ArtCouple | Decompressed Time Frames and the Interconnectedness of Things

On the opening night of the ‘Decompressed Time Frames’ exhibition by Simon Bradley and Ursula Troche aka: ArtCouple, it took a performance piece before the work could be declared finished and open to the public. The performance acted as a form of consecration, tying together the disparate elements of an exhibition that had, until this point, been delayed three times due to lockdown rules and a further post-lockdown outbreak of C***d here at BasementArtsProject. 

Finally with all of that behind us we were able to open the exhibition three years after we first discussed it. Not all of the exhibitions from the 2019 programme made it, there were some casualties for various, non-fatal, reasons. Although the work may have seemingly disparate elements, produced over a large time frame, continually expanding and contracting, the exhibition proves that nothing is unconnected.

‘Decompressed Time Frames’ (the exhibition formerly known as ‘Compressed Time Frames’) opens with the extension of a work begun as part of the 2017 Leeds Light Night, in which Bradley mobilised his audience, attached by an unsafe rock climbers rope, and traversed the city from art venue to art venue. Here the original rope is purely art object; interwoven into the fabric of the exhibition, no longer in use and shorn of its talismanic charms, it is an unadorned artefact of a pre-pandemic time long gone. Instead a ball of yarn that begins in the garden and winds around the kitchen, is taken up by the assembled audience as they are led downstairs into the ‘The Basement’. The spirit of the Light Night Traverse returns to play and ignites the spark that signals the exhibition open.

Displacement Activities

The traverse plays a very similar purpose to the BasementArtsProject ‘ArtRun’ organised by Deborah Davies back in 2011, our first year as BasementArtsProject, in which a non-art activity - a 10k run, or in the case of ArtCouple a descent in the manner of rock climbers, becomes the facility by which an audience can orient and locate themselves within the scene, moving between locations, attached or following each other so that everyone relies on each other. Everyone gets to experience the fullness of the idea together.

Once downstairs, the performance continues, stories abound amid a cacophony of sounds. Stories of a scaffolding based art gallery during lockdown, meanwhile the dislocated sounds of the scaffolding being disassembled and clattering to the floor echoes around the space. The title of the audio work ‘De-Rig’ is a phrase common to another side of Bradley’s practice as a musician and refers to the  taking apart of sound systems used for performance. In the arts there is as much de-rigging as in the world of scaffolding.

Strung across the window of ‘The Basement’ is a sign stating ‘Due to compressed publication time frames, we are unable to produce our normal timetable posters for this station.’ The text uses a recombination of the found words of the poster, typeset by Northern Rail and posted up at Workington Station. Bradley and Troche’s work as ArtCouple is about the found object, it’s re-use and its new meaning through the act of manipulation and re-presentation.

Heading back across the pennines the railway theme is picked up on again in the largest of the objects in this exhibition. A literal section of train track from the Holbeck Viaduct. The traverse rope from the 2017 Light Night is threaded through the flat bottomed section of track and placed in the window frame between the front and back space. Cordoned off with a frame of yellow hazard tape (dating back to the Premiere of Displacement Activities at Leeds Light Night 2011), a spherical neodymium magnet anchors a pair of pliers in a gravity defying position. Emanating from beneath the train track is the static and crackling interference of some near-field recordings.

You Can’t Unring A Bell
Elsewhere in the front gallery, the walls are adorned with a number of ‘Stitch Pieces’ These works take the waste of consumer society; plastic containers that once held elements of peoples shopping; mushrooms, humus, eggs etcetera, but have in their next life ended up as interlopers within the natural world. Once created they can never truly be destroyed and often end up as death factories for small creatures. Here they have been removed from their natural environment afterlife by Troche, who has woven other objects into them, creating an array of smiley faces and dreamcatchers and such like.

