The fabric of the city's history commissioned for Plymouth Art Weekender 2019

Portmanteau, Jaeger and textile sculpture weave together in new artwork

From Friday 27th – Sunday 29th September, as part of Plymouth Art Weekender 2019, venues of all shapes and sizes across Britain's 'Ocean City' will play host to exhibitions, events and community based activity. All of which will invite dialogue, prompt questions, drive analysis and contemplation of life and the world as we know it. And today (20th August 2019), Plymouth Art Weekender announces its key 2019 commissions.

The Plymouth Art Weekender Community Engagement Commission this year is with Dartmoor-based artists Tabatha Andrews and Tim Bolton. Tabatha Andrews

makes performative installations that explore how materials and energy can trigger memory and unsettle the senses. Her work responds to many different sites and contexts including galleries, forests, public spaces and hospitals, and she has worked with a variety of communities. Tim Bolton is a sculptor and former vice-principal at Plymouth College of Art who previously worked in ceramics and glass. Tim and Tabatha are collaborating with seamstresses who worked at the original Jaeger textiles and clothes-making factory on the city's Union Street. Together they will be developing a series of eclectic, bespoke designs, borne from textile patterns to create objects and interactive activities that passers-by can engage with as part of a sculptural project entitled 'Make It Up'.                             

The title, 'Make It Up' was inspired by Elaine Scarry's writings about the human ability to imagine and create artefacts – to 'make things up' and then 'make them real.' An initial iteration of the work will be presented at the Union Street Party on Sunday 15th September, where visitors will be invited to take part in activities encouraging them to reinvent the world around them by exploring the relationship between portmanteau* images and tailors' pattern-making in the city.

A series of surrealist games made by the artists will invite people to imagine the creation of new objects, shapes and forms such as, for example; a jacket crossed with an electrical junction box, a van crossed with a home or a place of work crossed with the idea of happiness - bringing two often conflicting ideas or artefacts together to create a new ideal. Unusual sites on Union Street will be transformed to make temporary spaces for this event.

Over the Plymouth Art Weekender itself, Tabatha and Tim are planning to develop a series of large-scale, hard 'block' patterns, cut out of recycled materials. These will be abstract sets of instructions for imaginary objects that will be hung along Union Street, forcing dialogue and intriguing those who witness them.

This year's Community Engagement Commission sees the Weekender partner with Nudge Community Builders, a community benefit society that is bringing buildings and spaces back in to use on Union Street. Nudge's funding from Creative Civic Change supports communities across England to use the power of the arts and creativity to create meaningful civic change in their areas. Celebrating it's tenth birthday this year, the Union Street Party run by locals including those behind Nudge will be a great precursor to engaging with the final commission for the Weekender.

Tabatha Andrews said, “We're really excited to bring 'Make It Up' to Plymouth. We really want people to have fun, use their imaginations and come on a journey with us. Working with original Jaeger seamstresses, the project will explore connections between one object, body or place and another, breaking down the distinction between the human subject and our environment and unpicking the idea of the 'bespoke', the 'made to measure', and our personal preferences and aspirations.”

The sculptural project was also partly inspired by Babcock International, based nearby in Plymouth, which constructs and maintains ocean-going vessels, and also has a department that tailors soft protective cases for a range of large scale abstract forms including heavy guns on warships, utilising a combination of sail-making and tailoring. There are currently a number of Babcock apprentices working on such cases at Makers HQ so the history and future of tailoring in Plymouth doesn't just relate to clothing, it is also architectural.

Makers HQ is an 18 month old Community Interest Company (CIC). Set up as a collaboration between Millfields Trust, Plymouth College of Art and the local Stonehouse community to establish a fashion factory on Union Street and to reignite fashion and textiles manufacturing in the city. Its vision is to create jobs and provide work opportunities through its sampling studio and all profits are reinvested into the provision of training and education programmes.

Founded in 2015 by Visual Arts Plymouth CIC (VAP), after the British Art Show 7 in 2011 saw a growing appetite for ambitious artistic activity in the city, the Plymouth Art Weekender started off as a grassroots experiment to bring together emerging and existing artists in a 'fringe-like' fashion. The collaborative event has grown in magnitude and last year, the Weekender partnered with The Atlantic Project, a pilot for a biennial for Plymouth to bring a set of renowned international artists and a programme of commissions across the city on the same weekend.

As part of a unique city set up, new contemporary art production agency, Flock South West is coordinating and managing the Weekender in 2019 and 2020. Passionate about helping to develop and deliver artist, curator and producer led projects, Flock South West pools together the extensive collective experience of its directors and other associates working in the city to provide production support for small and large creative projects. 

