Whilst I always understood that Jacob’s Ladder would be a labour of love for both myself, as BasementArtsProject: the commissioning organisation, and for sculptor Keith Ackerman, I knew that it would definitely take longer than the one-hundred days of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019. But we never imagined the three year odyssey that it would become thanks to the C***d pandemic lockdowns.
Read MoreThe clock stopped at the time of birth; marking a transition between worlds as the first breath is drawn.
The anguished screams of birth, become the rhythmic sigh matching the cadence of a weary world
Read MoreHaving worked as a Police Forensic Artist, McDonagh’s current practice is not too far removed from a world in which the gaps in reality are filled in by imagination. She has moved her attention from the world of reconstructing human identities for the purpose of identification, to the reconstruction of abandoned human habitation through architecture and found objects.
Read MoreFor the last few months I have been in discussion with artist Paul Digby about his latest sculpture project ‘Looking To The Future: Emily’, and talking about BasementArtsProject’s position as co-creator on it.
Read More‘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.
Read MoreBeneath the surface of the locked down world the oxygen is running low. The tiny life support capsules sustaining our presence in the airless vacuum of millions of hard-drives, can only sustain three dimensional life for so long. It is time to head for the surface, but not too rapidly.
Read MoreSo how do we get past the problem of perception, access and desire. Life is about dialogue, that is how we learn. We educate ourselves through experience, we find the edge of our zone of comfort and understanding and we push past it, through to what lies beyond.
Read MoreWhen we lose a sense of purpose we lose our sense of the future, and that is where hopelessness slips into the void and feeds our deepest fears. That is the point at which the sun sets never to rise again.
Read MoreIt is hardly surprising, that since reopening BasementArtsProject in August, the nature of the exhibitions have been somewhat political. Pushing through a time of great turmoil and upheaval as we are doing right now, things that have been bubbling under for a long time have quite predictably and reasonably come to the surface.
Read MoreDuring the Lockdown I received an update from the studio of Yol, and just before I left another video update arrived in which he appeared to be trapped inside the Coronaverse. I shall leave you with his emergency transmission.
Read MoreToday is essentially a free day. With the exhibition now fully installed and all of the tech stuff working properly, I can spend the day taking in some art elsewhere. I have arranged to meet Sylvia and Christiane at the Dusseldorf U building.
Read MoreMoving out of lockdown, the world is opening up, a chasm to be filled by STEM courses at Universities where the arts are systematically destroyed in an attempt to keep the economy going.
Read MoreThursday 22nd October
Today I am meeting Viennese artists Christiana Spatt and Maria Hanl at the Torhaus. Maria’s work is a film piece and has already been installed, Christiane is a painter and photographer and her work is the final piece in the Corona jigsaw.
Read MoreYesterday in a special edition of the Lockdown Journal, we updated you on the status of the ‘Compressed Time Frames’ exhibition by ArtCouple, and today I bring you some material by Abdullah Adekola, poet and founder of the Black led and Leeds based poetry collective ‘Say It. With Your Chest’. We hope to be working with Adekola in the very near future, watch this space.
Read MoreThe city streets do not seem to be very busy with cars. There is a hire system for electric scooters, they are everywhere and people just leave them parked at the edge of the pavement. Bikes are also popular. Dortmund feels like a city with an environmental conscience.
Read MoreMan is not rational; only what encompasses him is intelligent
Read MoreToday, I depart for the Industrial Rhineland of Westphalia, specifically the city of Dortmund for an exhibition entitled ‘Meine Welt Auf Corona’ (My World After Corona).
Read MoreThe work of Lou Hazelwood and Chris Graham, when working as a duo, seeks to make sense of the slippage from one political and philosophical state to another.
Read MoreThe ‘Emergence’ exhibition looks at the energy that transforms material and gives new form to that which already exists. It is about the hand of the artist in the transformation process, the mind of the artist in the conception of the work and it is about the nature of the material being transformed.
Read More
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Yol]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635756549798-2YHKYICM9NDGQX3NEKXO/Screenshot+2021-11-01+at+08.47.39.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 04]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635117880847-SRT6NNJDF9ZL9NB46L88/IMG_6872.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Lou Hazelwood]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635112055249-DRPLKRKP6YYPLPCV9SBU/Circumvent%2C+Join+the+Dots.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 03]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1635000200597-OLEKHCCN8KU8K8TKXNR2/IMG_6884.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Adekola]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634834352930-VVHVCJ75MU04WTN9ALT7/Screenshot+2021-10-21+at+18.37.43.png)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 02]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634923502966-5QKJ51ZWVMFHIMHDP90Q/IMG_6768+4.JPG)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [ArtCouple]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634830612369-EWYWYKRQU8FA5AQQ1J4Q/ArtCoupleShadow2.jpg)
![Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 01]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a32eeef7131a54afcc07e5f/1634825417813-WTWG3XJLOI7BJB5PVY9E/IMG_6737.JPG)
