Associate Artists
We Live Here
The beauty of Live Art and other experimental practices is that they exist not just in one place, but many; often rejecting conventional art spaces. Due to their ability to adapt and thrive, they move across a number of locations, from suburban house to office building, from dockside to church. In this way, Live Art can be seen to remain placeless, existing only at the very second it unfolds before an audience. When Live Art is found within the walls of institutions such as Arnolfini, it can still remain playfully anarchic.
We Live Here is a new artist development scheme inviting a selection of artists living and practicing in Bristol to create works at Arnolfini, whilst offering audiences the opportunity to participate throughout the process of creation in a series of meetings, discussions, works in progress and performances.
Arnolfini’s Associate Artists are:
Action Hero
Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse have been working together as Action Hero since 2005. Action Hero make live art and performance that seeks to use audiences as collaborators and co-conspirators, and are interested in creating work that links audiences together and unifies them as part of the live event, building a temporary community.
Their current interests lie in work that tries to rewrite landscapes and encourages audiences to reconsider the spaces around them. They often make work that responds to site and context, and plays with notions of real and imagined places within those sites. Their performance has been defined by necessity: limited resources have created an aesthetic of roughness and intimacy that has become central to their work.
Tim Atack
Pete Barrett
Pete Barrett has been creating live art since 2004. Bound together only by a certain sense of concentration, ritual and privacy, his work was originally inspired by the body artists of the 70’s and the extremes of endurance and duration.
Accompanying his work, Barrett has moved from the familiarity of the shocking into uncharted territories of love, shame, routine and the passing of time.
Bodies in Flight
Alex Bradley
Alex Bradley has been practicing as an artist since 1989 specialising in performance, audio and digital technologies. Alongside this independent practice and the wide range of solo and collaborative projects he has also undertaken a significant number of contracts for project management and consultancy using his expertise in emergent technologies. Educational content has always been part of his artistic practice and has gone on to form some significant projects that he has worked on.
Laila Diallo
Born in Canada, Laïla studied at L’École de Danse de Québec before travelling to La Rochelle and to London to pursue her training, respectively with Régine Chopinot and at the London Contemporary Dance School. In 1998, she received an MA in performance from the University of Kent. She was a member of Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company between 1997 and 2005.
Sense of Self, a duet co-created and performed with Montreal based choreographer and dancer Mélanie Demers, is currently touring in Europe and Canada. Previous works include the solos waiting fleeing, Out of sight in the direction of my body and The Wayside as well as the duet Between the Shingle and the Dune, in collaboration with Theo Clinkard.
Credits for theatre and opera include War and Peace, Canadian Opera Company; Thérese Raquin, National Theatre; Days of Significance, Royal Shakespeare Company; The Vortex, Theatre Royal Windsor, A Doll’s House, Theatre Royal Bath and Macbeth, Scottish Opera on Tour, She was also Assistant Director and Choreographer for Dido and Aeneas, La Scala de Milan and for the musical Kirikou et Karaba. Laïla was awarded a Rayne Fellowship for Choreographers in 2006.
Michael David Jones
Michael is a Live Art Mongrel who trained in Dance, Drama and Fine Arts before discovering a passion for Live Art and Performance. He has worked with the Pacitti Company (2006) and with Guillermo Gomez Pena and La Pocha Nostra (2007) as well as working with local artists and showing his own work both in the UK and internationally.
Michael is currently undertaking a practice based research MPhil at The University of Bristol investigating Intimacy and Authenticity in Performance. Through a series of (auto) ethnographic explorations he seeks to explore the conditions conducive to intimacy and the potential within live art for the manufacture of 'moments' between strangers. Inherent within the research there are unavoidable questions of gender, sexuality and identity which inform and in some ways limit the live encounters he creates.
In recent work. Jones has become interested in the relationship between fiction and reality; areas of day to day life where performance occurs, and performance informed by 'real life' experience. He writes a regular blog and has contributed articles and interviews to arts websites as well as organising artist led events both through and independently of the Arnolfini.
Ed Rapley
I like to play around on stages and in the streets of whatever city I find myself in (usually Bristol). One day I hope to become rich and famous, and in an ideal world this would involve neither riches or fame.
Stephen Robins
Stephen has been associated with the Arnolfini for three years; in that time he has created, either as a solo-artist or in collaboration with others, three durational performance works: Rant, April 2008; Coinage, Jan 2008; and NiceDay, September 2007. Stephen’s art practice works the relationship of beauty, ugliness and justice and is the concern of his practice-based PhD (AHRC), co-supervised by the Arnolfini and University of Bristol. Projects in development include, The Logical Process of Becoming a Pig, with fellow associate artists Shi Ke, Alex Bradley and friends of Arnolfini, Harminder Judge Singh and Esperanza Tommasini; and a work for two performers pulling funny faces.
Stephen’s work is characterized by humour, tears and long periods of stillness. In November 2008, Stephen was invited to perform with La Pocha Nostra in creating Runaway Runway for the Arnolfini.
Shi Ker
Folake Shoga
Folake Shoga is a Nigerian/British artist working out of Bristol, using among other things moving image and sculpture and drawing. Her last big project was to curate Calling, digital residencies for Black artists at Watershed in 2005 (www.calling.org.uk). Since then, Folake has been cautiously exploring both practice and critique in Live Art, a new field for her. Folake sometimes writes under the name Osunwunmi, a name that invokes the Yoruba Orisha as exemplar and as inspiration.
