WE MAKE THE ROAD BY WALKING
On the 29th of August 2012 two of my brothers and I set out to walk the entirety of the proposed California High Speed Rail route from Los Angeles, finishing in San Francisco on the 30th of September 2012. We walked a line across California where a variety of people, places and practices converge. Since the route connects California’s largest cities through most of its agricultural and rural places the rail’s imminent construction has generated a lot of controversy reflecting the complex interconnectedness of geography, work, leisure, economics, farming, food, ecology, sustainability, urban and rural culture, and more besides. We spent those days speaking to all who are directly affected and inviting a variety of others as well to walk with us in conversations shaped by our immediate environments/landscapes/locale. This ground level, walking pace engagement was documented by video with each days walk posted along the way to the website below.
http://wemaketheroadbywalking.com/the-walk-2/
AN EPOCH OF REST
A project & installation for Instant Archives, a group show at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow
The idea for this project emerged from obsessing over holiday brochures and not at all at ease with the experience and observation of how 'emerging' artists worked and supported themselves, the competing economies they work between, the types and propotions of work and leisure that were available to them, and the polarized views of the value of artists in Glasgow. As an American ex-pat in the Uk I also didn't really understand the British holiday and wanted to experience this cultural institution to better understand it and see if I could find some rest in it.
The project asipired to being a multi-purpose, multi-functional work that would fulfill multiple desires - divergent but interrelated. I proposed to the gallery that I use my production/artist fee to sit poolside at a holiday destintion for the duration of the opening. The fee was just enough to make a series of inkjet prints of cut-out pools to be exhibited, to fly to one of the resort destinations of one of these pools for the night of the opening, and to return the next day. Those who attended the opening were made aware of this.
Epoch of Rest is a title borrowed from the William Morris novel 'News from Nowhere, or, an Epoch of Rest : being some chapters from a utopian romance'.
UNEMPLOYED TWO-GETHER
This is an ongoing work in progress.
It started in May 2011 when I made a public proposal inviting the unemployed to build an organisation that would be in the business of breaking world records. The initial world record would be the three-legged race. The project was designed to bridge the gap between unemployment and work, to build and share skills in doing something extraordinary, and to penetrate existing attitudes towards unemployment by visualizing a statistic in this way, and by pleasurably achieving headway towards employment in earning something other than monetary return.
DOERS AND/OF DOINGS
Doers and/of Doings: A Pop-Up School was a month-long project supported by Sierra Metro Gallery in Edinburgh.
In Janurary 2011 I sent a call out inviting artists at an 'impasse' in their work to join a month-long school where they would all become both teachers and students of each other's impasse. We would then collectively craft individual curriculums of actions and experiences for each person based on the groups experiences and existing knowledge. These were carried out and presented to the public at Stills Gallery in Edinbrugh.
This website is where you will find the proceedings of the school as they happened throughout the month of Feburary 2011 including the curricula and documentation.
http://doersandofdoings.wordpress.com/