Plymouth Art Weekender 2019 is supported by Arts Council England National Lottery Grant Project Funding, Plymouth City Council, The Box and a successful crowdfunder campaign. 

Paul Brookes, Acting Chief Executive of The Box said, “A fundamental aim of The Box is to create opportunities and platforms for artists to showcase their work in the city, and to develop a dynamic, sustainable visual arts ecology in which artists are enabled to live, work and thrive. The Plymouth Art Weekender contributes to this ecology, in particular the opportunities it provides for artists studying, living and working in Plymouth.”

The Plymouth Art Weekender takes place on Friday 27th – Sunday 29th September 2019. You can visit a market stall in the Pannier Market on the Friday and Saturday, which will serve as a focal point and central information hub across the weekend. For more information about the event, please see: https://plymouthartweekender.com/

ENDS

Issued on behalf of the Plymouth Art Weekender by Excess Energy Communications. For further information, imagery or interviews, please contact Sarah Harrington on Sarah@Excess-energy.co.uk or by calling 01637 852 130 / 07714 634945.

Notes to editors

About Plymouth Art Weekender

The Weekender confidently celebrates Plymouth, its people and the visual arts, promoting the city as an exciting contemporary art destination. The Weekender showcases a wide and diverse range of activity for all ages including a large array of events and exhibitions throughout the city by artists from near and far.

The Development of Plymouth Art Weekender (PAW) Visual Arts Plymouth (VAP) is a Community Interest Company (CIC) made up of a diverse group of volunteers who represent visual arts organisations, communities and independent artists and curators from across the city. VAP CIC is a platform for the visual arts in Plymouth, connecting grassroots activity with a larger city-wide cultural plan and vision. VAP hosts professional development mentoring, workshops, talks and forums and audience outreach events throughout the year which are open to all. Forming after the British Art Show 7 toured to Plymouth in 2011 and as appetite for more city wide visual art activity grew, VAP initiated the Plymouth Art Weekender in 2015.

The Plymouth Art Weekender provides a free listing platform which enables participants to experiment with new ideas, engage audiences and be ambitious with their delivery. Each year VAP has made an active decision to take artistic and programming risks and set up voluntary task sub-groups whilst still advocating a lack of overriding hierarchy. The Weekender brand and ethos transmits a can do DIY attitude, one that promotes participation in the visual arts whilst having a high impact in the city. Now in its fifth year, the Plymouth Art Weekender provides long term, sustainable ambitions for artists, organisations and audiences alike.

For more information about the Weekender 2019, please see: https://plymouthartweekender.com/

About Flock South West CIC

Flock South West is a new contemporary art production agency based in Plymouth, UK. Flock South West pools together the extensive collective experience of their directors and other associates working in the city to provide production support for small and large creative projects.  Flock are also passionate helping to develop and deliver artist, curator and producer led projects. Flock South West are a non-profit community interest company, and prioritise excellent artistic practice and supporting artists, art workers and creative communities above making money.

For more information about Flock South West, please see: www.flocksouthwest.org

Tabatha Andrews bio:   https://www.tabathaandrews.co.uk

Tabatha Andrews is an artist who works with a wide range of materials and communities. Moving between sculpture, installation and performance, her work is experiential, unsettling the hierarchy of the senses and transforming different sites and contexts. Andrews recently made works about our experience of sound for Spare Parts, an exhibition at Science Gallery London, collaborating with the composer Charlotte Harding and blind opera singer Victoria Oruwari. In 2016 she made The Dispensary, a cabinet of curiosities for people with dementia at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. Among Remote Lost Objects (2015) was a sound installation exploring memory, resonance and the senses which showed at Karst Plymouth and ROOMartspace London. Andrews is currently collaborating with Andrea Streit, a neurobiologist at Kings College London, on an exploration of hearing and listening. She will be working with artists with special needs in collaboration with Freefall and Exeter Phoenix this autumn, and is an Associate Lecturer at Plymouth University and Falmouth School of Art.

Tim Bolton bio:

Tim Bolton originally studied Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art before practicing in architectural ceramics and glass for 10 years. For the last twenty-five years he has been making art schools, including Plymouth College of Art and Plymouth School of Creative Arts. Tim has worked with varied communities including being artist in residence at a high dependency residential psychiatric unit in Sunderland, working with house-bound learners and young offenders in London and with young people at Birmingham Schools. He is now embarking on a new phase of his career, working with artisanal weavers in Myanmar and India to regenerate craft practices and empower women's communities. Tim has worked as consultant and fabricator on numerous installations and project-managed substantial building projects and public art commissions.