A number of ‘String Pieces’ adorn the walls. Here tree branches are woven with coloured yarn, again accentuating the idea that nature is tangled up with mass production. 
“Yarn strung around branches, as mirrors of entanglement to and with trees, how we branch out, and how we are connected in myriad different ways to trees and each other, over time.” Ursula Troche

The remains of the evenings traverse line from the kitchen to the Basement lie scattered around the floor, echoing the stitch and string pieces whilst further embedding the feeling that one cannot untangle ones self from the performance, the exhibition and the concept of ecological damage.  

The internet is a strange place, particularly when trying to describe it in analogue terms. In one piece ‘The Internet’ two plastic nets that would have contained fruit from the supermarket, are stitched onto a piece of card with a series of interconnecting woollen lines. The space between forming ‘The Internet’.

On the wall next to this is another piece that depicts a crossover from digital to analogue. A piece of card on which a line traces out movements between locations as if on a map, only here there is no map outline, or place names, just random lines punctuated with buttons indicating locations.

As this piece was being installed I saw a post on Instagram by another artist associated with BasementArtsProject, Dr Alan Dunn, who was at that point crossing between the UK and the Isle of Mann for a project. The image was a screenshot from his phone as the internet signal became weak in the middle of the sea. The google map location becomes reduced to a dot moving around on vaguely shaped green and blue patches. Here the digital landscape becomes vague, a mere suggestion rather than accurate representation, and takes on the quality of Troche’s analogue map.

Another piece ‘Cobweb’ has a resonance with disintegrating webs, information becoming degraded and unintelligible. In this piece a Cobweb that had hung in the place where Bradley has worked for the best part of thirty years is transferred, by the artist, to an acetate in the hopes of preserving it and taking it with him as he moves on.

'“the original receptacle for carrying Cobweb was indeed a plastic pouch, and this caused the beast to compress. After that I carefully extracted and inserted it into the current display. Cobwebs actually use static electricity to trap their prey, so adding it to a static-laden pouch was very dumb... in retrospect...” Simon Bradley

Unfortunately, as the cobweb has been captured it has shrivelled into a strangely linear shape, the delicate patterns gone, replaced by an abstract dusty streak. The cobweb is shown in its hay-day, hanging in situ in a basement, not unlike the one in which this exhibition is taking place, in an accompanying video; and the web, preserved in a double-sided glass frame, can be viewed on the nearby light-box.

The ghost of C***d moves throughout the exhibition, weaving its way into the fabric of the exhibition as it has done in our lives and our programme for the last two years. LFT (Lateral Flow Test) tubes spill out of the fireplace onto the floor, stickers are given out deeming people to be High Priority or Urgent and swabs stick out of walls. Hidden in a dark corner are two furtive characters, children of the pandemic. Documents redacted, rendered unreadable, cross shredded and mulched into papier-mâché. Topsy (Top Secret) and Privey (Private Member) contain all of their secrets and hold them in plain sight, unintelligible even under a penetrating and searching black-light.

Decompressed Time Frames represents a new start. The second of four exhibitions planned for 2020 but delayed by the pandemic; here the past continues to comment on the future, but as we look at the stilled frames of the last couple of years, we can assess the future according to our understanding of these individual moments.

Bruce Davies | April 2022

This Side That Side: an update - Sept 2022

Art Couple | De-Compressed Time Frames
BasementArtsProject | April 2022
Works List

ArtCouple (AC) is Simon Bradley (SB) and Ursula Troche (UT), our work combines, separates and recombines. Our framing poster is a photo of the found words: 'compressed publicaton time frames’, typeset by Northern Rail and displayed at Workington Railway Station. The following headings are arbitrary, but may shed light on the anatomy our entanglements.

Rail Attraction (SB)
Section of flat-bottomed rail, neodymium magnet and pliers. The piece includes a near-field RF sound recording 00:10:06. The original, but sadly de-nuded, Leeds Light Night 2017 Traverse Rope is drawn through the ‘web section’ of the rail, together with new threading (UT) introduced at Basement Arts. The rail section itself was found in the vicinity of Holbeck Viaduct. Neodymium (Nd) is a rare earth metal element used in a variety of industries including audio equipment and electric vehicles.