Duncan Speakman
Duncan Speakman is an artist based in Bristol, UK. Originally trained as a sound engineer his work now examines how we use sound to locate ourselves in personal and political environments. Seeking out the poetics of the everyday, he creates socially relevant experiences that engage audiences emotionally and physically in public spaces. Alongside his art practice he is a senior lecturer in Media Practice at the University of the West of England and is currently developing site-responsive soundwalks, street games and pervasive theatre works.
He has been exhibited internationally and in 2001 was awarded the Clark Trust Bursary for digital arts and has received critical acclaim for his videoblog, 29 fragile days. In 2007 he was peer advisor on the Almost Perfect locative media residency at Banff New Media Institute and since 2008 has been an artist in residence at the Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol.
Special Guests
Exploring the interface between theatre and live art, The Special Guests have been devising live performance for theatres, galleries and beyond since 2002. The company create work which has a playful relationship with wide-ranging audiences, champions truth, flirts with disaster, carries comedy in its heart and tragedy in its wiring. The Special Guests are members of the artist-led organisation Residence and also curate the DIY cross-artform event The Flaw Set. They are currently working on a new work Something Got a Hold of Me. The Special Guests are Matthew Austin, Lucy Cassidy, Nina Wyllie and Suzie Zara. Their Creative Advisor is Sara Jane Bailes.
http://www.thespecialguests.co.uk/
Clare Thornton
Clare Thornton’s work is driven by her curiosity around memory, body/site and social history. She uses a wide range of media including performance, textile sculpture, video, photography, text and talk as means to unfold personal narratives, emotional landscapes and the making of meaning. Her installations characteristically incorporate sculptural costume elements and focus on the clothed/adorned body as a site/tool for exploring these concerns. Having previously worked with corsetry, exploring ideas of thresholds, tension and release, Thornton is currently researching the Ruff/Collar in 16th Century Northern European portraiture; notions of status, symbolism, control and the individual in society.
Clare Thornton lives and works between Oslo and Bristol. She completed her MA(Hons) in Theatre Studies and Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland (1992).
Uninvited Guests
Formed in Bristol in 1998, Uninvited Guests make entertaining and provocative performance. Their work represents a contemporary reality, in which memories of movies are as much part of our experience as intimate dialogues with lovers. The company works in various contexts and constellations, focusing mainly on performance but also producing installation and digital media. Recent work has blurred the line between theatre and social festivities, with audiences joining us in events that are celebratory and elegiac, nostalgic and critical of these times. Previous projects include Guest House, Film, Offline, Live Chat, Schlock, Aftermath, It Is Like It Ought To Be: A Pastoral and Love Letters Straight From Your Heart.
It Is Like It Ought To Be, which was partly developed at Arnolfini, toured to China in November 2008 after a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007: “The latest show from Uninvited Guests is absolutely brilliant” (The Guardian).
See a television report of the tour here: http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/s6Fo8ATj4BE/.
Their current show, Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, also developed at Arnolfini, was part of the National Review of Live Art in 2008 and has since toured nationally. It is currently being performed in community contexts in London.
Uninvited Guests’ Artistic Directors are Paul Clarke, Richard Dufty and Jessica Hoffmann. For more information please visit http://www.uninvited-guests.net/.
Arnolfini ‘We Live Here’ Associate Artists. Supported by Esmée Fairbairn. Produced by Fuel.
Paul Hurley
Paul Hurley works primarily in body-based performance. Between 2003-2007 he produced a series of 'becoming-animal' works, and since then has been making more abstract action works that explore ritual, embodiment and the secular shamanic function of contemporary performance art. His work has been shown in galleries, theatres and festivals across the world, and he is currently completely his PhD 'Reconfiguring the human: on the becoming-other of performance' with the University of Bristol and Arnolfini.
Tom Marshman
When constructing a performance for the public arena, Tom is concerned with producing a show that has very readable visual images, within a firm context so there are clear links throughout. Through many projects he has collaborated with artists of many forms, enabling skill sharing and dialogue around content. He mixes storytelling, poetry, architecture, archaeology, archiving, sound, movement experimenting with theatrically and dramaturgy. With a particular interest in how the audience engages and responds to the ephemeral experience and what they take away with them.
Low Profile
LOW PROFILE is a collaboration between artists Rachel Dobbs (IRL) and Hannah Jones (UK). Recent performances include DRY RUN part 4: MacGyver’thon, Proximity Effect, Plymouth Arts Centre (2008), DRY RUN part 2: How to save your skin when disaster strikes without warning and DRY RUN part 3: Scale of Emergency, The Royal Standard, Liverpool (2008) and Show for You, commissioned by Plymouth Arts Centre, PL:ay festival, Plymouth (2007).
LOW PROFILE’s recent solo publications include Worth The Trip, commissioned by Newlyn Art Gallery (2007), alongside invitations to contribute to a number of publications, including Minor Breast (Braço de Ferro) (2008), OMSKbook (ed Clare Moloney) (2007) and the forthcoming Between the Vanguard and the Peripheral (Plymouth Arts Centre) (2009).
LOW PROFILE are Arnolfini Associate Artists.
http://www.we-are-low-profile.co.uk/
