Showing posts with label British Library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Library. Show all posts

Tuesday, 26 March 2024

Lucy Furlong - Translocation and Dislocation (words by Dean Reddick)

Welcome to the Translocation and Dislocation exhibition, a selection of eclectic artworks that have been placed or screened beyond the tradition gallery walls. Alongside the art, you can read written works by our First Responders. We will choose a different location for each artwork, the art might be placed in a complementary location (to add to the narrative) or juxtaposed against a competing backdrop to create new meaning.

Created by artist and poet Lucy Furlong, this Asemic Airways flight was first flown outside the British Library on a very wet day. Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. First Responder Dean Reddick has recorded his own interpretation for us, read it below.

Lucy Furlong



First Responder: Dean Reddick

Dart

Flat to start with a rippled skin, a premonition and prayer for rain.
Then the folds, carefully administered with your tongue sticking out,
A small concentration crease on your brow.

Pristine and new, sharp nosed and eager, waiting
For the fuel of your arm to enter the air and let me go.
Briefly alight, slicing, gliding, falling.

The destination is wet, muddy and puddled.
All my hard edges gone soft and loose.
A single flight from here to there.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The writing journey of Lucy Furlong has taken her from signing a record deal aged 19, as a singer and lyricist in a band, to a stint in corporate communications working on in-house publications in the 1990s and early 2000s. She attained a degree in creative writing and journalism at Kingston University, and then a MFA in creative writing, specialising in poetry, alongside a Post Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGCLTHE). Lucy has published and performed poetry for over a decade, and her work is taught as part of the Open University MA in Creative Writing. 

Dean Reddick is an artist and an art therapist. He frequently works with casting process and loves drawing trees. https://deanreddick.blogspot.com/

Thursday, 5 February 2015

Dean Reddick - Mr Net

Treehouse, Dean Reddick by Euston Station
Welcome to the Dwell exhibition and book. For a whole month we will be taking each artist's page and transforming it into a 3 dimensional dwelling. Each one of these small sculptures will be exhibited in public on the London streets.

Dean Reddick - Treehouse
The first four days have seen our dwellings beside the water, either the Thames or the Regents Canal. Today we're heading inland to find a place for Dean Reddick's miniature hideaways. Dean is the driving force behind the Dwell project and is also a well respected artist and art therapist. Until recently he was an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmith's College where he helped organise the 'Defining Art Therapy for the 21st Century' Conference in 2013. The event tag line was 'Finding a voice, making a mark' and it this ethos that runs through his personal practice and his projects for CollectConnect.

Hidebird E17 Arts Trail
Dean Reddick has been exhibiting with us for many years and with myself for even longer. His name is carved into Walthamstow folklore (where he works and lives with his family) because of his legendary Hidebird exhibition. Nearly every year he erects a bird hide in his front garden. The hide is inhabited by artist's bird sculptures and we as spotters and twitchers are relegated to the outside space. This is typical of Dean's work, his sense of place in the community and his playful attitude for Nature and Art.

Dean Reddick
There are two Dean Reddick dwells in the book, Shelter One and Treehouse. Today we find the latter in a real tree, not just a paper one, near Euston Station. One of the reoccurring themes of the dwell project has been not just the physical space for dwelling but that for the mind to inhabit, a place to dream. Treehouse is another of these, it harks back to our childhoods and the treasured memories we still nurture inside us. For who could refuse the chance to build a treehouse once again, to escape and play in the skies.

Shelter One, Dean Reddick, British Library
Despite a brief sojourn in Coventry to complete his Art degree Dean Reddick is a Londoner and has lived here all his life. He supports Arsenal and is proud of the capital's culture and history. This exhibition is very close to his heart. His second constructed net is located outside the British Library, Euston Road and is called Shelter. Dean explains a little more about the project and why shelter might be relevant at this moment in society.

"Dwelling seems to me to be a fundamental state for people animals and plants. There is the concrete dwelling, a place such as a home, a nest, a den. There is the idea of dwelling on something, to think and mull over, which suggests that the mind is a place where thoughts and ideas can rest, at least for a while. For me, the idea of dwelling implies a private space or state of mind even though a dwelling might be shared. Finally I hope that Dwell also makes us aware of the social economic and political aspects of dwelling; dispossession, homelessness, war, asylum and refugees, habitat destruction and the emotional states where we cannot dwell but must endlessly move so that we become strangers in our own bodies."

Dwell Book
Sampson Low Ltd
Its wonderful to see Shelter One beside our national library for it is here that all CollectConnect books are preserved for future generations as well as The Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

Don't forget to have a look at the next Collect Connect project, 'The Art of Caring' exhibition at The Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The theme is Caring/Care and it is FREE to enter.

To buy the Dwell Book for £6 then follow this LINK.

AL.