images from a residency

Christine Arnold

Hondartza Fraga

We are pleased to announce that we are planning a project with Hondartza Fraga, a Sheffield-based Spanish artist.

Bearing Elsewhere (still), HD video, 2010

I am a visual artist, originally from Spain, based in the UK since 2005. I keep my practice active between the cities of Santander (northern Spain) and Sheffield. The common thread running through my work is individual and collective relation to the world around us; the different ‘distances’ between ourselves and everything else: spatial, temporal, emotional, cultural and imagined. The cultural exchange between home and homeland is implied – more or less unconsciously – in most of my work.
My work explores the relation of dependency between images, objects and the individual. I am interested in different image-making processes to explore the physical and emotional distance between opposites. I use different mediums in my practice, primarily drawing, photography and video.
My latest works revolve around the notion of loss, distance, journey, and the meaning of home. In my drawing, I am interested in using souvenirs and domestic objects to force a dialogue between the domestic and the remote, suggesting narrative and contradictions between seemingly unconnected subjects.

Hondartza Fraga

day 6

Christine Arnold’s residency in Garden Street

further thoughts on a residency…

If only art could be dangerous – an incitement to thinking.
Exiled from the city for encouraging left-field thinking.

Now I’m travelling on a train, going through a tunnel through the Pennines. My seat faces the wrong way and I am pulled into the darkness behind me.
The window reflects my image back to me – the slight blurring of a double glaze. The sound changes register, a dulling thud in the ears.

I left my city shrouded in thick, damp fog and emerge through the tunnel into weak sunshine.

Maybe this work now is on doubt. Or refusal. Or failure.
If I were to speak about it, I would speak in its absence. On the expectations of some kind of object. On the expectation that it will be there for you, permanently, not answering back.

And yet…there is an absence – it happened while you weren’t looking. See. Here are the photographs. Maybe this is all in my imagination. Maybe I’m not telling you the truth as I cannot say what that might be.

I could of course construct the story after the event.
Well, we all do that. To show/prove that we exist, otherwise it would all be nonsense.

Christine Arnold

Images from UPLM residency, 14/2 – 14/3 2011

thoughts on a residency

Perhaps we could enter into a negotiation here

There is already so much art in the world that I felt the need to….
and there my pen ran out, and a statement is merely indented in the page
maybe you have to guess at its content.

I wrote that I wanted to remove something – but you have to make it first before you can get rid of it.
The nature of a practice, rather than proposing an “outcome” – what happens in the end – should there be one – is only another staging post along the way to an unknown destination – like “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller”‘ it may throw you back to the beginning. Again again again.

There is no “truth” content here.
Art cannot give you that.

I am out to disturb.
I am willing dissent.
I am telling you the ‘object’ of art is a carrier, a bearer of your misperceptions.

Can one escape the will to categorise?

Christine Arnold

Christine Arnold, Walking Dreaming Thinking. A Book of Reflections (Liverpool, Bluecoat, 2010).

UPLM project closes

The Underground Painting Liberation Movement residency closed this weekend, after 4 weeks in Garden Street.

UPLM exhibition, 7 Garden Street, March 13th 2011. Photo by Amanda Crawley Jackson

Christine Arnold residency began today

Christine Arnold began her 4-week residency at 7 Garden Street today.

Working between art and writing, her practice explores the shifting and layering of place, memory, history and story. Recently, her practice has linked walking and writing in the cities of Sheffield, Paris, Berlin and Budapest.

As the residency progresses, more information will be posted here about when you can visit Garden Street to see Christine’s work. We also hope to engage some discussions about the ideas raised by Christine’s residency during the regular Reading Loop sessions on Wednesday evenings.

Christine Arnold, Walking Dreaming Thinking. A Book of Reflections (Liverpool, Bluecoat, 2010).

Jérôme Grivel residency

The French artist Jérôme Grivel will begin a four-week residency at 7 Garden Street on May 1st 2011.

His practice explores the problematic of sound and its reception by the spectator. His work is voluntarily physical, aggressive and even violent, drawing its inspiration from the artistic culture of the 1970s and the functions and principles of noise. This music, born of an underground culture, assumes from the moment of its production the effect it has on listeners. The work is about taking spectators somewhere, whether they appreciate that or not. It’s about saturating spaces, producing a physical implication in that space in order to confront better the elements which surround us.

Christine Arnold

Christine Arnold, Walking Dreaming Thinking. A Book of Reflections (Liverpool, Bluecoat, 2010).
Image from http://threshold-zone.tumblr.com

Christine Arnold will begin a 4-week residency at 7 Garden Street on March 15th.

She works between art and writing, exploring the shifting and layering of place, memory, history and story. Recently, her practice has linked walking and writing in the cities of Sheffield, Paris, Berlin and Budapest.