WAKE

11 June - 17 July 2011

Dilston Grove London

Table of ContentsWAKE

Anne Bean

Intro

Carl Von Weiler

William Cobbing

Rachel Lowe

David Cotterrell

Bronwen Buckeridge

Rachel Withers

11/12June

Conceptand Credits

02/03July

18/19June

09/10July

25/26June

16/17July

EpilogueOn WAKE

In WAKE (visible tracks of turbulence), six artists worked sequentially in a series of week-long mini-residencies. Each artist chose their successor and each left behind their materials and structures for the following artist to inherit and build upon. Picking up where the previous artist left off, the newcomer responded to, recycled and added to what they found, which they then revealed to the public over six weekends.

Week 1 Anne Bean Week 2 William Cobbing Week 3 David Cotterrell Week 4 Carl Von Weiler Week 5 Rachel Lowe Week 6 Bronwen Buckeridge

Concept by Anne Bean

Photographs © 2011 Hydar DewachiText © 2011 Rachel Withers

Publication design by Hydar Dewachi

Planet Dilston, centre-point of a galaxy, 100km radius. Time and distance pouring two heaps. Becoming desert, sand still cascading. Luminescence, shifting rhythms over the surface. Eclipsed, sucked into blackness. A phantom heap escapes from this darkness, backwards and shadowy. Returning to before the beginning, existing only between ears, empty space.

Anne Bean

“

”

Anne Bean11/12 June 2011

06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 June

06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 June

06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 June

William Cobbing18/19 June 2011

13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 June

13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 June

13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 June

David Cotterrell25/26 June 2011

20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 June

20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 June

20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 June

Carl Von Weiler02/03 July 2011

June 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 01 | 02 | 03 July

June 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 01 | 02 | 03 July

June 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 01 | 02 | 03 July

Rachel Lowe09/10 July 2011

04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 July

04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 July

04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 July

Bronwen Buckeridge16/17 July 2011

11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 July

11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 July

To suggest that Dilston Grove, the former Clare College mission church in Southwark Park, has the character of an ark isn’t merely fanciful, because the building that we see has an unusual relationship to South London’s waterlogged ground. Both anchored down and buoyed up by a massive underlying raft of concrete, it effectively floats on a soft sea of mud.

Maybe the building’s nautical air had some unconscious influence on Ann Bean’s choice of a title and a guiding metaphor for her collaborative project WAKE. Bean proposed that six artists develop work there sequentially, in one another’s “wake”, across a series of six week long residencies. Crucially, she also chose to relinquish control over the list of participants, inviting each to select his or her successor. She chose Will Cobbing to follow her own Week One project not least, she says, because she had no idea who he would bring on board. That person turned out to be David Cotterell. Cotterell recruited Carl von Weiler. Von Weiler handed the space over to Rachel Lowe, and Lowe invited Bronwen

Buckeridge to bring the project to a close. The six had just five days to realise their individual plans and one weekend to exhibit them.

All six exhibitions showed a technical polish and sense of resolution that belied their high-speed construction. All six also (despite the decision of most to redeploy the materials left behind by their predecessors) succeeded in expressing an entirely individual and distinctive spatiality.

Contextualising the slow unfurling of hundred kilometres of shining golden gift-wrapping ribbon with maps and photos, Ann Bean’s simple, mesmerising two-day-long performance poetically translated “Planet Dilston’s” terrestrial location into an episode in time.

Will Cobbing’s multi-image video installation turned the building into a peculiar kind of museum. Bean’s ribbon, spread out and tangled into a “desert” of golden dunes, became the setting for a collection of videos offering a series of wry commentaries on relationships between sculpture and the body.

David Cotterrell mountaineered up into the roof to install video

Rachel WithersOn WAKE

| Epilogue |

cameras, landscaped the golden mass of ribbon into a long road- or river-like strip and projected images downwards onto its surface, turning the floor into a rippling, dappled, flowing, liquid continuum.

Carl von Weiler wrestled the ribbon into five capacious black sacks, and hoisted them into the air. Dangling from the roof on ropes tethered to the walls, the lumpy, pendulous, boulder-like sacks infused the space with powerful feelings of tension and suspense — even a hint of threat.

Rachel Lowe used “cool” means — an obsolete video camera’s struggle to cope with a complicatedly-lit object — to generate a subtly uncanny outcome. The erratic, flickering projected video footage magicked away what once was Dilston Grove’s altar wall, conjuring up an illusory space and, lurking within it, a hint of some arcane rite in process.

Bronwen Buckeridge’s project reinvoked a common experience: the visit to the optometrist. One by one, visitors listened through headphones to an optometrist’s

gentle but authoritative voice (“Look up”, “look down”, “look to the left”, etcetera) whilst resting their chins on an optometric headrest. Buckeridge’s work directed their attention both to the spectacle of the empty, darkened church, and their own eyes adapting to the darkness; it also set up a curious parallel between the odd mixture of professionalism and intimacy that’s present in the clinical relationship, and the work that artists do.

WAKE’s successes were down, not least, to the raft of sound thinking on which Bean’s plan for WAKE rested: faith in the creative possibilities of sharing control and shrewd and extensive experience of collaborative work. And there was also her trust in the positive influence of Dilston Grove itself, whose superficially stark, concrete-and-pebbledash surfaces have finally proved a deeply empathetic vessel for the creation and exhibition of contemporary art.

| Epilogue |

WAKE was a companion exhibition to ARCHIPELAGO which ran concurrently in Cafe Gallery.

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Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England