MANCHESTER ARTISTS' BONFIRE. This is the project space for the 2012 research project, all pledges to the bonfire will be housed here.

EVENT: 26 January 2012. Bonfire 6-9pm, After Event 9pm-1am. Islington Mill, James Street, Salford.

From main page click bottom section (date) of image for full pledge.
Pledge# 26 Jessica Mautner. Practice: Multidisciplinary Blog: www.mixedfibres.wordpress.com Title of art work: daeth is not ceratin Description of art work: Sixteen 15cm x 15cm black origami-paper squares, with unfinished incorrect versions of poems about death by e.e.cummings, philip larkin, seamus heaney and charles madge typed on them, folded into 16 zhezhi sycees. Remnants from the process of making a performance called ‘Try to eat everything’. Pledge: I am burning my mistakes. Not because I want to forget them, or to move on, but because I don’t want to indulge them.  Most of my pieces are made over quite a long time, the result of an intense process of reading, exploring, experimenting, talking, doubting, building, destroying, thinking and feeling. People often ask me: but will the audience get it? By which they mean will all these references and ideas and concepts and theories and factoids be readable in the final work. The answer of course is no. And to me that is only a good thing. In this age of blogging and webcams and open-studio-artist-in-residencies, I feel oppressed by the expectation to reveal every stage of my process and explain myself constantly. What’s more, ‘process’ seems to have been elevated to an artwork in itself. This is not an argument for slickly finished articles or unfathomable abstraction, but a concern that the capitalist cult of personality, identity and individualism, coupled with fashionable relativism and kooky homespun pseudo-eco aesthetics, have come to revere the perceived offkilter charm of errors and slips. While we can all learn from our errors, I am sceptical of a trend in art to commodify glitches and mistakes as art objects in themselves. It just seems too easy. This trend makes artist-celebrities and implies a mystical attitude to human actions. And we are all so broke these days, I think perhaps many of us have learned a certain deep-set commodification-drive which can interfere with our ability to tell if art objects are actually good, or interesting; to decide for ourselves, as artists, what is art. I ‘made’ these papers during a kind of sausage-mill process of creating 100 identical ‘gifts’ (strange reminders of death, invitations to reclaim autonomous agency as mortals, part of a performance in Liverpool city centre) over two nights in November. They are a record of the ‘process’, direct evidence of the artist’s struggle to create/labour while half-asleep and after making 90 identical biscuits and individually typed origami-folded wrappers. It was late, and I kept making mistakes, trying to type out great Modernist poems on an old typewriter. At first, I kept the mistake-papers just to recycle - into plain old non-art origami which I often do to take a break from writing or thinking. Getting them out the other day, though, I found myself thinking that the sheaf of half-written pages with all kinds of unfinished mistaken phrases about death seemed somehow…. quaintly poetic, aesthetically appealing, meaningful. I thought they might even look good as an artist’s book or exhibited in a grid formation in a large frame. That’s when I knew they had to go. The piece I made in Liverpool, like most of my work, was very site-specific, linked exactly to that place, that time, those feelings, the people I worked with, the time of year, that me, etc etc etc. Exhibiting ‘accidents’ somehow related to that piece simply weaken it, and would be self-indulgent. I’ve chosen to intentionally hide the aesthetic appeal of these papers, so I am going to burn them not as I found them, but folded up into zhezhi sycees. Zhezhi is the original Chinese art of paper-folding, and sycees are the ur-zhezhi form. Sycees are ingots, an ancient form of currency, and golden paper sycees have long been part of a traditional Chinese funeral, where they are burned for the deceased to benefit from them in the afterlife. Nowadays, convincing fake banknotes, huge paper constructions of fast cars, tv sets, houses etc are more common at those kind of traditional funerals. But with the sycee, I feel I am burning the currency I thought of gaining when I envisaged exhibiting or selling those papers for that split second. There’s something very powerful about burning money; a direct attack to the capitalist system by literally removing some currency from circulation. Maybe I will inspire someone to actually do that. —- The texts to be burned are inextracts from the following poems:  e.e.cummings, “one x” Philip Larkin, “The North Ship” Seamus Heaney, “The Digging Skeleton” Charles Madge, “The Hours of the Planets”
12 ♥ / 25 January, 2012
Pledge #23 Scarlett Pimlott-Brown. Practice: Fine Artist Website: www.flickr.com/photos/armchair_cannibal/ Title of art work: Ø Description of art work: An empty nest, approx. 25cm in diameter, woven from a variety of scavenged natural materials intended to burn at different rates -supplemented with intertwined Sparklers to add to the mechanics of the burning. This is predominantly a process piece, rather than one with any loaded metaphors. And I intend to document both the construction, and deconstruction, through a series of photographic stills, and etchings. Pledge: Initially I began to think about why I’d be comfortable with the regression of something I’d shaped turning back into it’s pre-existant materials, why burning my work did not come from a dislike of it, or a need to take action against something I had created. Making the decision to burn it feels like as much a part of it’s organic cycle as creating/forming it in the first place did. My practise primarily entails working with analogue photography, and 19th century techniques, supported by drawing, print making, and painting; this shift into spatial three-dimensional work has come about through an inquisitiveness about place and space, both in the physical and metaphysical. I’ve become interested in situational and location-specific works. And by taking away from the bonfire photographic images of the event, I will begin to further question why it is that I always revert back to where I feel most comfortable within art -working with flat mediums. There have been continuous themes of the Specimen, and Ornithology -the study of birds, throughout my work for the past year or so now, I like their patterning, and how repeating patterns can change in scale so dramatically throughout nature. I will be looking at the weaving structures used in nest building to inform this piece. Bonfires originated from the act of burning a dead body to crack the mortal shell open, allowing the soul’s release and ascension. Putting ourselves back into the natural cycle by force, rather than decomposition. In this context the nest will be reduced to it’s purest form, but not without a display in the process. Following on from this action I intend to weave a much larger one around myself in the woods on the first day of spring, thus enclosing myself within the physical object that at an earlier stage was externalised and could have been thought to symbolise that I felt within; whilst simultaneously juxtaposing a man-made object in the image of a natural one, back into it’s original intended habitat. This is similar to when eggs hatch, yet are still encased within a larger protective environment. “Ø” could be seen to touch on allusions to the hierarchy of the art world, and the development of new ideas and movements relying on the renewal and stemming-from of previous forms. However, throughout my time as a political activist and an artist, I’ve found this a very uncomfortable coupling of my interests, and so choose to refrain on a base level from mixing my art with my rejection of particular current structures.
45 ♥ / 25 January, 2012