Fragile Power

A recent run of collaborations led to a set of works in a group exhibition at Florence Arts Centre (6 November – 19 December 2021).

Exhibition

RE:FORM was an exhibition by Art Crit North Cumbria.

It grew from a collaborative prompt: artists were asked to make a new piece of work in response to a unique shape. The shapes came from Amy Story’s 2017 project Found Constellations, which explored Cumbria’s industrial and railway heritage.

Art Crit North Cumbria is a peer group of artists from different backgrounds and disciplines. We support each other’s practice through open feedback and shared knowledge.

Artists in the show included: Alison Critchlow, Amy Story, Anne Waggot Knott, Carlie-Rose Bush, Caroline Dalton, Catriona Archibald, Dave Gowers, Dorothy Ramsay, Laura M R Harrison, Leo Ponton, Steve Meyfroidt & Kym Coratin, Susan Young, Vega Brennan.

How it started

This work started from two separate prompts that came together.

The first came from Amy Story. She revisited her 2017 railway-station mapping work and assigned each of us a simple geometric shape from her final pieces.

At first I simply traced my shape outwards on my iPad, deliberately letting small inaccuracies in where the lines changed direction.

To my surprise, the joins between the lines became more interesting than the shape itself, and the little slips and shifts became the subject.

Randomness is already part of my software-aided drawing practice, so I recreated the same idea with an algorithm (built in openFrameworks). That gave me a way to generate unlimited variations.

Around the same time, a second prompt arrived through a student group: make work in response to the word allele.

I didn’t want to get into genetics jargon, so I took it as a simple idea: small variations in a system, and what happens when you choose one path over another.

That fitted with the variation drawings I was already making. I paired up with Kym Coratin (painter and poet) and we started a back-and-forth process.

I sent sets of drawing variations made by tweaking parameters in my app. Kym responded with text, sometimes in the voice of Mother Nature, which helped guide the next round.

Making work for exhibition

As the exchange continued, we began collecting “generations” of the work into a book. That project is still ongoing.

But the RE:FORM exhibition gave us a deadline and a physical context, so we shifted to making objects for a gallery wall.

We tried handmade papers and combined plotted linework with hand-made calligraphy. Our shared subject was tiny variations over deep time: evolution, “fitness” and the slow creep of change over billions of years.

Behind it was a present-day question: what happens when human activity speeds up change beyond what the rest of life can adapt to?

The finished works were hung together, with the words next to the images, so people could look closely and compare them.