Re:Call 3 additional images

Re:Call 3 was installed in Room 308 Ruskin Hall from February 14th to February 19th. It featured the work of Nikki Pugh and Oscar Cass-Darweish. Below are additional images of the work.

Re:Call 3 Interview Nikki Pugh

Art has left the Building

Re:Call Interview

Nikki Pugh

1) When were you at Bournville School of Art?

2001-2006 (and 2000 at Ladywood Leisure Centre)

2) What course did you study here?

Portfolio Foundation (2 years part-time)

BA Art and Design by Negotiated Studies (mixture of full and part time)

3) Who were your tutors?

That question doesn't make much sense to me - I think I worked with most people at one time or another..

4) What area did you specialize in?

I didn't - that's why I chose Negotiated Studies!

5) What memories do you have of your first day at Bournville School of Art?

I kind of blurred in to starting at Bournville – our first year of Foundation was taught off-site due to the refurb, but I think I might have been doing silversmithing in the basement of Ruskin Hall at about that time too. The refurbishments hadn't really finished by the time we went back to Bournville, so I remember the  quad at Maple Road being a big pile of earth and diggers, plumbing not being connected, freezing cold studios and generally having to make the best of it. Character building!

6) What memories do you have of your final show at Bournville School of Art?

There was an Unfortunate Incident involving a nail and some paneling that had been put up with no gap between it and the radiator... I wasn't involved, but a valuable lesson there!

Also that I was working off-site at the University of Birmingham trying to sort out cock-ups with contractors and hydraulic platforms. Stressful!

7) What piece did you do for your final show at Bournville and could you describe it?

Collectively, my piece was called 'Three Texts'. It comprised 'untitled (testimony)', Day Science/Night Science' and 'Counsel for the Artist'. Intended to represent the year leading up to graduation, the present, and something of a manifesto for my practice in the years to come.

Three Texts

Three Texts

Day Science/Night Science

I still refer to 'Counsel...' in my work.

8) Could you give just five words to describe your experience at Bournville School of Art?

A lesson in self motivation.

9) Could you indicate what creative activity you have done since your time at Bournville?

I worked almost exclusively as a freelance artist up until the government cuts a few years ago. Now working in  part time jobs and freelancing around that. I also started an MA this academic year.

10) Could you describe your current creative practice/ideas/work?

11) Could you say a little about the work you have chosen to include in the Re:Call exhibition?

I started working with GPS technology in 2008. I'm interested in it as a material – how it has a grain, how it splinters, how it pushes back.

The drawings exhibited as part of Re:Call are traces of many hours spent walking around one of the 'Eastside' regeneration areas. I hold a GPS unit in each hand as I walk, recording the positions where they think they are each second. I join both positions for each moment in time with a line. Errors are introduced due to affects from my body and from the landscape, resulting in different characteristics of the lines as I'm walking through different types of surroundings: in built up areas the lines get longer and more haphazard as the GPS signal bounces off of buildings. In open areas, the lines are much shorter and more uniform as the effects from the fabric of the city are reduced.

Each drawing was made at a different time and can be read as a map. The changes in the 'fingerprint' of the area can be seen as car-parks are built, roads closed and buildings knocked down.

19264 seconds

12) What are you working on at the moment?

A project exploring connections to distant places. Identify those locations that resonate with you and, when you walk with one of these pods, they will shift their weight gently in your hands when you are walking in the direction of that location.

13) What are your creative plans for the future?

Mostly based around survival at the moment – trying to find a way of making an arts practice sustainable.

14) Is there anything else you would like to add?

Re:Call 3 Interview Oscar Cass-Darweish

Art has left the Building

Re:Call Interview

Oscar Cass-Darweish

1) When were you at Bournville School of Art?

From 2005-2009

2) What course did you study here?

BA Visual Art by Negotiated Study

(as well as Foundation Art & Design)

3) Who were your tutors?

Steve Bulcock, Sean O’Keeffe, amongst others

4) What area did you specialize in?

Digital practice (websites, 3d animation, projections & installations)

5) What memories do you have of your first day at Bournville School of Art?

Sun, people, smell of ink, busy cafeteria, chocolate, finding it difficult to navigate maple road

6) What memories do you have of your final show at Bournville School of Art?

Feeling simultaneously confused, relieved and annoyed. Arriving too early and being anxious on the private view, the distracting presence of ‘scum slave’…

7) What piece did you do for your final show at Bournville and could you describe it?

Episodic 3d animation of a warped virtual space, on a screen acting as an aperture angled inside an abstract sculpture. Accompanied by an interactive website revealing the opposite vantage point of the same animation.

