nature acts as a catalyst, lacing my pieces with an abstract and figurative tension.

Throughout my two month Scholarship, I observed and intuitively responded to my new surrounding environment to build a sustained body of research. From observa-tional documentation, and intense experience of environmental colour, I have made a series of works that capture a gestural immediacy juxtaposed with polished construc-tion. My mixed media paintings, emerging from my extensive studies of Florence, are an exploration of colour, shape, composition, weight, motif, surface and narrative that are a projection of my interpretation of place. Using a collage of found material from the streets of Florence as a foundation for my pieces to evolve from, I am reinforcing my personal experience and connection with place to convey a projection of Flor-ence.