Cobweb (SB)
Video 00:09:49, sound piece, graphic score, and compressed cobweb. The cobweb was extracted from its basement studio context where I had been working for over 30 years, during which time it had become intimately involved in several ongoing projects. Having carefully laid the extracted web on a table, I introduced it to a plastic wallet in order to transport it safely. This was a mistake, immediately upon contact with the plastic, the web compressed into an alarmingly linear form, losing almost all of its delicate structure forever. The graphic score Birdlines is a piece made from tracking bird flights through a window I was forced to look out of while I was temporarily unable to walk. 

Movement piece (UT)
A response to Cobweb (SB), showing the most significant times of when I moved house.

De-rig (SB)
01:39:34  Field recording of the dismantlement of the scaffolding (12th April, 2020) that had given rise to the Out-O-Space Gallery in the first UK lockdown.

String pieces (UT)
Yarn strung around branches, as mirrors of entanglement to and with trees, how we branch out, and how we are connected in myriad different ways to trees and each other, over time.

This is a pair, working in correspondence with each other, in both of the Basement rooms.

The Internet (UT)
Two fruitnets stitched onto cardboard, with the space betweeen them forming, inevitably, the internet.

Black Box (SB)
Black wooden box, two mulched paper figures, sound piece 00:07:25 and ultra-violet torches for viewing. Private Member and Top Secret, affectionately known as ‘Privey’ and ‘Topsey’ respectively, are constructed from mulch made from highly sensitive documents that had been cross-shredded. They comprise secrets hidden in plain sight. Experimentation with eyes followed UT’s Eyestones series.  

Stitch pieces (UT)
Yarn stitched on plastic packaging, as a contribution to take some of our excess plastic out of circulatiobn, for the love of our earth and against climate change.

Smileytubbies
Smiley faces made from stitching on used-up hummus tubs – which arre more tubby than the teletubbies because they are made from real tubs.

Lidstitches
Dream catchers stitched onto the lids of the hummus tubs.. pieces stitched on mushroom packaging boxes:
Other pieces include stitches on mushroom tubs and biscuit trays

Egg-box-piece
Found plastic stitched onto a plastic egg box

Deformed pieces
Plastic packaging deformed under hot water, intended to deform capitalist forms, -  extending decrompression - where I used my stitching technique to trace the new deformed relief of the plastic

Pylon 111b (SB)
Wire, wood, and wool. This is a sculpture made from cable attached to a pylon that has now been felled. The demolition took place on 9th November, 2020—coinciding with the thirty-first anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The piece was derived from a previous ArtCouple project (PYLON 111) carried out with RE Drift. A sister piece, Socket(UT), combines a fragment of beached electrical socket with a twig as its pylon. 

Egg Box Time (UT)
Pieces of yarn as timelines rolled into five of the cavities while the sixth contains a limpet shell.

Test of Time (SB)
Discarded items from Covid-19 testing, distributed swabs, stickers, and an hourglass (to be turned regularly).

Flat Basket (AC)
Found on beach at West Tarbet, on the Mull of Galloway, September 22nd, 2019.

A tangled piece of yarn extending from a tree in the garden down into the basement works its way through Flat Basket and Rail Attraction through Live Yarning (AC), a site-specific yarn intervention connecting several pieces in the exhibition. At the opening performance, we continued Live Yarning and involved the audience in powering up the exhibition through connecting the new, live yarn with the dormant potency of the Traverse Rope.  Time De-Compressed.   

The closing performance on 28th April 2022 will continue from where we left off and take a few things along with it.

 The Traverse http://displacementactivities.org/2018/02/14/thetraverse/

 Out-Of-Space Gallery: http://artcouple.co.uk/?p=224

 String: https://colourcirclesite.wordpress.com/2021/08/02/trees-of-life-worlds-and-stories/

 Private Member http://artcouple.co.uk/?p=116

 Stitch: https://colourcirclesite.wordpress.com/2021/10/09/art-line-stitch-recycle-re-imagine/

 PYLON 111 https://redrift.net/pylon-111/