8) Could you give just five words to describe your experience at Bournville School of Art?

Quiet, fulfilling, disoriented, proficient, deceptive

9) Could you indicate what creative activity you have done since your time at Bournville?

Worked as a web designer, curated exhibitions in London and Birmingham, presented work as part of group shows, created/presented work online.

10) Could you describe your current creative practice/ideas/work?

Currently a practicing artist/curator, working on collaborative projects as well as design work when available.

11) Could you say a little about the work you have chosen to include in the Re:Call exhibition?

Unearth is an audiovisual piece that explores the digital screen as virtual space. A beam of light scans objects and spaces acting as a metronome to the slowly developing soundtrack. Threatening to resolve itself the video deliberately reverts to the consolation of a repetitive scanning line of white pixels. Versions of this piece have appeared in parts of other works and installations.

12) What are you working on at the moment?

More short video’s and music, applications for residencies, research projects, publications and web documentation for past exhibitions.

13) What are your creative plans for the future?

Build on design experience, develop an online exhibiting space.

14) Is there anything else you would like to add?

Re:Call 3

Re:Call 3 Tracking motion

Re:Call 3 features the work of Nikki Pugh and Oscar Cass Darweish. For this installation additional sections of the frame were overpainted. Nikki's work: the gps tracked circuits of Eastside, translated into drawings on paper, rewrites the map, combining movement and place. Oscars video work Unearth tracks virtual space, a visual and sonic re-imagining.

Re:Call 2 additional images

Re:Call 2 Narrative Structure

Simon Hope's framed photograph, Do Bears shoot in the woods? and Lizzy Piffany's video In memory of a free festival were installed in Ruskin Hall room 308 from February 7th to February 12th.

Re:Call 2 Interview Lizzy Piffany

Art has left the Building

Re:Call Interview

Lizzy Piffany

1) When were you at Bournville School of Art?

2006-2010

2) What course did you study here?

I did the Foundation course (2006-7) and the BA (Hons) Visual Arts by Negotiated Study (2007-2010).

3) Who were your tutors?

Penny Mason, Linda Matti, Kevin Harley, Sean O’Keeffe, Ruth Claxton, Stuart Whipps, Jo Newman, Steve Bulcock, Sally Harper briefly.

4) What area did you specialize in?

Documentary

5) What memories do you have of your first day at Bournville School of Art?

Tom Jones (not the singer) who was head of the school at the time gave us each an envelope of visual reminders to help us remember his five big suggestions to us in approaching our art studies. He said we always had to question everything everyone said (including ourselves) about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. And there are patterns everywhere in nature so remember to look out for the patterns. And I’ve forgotten the rest and I can’t remember what was in the envelope to help us remember.

6) What memories do you have of your final show at Bournville School of Art?

Stuart Whipps telling me he liked my work. Sean O’Keeffe telling me he loved my work. Me feeling a deep resonating significance to my very being. Which took a few years to wear off. Feeling triumphant because I’d finished something worthwhile for the first time at the age of 32, and it was something that felt like it had been there all my life just waiting to get out. Feeling vindicated.

7) What piece did you do for your final show at Bournville and could you describe it?

It was a 25-minute documentary called Dawn, which was a sort of real-life fable centering around my friendship with my wingman Tim, featuring home-made music and home movies (Ruth Claxton asked me what I meant by “home movies” at my final assessment and I didn’t really know and I’m still a bit vague but I reckon you feel it when you see it). Tim’s been my creative mentor and co-conspirator since before I started at Bournville and appears in all my films (he’s the first person you see in

the film I’ve entered for Art Has Left The Building). Dawn was an attempt to describe this weird other-worldly experience I had where everything around me synchronized with everything inside me and I got all sorts of epiphanies and knew the universe and me were one and the same entity. Which is how I got obsessed with synchronicity (see question 10). 

8) Could you give just five words to describe your experience at Bournville School of Art?

       

Demystifying. Breathing space. Piffany Path.

9) Could you indicate what creative activity you have done since your time at Bournville?

Made these films:

Birmingham Welcomes the Conservative Party (2011) 5mins

In Memory of a Free Festival (2011) 36mins

Tim Makes Jarbies (2012) 11mins

The Legends of Doctor Rock (2012) 39mins

And been filming a couple more with the intention of editing them at some point (see question 12).

       

I’ve put on a number of screenings at some pubs in Digbeth and Moseley and the Ort café in Balsall Heath, and Birmingham Welcomes the Conservative Party got shown at the mac as part of an exhibition where everyone could submit work to be shown in changing exhibitions each week. It got picked one week at the last minute because the riots happened and it became vaguely topical because it features a lot of angry people venting their political rage on the streets of Birmingham and a lot of police trying to contain them.

