Final Works
When the 24 Solar artists have completed their responses to the Solar Project the results will be available to view here.
'A Virtual Biennale'
'An Experience of the Sound of WiFi in St Andrew Square'
'3°40'36.97"S 55°24'35.80"W'
3°40'36.97"S 55°24'35.80"W uses Panoramio, online software which enables anyone to geotag photographs that may or may not subsequently appear on Google Earth and Maps. In an attempt to supplement the partially street-bound views offered by Google, I have uploaded ink drawings I have made of Fordlândia for potential use within Google’s maps. A place that I have attempted to reach but have never been to, Fordlândia is a failed town in the Amazon, now uninhabited, and built by Henry Ford in the 1920s to house workers harvesting the site’s indigenous rubber trees. What’s left of the place can’t even be seen via Google, with the image fragmenting into oversized pixels when you try to zoom. In intimating and digitally grounding representations of space as imagined, 3°40'36.97"S 55°24'35.80"W at once extends and unhinges the conditions of its own display.
'Mirage'
'From Luskentyre'
'The Antikythera of the North'
'The Woodland Labyrinth and Greenlaw, Scotland'
The Woodland Labyrinth was created as a visual art piece for Solar. Artist Helen Johnson collaborated with net-maker/artist Fiona Drewery to create the labyrinth in a space of woodland situated in Greenlaw in the Scottish Borders. The Woodland Labyrinth has been gifted to the community and is available to visit.
'Assistance Needed'
'A Journey in Two Directions'
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'Points of View'
'I'm Calling: Lost in the Stars'
'Over the Rainbow'
'The Incredible History of the Scots in Colombia'
'The Orangery'
'Are You A Dedicated and Ambitious Would-be Parent?'
This is the next chapter in an ongoing piece and continuously expanding alternate reality entitled Forgive Us Our.
Forgive Us Our is a cautionary tale that describes in text, film, photography, performance audio and book the public and personal response to an imaginary scenario in which synthetic biology is used in an attempt to eradicate greed, lust and anger from a group of children that become known as the SOBA babies. The story is told retrospectively, when the ‘babies’ of the original scandal have grown into adults; adults that we identity with through their dysfunctionality and comic attempts to overcome their shortcomings.
Forgive Us Our seeks to disintegrate the boundary between fact an fiction. Having explored this project in the context of exhibition, performance, public space and in the form of a book, I now seek to infiltrate the virtual space. Are You a Dedicated and Ambitious Would-be Parent? goes back to the very beginning of the Forgive Us Our story. In the form of an advert placed by the SOBA Institute looking for parents to take part in the programme.
The ‘site’ I have chosen to design this work for is virtual and thus multiple. The piece will exist on the web appearing on forums, advertising banners, networking communities, and on a tailor built web-site. This virtual site for the work will be used to test the plausibility of my narrative and to gage how a situation such as the one described in Forgive Us Our might come about. It is hoped that the piece will eventually propagate itself across this virtual space.
You can view existing material here, or visit the Soba Institute website.
David Cass and Joseph Calleja Collaboration
'Unearthed' by David Cass
The discovery and rediscovery of this land: in one second I am on moorland, my mind is elsewhere. In another I am moving through uncertain land, my mind lies upon the heather and gorse.
Francis Alys’ Narcotourism (Francis Alys, 1996) discusses the state of ‘physical presence and mental absence’ and vice-versa. It is this concept that inspired what I intend to be a constant state of unrest, and a film which offers an ungraspable ‘sense of place’. Joseph Calleja and I embarked upon the collaboration, Out Of Site in July of this year - a project in which each artist briefed the other to create an auto-biographical site specific project – the sites being our homes. The project is essentially a swap. Calleja instructed me to create a project within boundaries set by him, and I instructed him to create a project within boundaries set by me.
Karen Forbes approached me to be part of the Solar Pavilion Project on the back of a film I had created during my time at ECA with fellow student Bobby Nixon. I therefore thought it appropriate to echo the low-fi, collage-like spirit of this untitled film in Unearthed. Set primarily on the Lauder Moor (just seconds behind my family home), the film flickers collected digital footage of my travels since graduating, as well as self shot, family, and found Super8 footage. The one exception being a short blurred clip of a painted matchbox: used to symbolise my current studio practice, but also to draw attention to the soundtrack (the film opens with the sound of a burning match, and this sound is recurrent throughout the film).
