Boundless: Transitions Exhibition 5 - 29 October 2023
at A.P.T. Gallery, Deptford This is a bird's eye view of the A.P.T Gallery, an amazing space just 5 minutes walk from Deptford and Deptford Bridge Stations. I can't help feeling that all those explorers (adventurers really!) would have given their right arms for a chance to see the earth like this and not to have to set sail just guessing when they would next hit land! Our exhibition will look at the complicated history of all of us - the movement of peoples, wildlife, ideas and cultures across the globe. Instagram - @a_maze_artists I'm working on my ‘Spice Ship’ with sails of recipes at the moment, when finished it will be piled much higher with cinnamon and pull nets with pepper and cloves. This will be part of ‘Fleet’ my installation in the Boundless: Transitions exhibition. The sails of the ship are covered in 15th century European recipes that uses cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, pepper and cloves - they were worth their weight in gold as the Portuguese opened up the maritime trade routes. Much as this benefitted wealthy Europeans who enjoyed food that tasted much more interesting and delicious, European adventurers predated on their trading partners and were quick to see the opportunity of expanding into the Slave trade and causing centuries of misery and exploitation. 'Sugar and spice and all things nice' goes the nursery rhyme - no so much though.....
The ship measures 66cm x 56cm x 11cm. Fion Gunn July 2023 Fion needed birdsong for her piece ‘The Dreams of City Dwellers’. I dug into my drawers of electronics and found an old Raspberry Pi micro-processor, a very small amplifier, batteries, a speaker cone, jack plug, and a toggle switch. All I needed then was a box to put them in. A neighbour had given me crystallised ginger boxes to burn, but they were far too good to burn so had sat on the kitchen table since Christmas. After juggling around I made them fit. Then a quick bit of soldering to connect the components followed by quite a few hours of programming to make it work by only flicking on the toggle switch. As always, the programming should have taken half an hour but actually took a few days of fiddling, a lot of googling and then Yay! It works. To operate just switch the toggle switch on and after 1 minute 17 seconds you hear beautiful bird song. Drilling the holes through the box to mount the toggle switch and amplifier took far longer than it should, but in the end the result was quite neat.
Alan Hudson July 2023 From the left: Maureen Kendal, Fion Gunn and Ardern Hulme-Beaman presenting at the Electronic Visualisation in the Arts (EVA) Conference in London yesterday. We will be uploading all of the papers on which we have collaborated to the site shortly.
We are so delighted to have great partners on board for our exhibition and events in Deptford this October 5 - 29. The gallery will be open Wed-Sunday inclusive and throughout that time we will host panel discussions, a writers' evening, participatory guided tours and public workshops. The full schedule will be published on this site in early September - keep watching!
A-Maze Artists Collective are delighted to participate in an exhibition by the Computer Arts Society, 25 Copthall Avenue, London EC2. The exhibition is curated by Sean Clark and will open on 10 July and run until December. computer-arts-society.com/exhibitions/cas-members-2023.html
This is one of the many great AI generated images on Nazia Parvez's new website - it's from a series called Desert Nautilus and explores the themes of climate change and resilience.
formblu.com/ Ardern has been looking at footprints more and reflecting on "how we leave impressions, some temporary, some long, some ancient, but none permanent (on the geological time scale at least!)."
He has collected images of prints in mud - some pigeon, fennec fox and lizard footprints (images above) and says " I'm thinking about how we're moving away from having footprints at all, contemplating new technological developments, from trackless modes of transport like seafaring to digital technologies which leave little physical trace. Considerations of carbon footprints and how we can get to a stage where we leave none of those either" Fion Gunn, Displaced no 8, 2020, mixed media, 51.5x25x35cm It always pains me when I see plastic toys dumped on the side of the road, they can't be burned, when broken they're difficult to repair or to recycle (depending on what your local council can do) and so they just add to the growing heap of plastic rubbish. I try to wage war against this - well, in a very small way. If I find a discarded plastic toy boat I take it back to my studio to transform it.
In this case I started with the hull and covered it with raw linen which I had dipped in paint. I removed the deck, masts and other bits and pieces to use in another imagined vessel, then I built an underwater landscape and the surrounding rocks. The transformed vessel with its inland sea has a mast made from cinnamon which supports the last piece of green vegetation to be seen in a world which has been totally flooded. A boat with the remnant of humanity floats on water which covers a deluged city teeming with fish and algae. I wanted to capture that nightmare scenario to which climate change could lead, poetically and in miniature. The viewer is scaled up and becomes a giant with a different perspective - one in which they have power. I have never exhibited this piece! I completed it just before the outbreak of COVID in 2020 and the exhibition in Paris in which it was to feature was cancelled. On World Environment Day it feels like the right piece to feature in this Blog and here's the link to website's Beat Plastic Pollution page. www.worldenvironmentday.global/get-involved/practical-guide?utm_source=Un+Environment+Masterlist&utm_campaign=37457b02e1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_05_11_11_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-37457b02e1-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&_cldee=Fej2OCzdc9U01hfgth7rLUkdb0hiOAL74BtQZXiCr_1TwTHUnSlqL9_Pat19NwAA&recipientid=contact-b67e8a4c607ae911a97800224801377b-176fa048965a4777b926b49bd7dd1a7b&esid=598c3366-f3fa-ed11-8f6e-6045bd11f57a |
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