10) Could you describe your current creative practice/ideas/work?

I’ve been building up a collection of documentaries inspired by my experiences of my life in my community, and underpinned by an urge to broadcast a more meaningful angle on reality than the heavy rationalised normality of the media bombardment I was raised on, which so much clouded my vision as I was growing up that I didn’t start to see any beauty around me until my mid-20s, when I stopped watching telly. Gradually I’ve phased out newspapers too. I have to tune out the admass* so I can see the harmonious unity of the whole of creation behind the mass consciousness mask.

Since the first film I made, Synchronicity: In Search of the Unus Mundus**, I’ve held deep-seated aspirations to make a film that proves the existence of… … … … a force at work in the universe which I’m still trying to figure out what it is. I call it the unus mundus, for the sake of argument. In that film I hoped to be able to catch it red-handed, in the act of working its harmony through meaningful coincidences, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d imagined and while I was convinced of the evidence I don’t think anyone else was. This original motivation still preoccupies me however and I’ve continued to investigate synchronicities in the making of my films, even though synchronicity itself is no longer the main subject.

11) Could you say a little about the work you have chosen to include in the Re:Call exhibition?

In Memory of a Free Festival was a gift from the unus mundus, and from Synchronicity Dave, a friend of mine who first appeared in Synchronicity: In Search of the Unus Mundus.

Dave got the idea to have us an organic unorganized community festival on Moseley Bog for the summer solstice the year after I graduated. The idea was to just spread the word around and let it spontaneously happen, whoever came and whatever we brought with us would just self-organise and make whatever it would make, without anyone directing it. I anticipated it as an experiment with the unus mundus – I would just turn up and follow where I felt it drawing (through) me, believing totally that it would reveal itself in the love of the people gathered and the unity of what I caught. 

When I woke up the morning after the festival I thought I’d failed. When it came to editing it slotted together in such a harmoniously neat way that little by little I became elated as if I had harnessed the power of unus mundus connection my very self.

12) What are you working on at the moment?

Myself. I’ve realized I’ve just been pissing about with the unus mundus up to now and I need to do some major work on my soul before anything else.

But also… very slowly working with Tim on editing In Memory of a Free Festival 2 – we tried to have another festival a year after the original. It’s much darker than

the first one. It may not be suitable for public release.  And I’m gradually filming some new stories to make into films; one about a man who’s been giving away free cooked food every Tuesday next to St Mary’s church in Moseley for nearly two years, and the other about a band called the Army of the Broken Hearted who I randomly encountered in an alleyway and then realized the lead singer was this significant outtake character from my earlier work on Synchronicity and his songwriting is devastatingly awesome commentary on the soulless mass consciousness of the times we are living in.

13) What are your creative plans for the future?

Waiting and seeing.

14) Is there anything else you would like to add?

Footnotes

* admass:

“Admass is my name for the whole system of increasing productivity, plus inflation, plus a rising standard of living, plus high pressure advertising and salesmanship, plus mass communications, plus cultural democracy and the creation of the mass mind, the mass man.” (JB Priestley, Journey Down a Rainbow)

** unus mundus:

“a deeper reality that connects mind and mind, and mind and matter” (Ervin Lazslo, Subtle Connections: Psi, Grof, Jung and the Quantum Vacuum)

“Unus mundus, Latin for “One world,” is a term which refers to the concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and returns to. It was popularized by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, though the term was used as early as the sixteenth century by Gerhard Dorn, a student of the famous alchemist Paracelsus. “Jung’s concepts of the archetype and synchronicity are related to the unus mundus, the archetype being an expression of unus mundus; synchronicity, or “meaningful coincidence,” being made possible by the fact that both the observer and connected

event ultimately stem from the same source, the unus mundus.” (Wikipedia)

 “Synchronicity involves a connection between inner psychological experience and outer experiences in the world, where the connection is acausal in the sense that the inner experience cannot have been an efficient cause of the outer experience, or vice versa. In short, synchronicity is a meaningful, acausal connection between

inner and outer events. Because the phenomenon of synchronicity involves an acausal coordination of the inner and outer worlds in a meaningful way, it is not exclusively a psychological or physical phenomenon, but is “psychoid” meaning that it somehow essentially involves both psyche and matter. Thus, Jung interpreted

synchronicity to imply the existence of an extremely profound level of reality prior to any distinction between psyche and matter. In other words, synchronicity phenomena represent a manifestation in consciousness of psychoid structures present in the depths of a transcendental unitary reality Jung called the unus mundus.”

(Thomas J MacFarlane, Quantum Physics, Depth Psychology and Beyond)