The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play)

Painting is an activity riven with problems. It’s fair to say that the problems are the best bits. Problems are why painting takes hold of painters for their entire lives; it’s why we can’t control or tame it. It’s why we are constantly surprised by it and it’s why paintings – despite their flat, stillness – shift and mutate in their emphasis when exhibited in different contexts, places or at different moments in time. One significant problem for paintings is their association with an intentioned author – who themself is an assimilation of experience and influence – who must then outwork their ‘ideas’ by means of a loosely controlled brush loaded in gloopy pigmented mud. Another problem is the disjuncture between the reflexive live-ness of studio-making and the calcified presentation-mode that paintings can be expected to adopt when they enter gallery exhibitions.

The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play) attempts to consider the ‘problems’ of authorship and of display by allowing the uncertainty, questioning doubt and contingency of the studio to ingress the methodology of exhibition-making. In so doing it dispenses with the given job roles of ‘artist’ and ‘curator’ and it questions the assumption that collaboration is virtuous or democratic. The tentative resolution that each painter brings to their objects as they prepare them to leave the studio is immediately given up here as these paintings are forced to butt-up against each other, hang atop one another, or become inserted into holes cut into other paintings. Under these conditions, paintings are not given the safe space of the elegant white cube but are forced to fight for their lives, to hold their own while infecting, reflecting and absorbing their neighbours’ moods, energies, strengths and weaknesses.

Including projects led by Josef Back, Freddie Bannister, Miles Graham, Dan Howard-Birt, LLE (Casper White, James Moore & Abi Birkinshaw), Ian Malhotra, Johanna Melvin, millimetre (Kate Scrivener & Finlay Taylor), Rebecca Willing and over 40 other collaborating artists!

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Flower Painting

Dan Howard-Birt

With inserts by Samuel Bassett, Stephen Chambers, Ilker Cinarel, Lara Davies, Jacqui Hallum, Angus McCrum, Lorna Robertson, Ben Sanderson, Leah Nyssa Stewart, Sammy Tapp

Flower Painting is a large field of painted blooms made from life, from transcription, and from improvisation, into which are inserted small paintings by 10 other painters. Each is invited to make a flower painting for this purpose and yet it would be unfair to call this a collaborative meta-work as it is Dan’s painting which imposes a dominating context onto the others, and it is he who decides how these smaller paintings are arranged within his painting.

millimetre #30: Surface

A project by Ian Malhotra

Léa Dalissier, Ben Deakin, Mandy Franca, Lydia Hamblet, Thomas Hjelm, Ian Malhotra, Georgina Mary Parker, David Murphy, Jordan Strong, Kirti Virmani 

millimetre #31: Central to this Universe (or Goings on)

A project by Kate Scrivener & Finlay Taylor

Magda Blasinska, James Fisher, Oona Grimes, Katherine Jones, Rebecca Partridge, Anna Schapiro, Myra Stimson, Amy Winstanley

millimetre is a long-running exhibition project by Kate Scrivener and Finlay Taylor where group exhibitions (centred around concerns of the landscape and natural history) are shown in the restrictive confines of a single picture frame. With a particular interest in preparatory works, unrealised ideas, and studio ephemera these projects cultivate a quasi-organic sense of cross-fertilization where the potential of each object germinates in the mulch of the others. This exhibition includes two millimetre projects gathered by Ian Malhotra and by Kate Scrivener.

Vice Versa

A project by Johanna Melvin

Georgie Bates, Karl Bielik, Helen G Blake, Miranda Boulton, Sara Breinlinger, Julie Caves, Philip Cole, Chris Daniels, Michele Fletcher, Lothar Goetz, Geoff Hands, Nicky Hodge, Diane Howse, Nick Johnson, Michael Kaul, Stephen Keane, Sue Kennington, Mandy Leonard, Johanna Melvin, Jost Münster, Playpaint, Jon Ridge, Imogen Wetherell, Rupert Whale

Vice Versa is a project by Johanna Melvin and was first exhibited at Terrace, London. 24 abstract painters – 12 who make hard-edge abstractions and 12 who make free-form abstractions – were asked to each make a painting at a specific size. The paintings are then exhibited in edge-to-edge pairs where the language and restrictions of their specific mode of abstraction is forced to become charged, compromised and exemplified through its brute juxtaposition.

Stage III

A project by LLE (Casper White, James Moore & Abi Birkinshaw)

Backcloths and/or panels:

John Abell, Jo Berry, Abi Birkinshaw, Sarah Boulter, Dave Brook, Gordon Dalton, Lara Davies, Roslim Dew, Tamara Dubnyckyj, Robbie Fife, Elliott Flanagan, Rebecca Gould, Abigail Hampsey, David Hancock, Callum Harvey, Beatrice Hasell-Mccosh, Sam Heath, Marielle Hehir, Dan Howard-Birt, Maggie James, Lucia Jones, Billy Kang, Gareth Kemp, Dean Knight, Iwan Lewis, Rhiannon Lowe, Bianca MacCall, Daniel MacCarthy, James Moore, Ruth Murray, Aidan Myers, Philip Nicol, Mahali O’Hare, Tom Pitt, Chantal Powell, Ben Risk, Fiona G. Roberts, Robin Tarbet, Liorah Tchiprout, Ruby Tingle , Toby Ursell, James Vassallo, Casper White, Dylan Williams, Ellie Young 

Stage III is a new iteration of a project initiated by LLE (Casper White and James Moore) at Bay Art (Cardiff) and Kingsgate Project Space (London). Painters are invited to make either a large backdrop or a small canvas. Once at the gallery the canvases are hung onto the field of painted cloth. Immersed in this provisional context they temporarily perform their formal, material or narrative significances. Like in the theatre where we follow a dramatic journey and invest in character relations despite being aware that we are watching costumed actors upon a dressed stage, this project makes the viewer aware of the rules and games at play while acknowledging that these restrictions are themselves transformative and enriching of the painted parts.  

Small Holding

Josef Back, Freddie Bannister, Miles Graham, Rebecca Willing

Painters Josef Back, Rebecca Willing, Miles Graham and Freddie Bannister were provided a studio for a month with the invitation to make their own paintings within this shared space. During this time, however, they were encouraged to allow their works to coalesce toward a single conjoined object whereby an acceptance of the strengths and failings in others reciprocates an awareness and acceptance of the possibilities enabled by their own idiosyncratic achievements and weaknesses.

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The Errant Collaborators (a play within a play) is a project by Dan Howard-Birt. Dan is a painter with an interest in what we do with, and about, exhibitions in this moment where we might feel that they are losing their function as the primary site for ‘art-events’ (that strange occurrence conjured between viewer and object within a controlled environment). Choosing instead to make ‘projects’ he seeks to extend the values of the studio (reflexiveness, doubt, openness, provisionality, etc) into gallery spaces, often working with other painters with shared concerns. By working this way he acknowledges studios as the primary site for ‘art-events’ whilst attempting to re-introduce its possibility back into galleries.