Notes for a Performance

Notes for a Performance was an extensive practice-led research project considering contemporary art as a vital means of engaging with historical locations, collections, and objects. This research was in partnership with Bauhaus Archive, The Portico Library, the Tetley gallery, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Barrow and South Lakes Archive Service and Art Gene. The research considers how art practice can extend and embody cultural memory, by applying an anachronic methodological approach to historical material and artifacts. The research proposed that to understand historical collections and their sites, artists must acknowledge the impossibility of truly defining a fixed historiographic narrative. That any reading of history is culturally entwined with cultural memory and that the past can only be understood in the present and embodied ‘now’ . Notes for a Performance has been disseminated through performance, photography, drawing, limited edition artists book and publications and breaks down into the following art works.
• Notes for a Performance – Revisioning a Ritual. Performed and exhibited at the Portico Library, Manchester. Accompanying publication, Made in Translation published by Manchester Metropolitan University press 2017.

• Notes for a Performance – Revision and Smoky Meeting. Performed and exhibited at the Tetley, Leeds, Temple Bar Gallery Dublin, and the Holden Gallery Manchester. Accompany publication, Notes for a Performance - Final Draft published by Wild Pansy Press the University of Leeds.

• Notes for a Performance – Weather Permitting. Performed and exhibited at Art Gene, Barrow, and transmitted across SOTA communities. Accompanying publication Notes for a Performance – Weather Permitting published by Wild Pansy the University of Leeds.

• INHALE pause Exhale. A series of large-scale performative text drawings exhibited at Art Gene, Manchester Contemporary, Rogue Studios (British Art Show satellite programme) and Studio 2 Gallery.

• Smoking Men. A series of photographic portraits, working with the photographer Jonathan Purcell (UCLAN) exhibited at the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge.

• Notes for a Performance – Limited Edition Artist Books. Exhibited at national and international artist book fairs including PAGES, The Tetley, Leeds, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden and Espai Barra de Ferro, Barcelona, Spain