The self-made soundtrack is centred around a clip of my song And We’ll Sleep Off The Night, a piece of music which throughout the film is constantly reinterpreted, furthering the notion of discovery and rediscovery, like many repeated, reversed, and sped-up clips.
I don’t consider myself a film maker, but I see the creation process of a film very similar to that of a painting: the layering, the constant scraping back, the adjustments in tone and speed. I see this crudely chopped, uneducated attempt at film-making as a success in fulfilling it’s briefs (both from Calleja and Forbes): it links itself to the Solar Pavilion by quietly discussing my time in Edinburgh, and at ECA, whilst also presenting itself, like the Pavilion, as a sort of panorama: it offers an all-encompassing wide-angled view of the last 12 months of my life.
'77' by Joseph Calleja
‘What was embarrassing for them, became something they loved.’ Ron Arad
‘… but the fiction always carries its own truth…’ Laura Cumming
These two quotes, taken out of their context describe an introspective attitude with which I have carried out David Cass’ proposal in our ‘Out of Site’ collaboration for the Solar Pavilion.
I see this film as a collage of footage that documents, explores as well as hides through an obscure narrative. ‘77’ was shot in a derelict house at 77 Mgarr Road Qala Gozo, Malta. This house/workshop belonged to my grandfather, and in which my father carried on working while accumulating and storing his ‘stuff’. Every speck of dust accumulatively shrouds single accidental objects into a oneness that in itself not only anchors me to my predecessors, but it also becomes the motif of this film.
'Between'
The work for Solar Pavilion is a short film based on a series of walks round Edinburgh comprising of photographs of the painted division of where two buildings meet. These superficial skins of paint delineate the divided territories we occupy; they take on the character of flags. This project is in collaboration with Andy Brown who is a freelance videographer and editor living in Glasgow and Benjamin Oluonye who is a producer/musician/dj living in London.
The grid image is a catalogue of recorded and found painting, the grid forms a key to the map.
'Estuary'
'Paradies Strasse'
These drawings are composed of objects, spaces, places and structures which are sometimes real, sometimes imagined. The overriding ambition is not to depict the singular, but to engender a reflective resonance in order to take each image beyond the literal, thereby making them more ‘real’, more open, …..and more giving. Many elements are obviously naturalistic, superficially recognisable and ‘understood’. However they are not depictions of a one-dimensional reality. Rather, they are intended to open up broader metaphorical and metaphysical thought, and to trigger consideration of aspects of the human condition, quiet and loud, micro and macro, personal and universal.
One’s perception of place is shaped through experience, memory and feelings, our reaction to the visual governed by intellect and emotion. We hook up what is in front of us and around us to our own sensibilities, lives, circumstance and thoughts. Subsequent reflection is fuelled and moulded by a recognition of both the large and the small, the ‘big picture’ and the tiny details and subtleties that shape this grand view. My drawing tools and methods mirror this process, - liquid charcoal, pointed pencil, in, in, in, - see, see, see, - think, think, think.
The world is not black and white, but infinite shades of grey.
'Ode to Gilmerton Cove'
For more information about Tessa Lynch and her work, visit her website.
'Firule (the family estate in Split, Croatia)'
For five generations the Firule estate has been ruled by the family and has ruled the family. How do family members of various ages and gender see this relationship?
I gathered 30 videos filmed at the Estate by three generations of male and female family members, depicting motives that they consider emotionally or intelectually important. Some videos were found in family archives and date as far as 1950s, while others were filmed for the purpose of the project. All authors belong to Kuzmanic family and have spent most of their lives at the Estate. Videos are synchronised and simultaneously published in webpage.
These videos represent one location from various perspectives – temporal, social, gender etc. – thus creating a virtual dialogue between various generations and viewpoints. Simultaneous presentation enables viewers to directly compare various perspectives and opens an endless stream of questions…
For more about this project, visit the artist's website.
'St Andrews Hut Diary'
For more information about Bridget Steed's St Andrews Hut Diary you can visit her blog.
'Leith Theatre'
To view the work with sound please click here. Please ensure your speakers are turned on.
