A Weekend of art celebrating life’s transitions; tales of adversity, survival and inevitable transformation featuring artworks and performances...
A weekend of live art celebrating life’s transitions with tales of adversity, survival and inevitable transformation. Due to Covid-19 restrictions now adapted into a digital event available for audiences to experience and explore entirely online.
10 artists have been specially commissioned to respond to the historic lightship LV21 moored on the River Thames in Gravesend and the theme of Hell or High Water: Janet Currier @janetdcurrier, Sarah Doyle @sarahdoyleart, Rosalind Faram @rosalindfaram, Tracey Francis @nunheadarts, Mikey Georgeson @bloodandbrambles, Rachael House @rachaellhouse, Julia Maddison @juliamaddison, Joanna McCormick @joartmcc, Sarah Sparkes @thesarahsparkes and Monika Tobel @tobelart.
Commissioned works feature immersive artwork, creative activities and short films of live performances including; a rare appearance of the Gravesham’s Blue Sea Porcupine and a ghostly soundscape with glimpses into the bowels of the ship, a specially designed wrap around 360 video experience, a moving poetic video installation, a sing along transmission from the lookout post and hidden squashed sculptures nesting below decks in the chain locker, along with instructions to make your own paper wishing boat and a special printable zine to accompany genderqueer deities and a ritual to perform at home.
Please delve deeper into the artworks and follow the listed social media accounts for more exciting and inclusive contributions from the artists throughout the weekend.
For further information and enquiries please contact thecaptain@lv21.co.uk
CAROLINE GREGORY | Curator
Welcome aboard Hell or High Water
“Hell or High Water is a deeply personal project. It is a culmination of two years' collaboration, research and development in response to the historic lightvessel LV21 and the source of immense pride for me.
Following five years of chronic illness and a near death experience, my work is directed towards notions of survival and transition in the face of adversity and an exploring of the changes and transformations that often follow profound life challenges. I am also a live artist. Persistent and enduring threads in my work are around a gathering of seemingly dissonant pieces to create fusions of rich and diverse human connection.
Hell or High Water takes inspiration from the rich heritage, historic significance and continuous transformation of the unique location and surrounding riverfront. LV21’s ongoing function, rescue, retrieval and transition is hugely relevant and symbolic and directly mirrors the themes of the project and my own practice.
Each artist was invited specifically to take part because, whilst holding universal themes around what it is to be human, for me their work and practices reference significant, often profound, personal life challenges, transition and eventual transformation. Since the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic the themes of the event have become significantly more relevant.
Thanks to all of the amazing contributing artists for their patience, creativity and skillful adaptability in these strangely restricted times.
It is a great shame not to be able to offer audiences the live experience of meeting the artists and exploring the actual ship and the artworks. However, we are pleased invite you to join us for a magical virtual journey of wonder and discovery through this online platform!”
carolinegregoryart.com
Use the links below to Navigate to each Artist's section
JANET CURRIER | PUSHBACK
Pushback 2, 2020, an installation of 70 soft sculptures, scuba, boiled wool, butter vinyl, recycled hollow fibre, kapoc and sheep’s wool
"I was drawn to the deep shadows of the anchor hold, a dark tank like space in the bowels of the ship. It was an uncomfortable place to work. The first time I climbed the down into the hold, I was fearful. I imagined that I was climbing down into the depths of my subconscious, with a floor covered in a layer of rusty dust. I couldn’t really see what was down there with me. As I started work, I got used to the space and my fear subsided. I spent the day arranging and rearranging seventy soft balls into the large rope coils in the hold, periodically climbing up to the surface to survey the arrangement (from the viewer’s perspective) and back down to move things around again. Over the day the installation transmuted and changed and moved across the hold. This process of the piece in flux and of working through various arrangements of the thing in the space, I now realise, is very much the work for me. I hope that this is something that the video footage can capture. Installed in this extraordinary space, I felt that the work took on a completely different quality. It was suddenly more non-human, more alien and more disturbing than it has been in its previous iterations."
Janet Currier’s Recent work explores the experience of life changing illness and bodily processes at a microscopic level, where cells mutate and multiply. Particularly relevant at this time of Covid-19 her work reminds us of the fragility of our existence, and our dependence on a multiverse of organisms that we don’t yet understand.
Her installation entitled ‘Pushback’ is made up of multiple sculptures inserted or squeezed into the nooks and crannies of LV21. Soft objects meet, the hard and rough surfaces of metal, rope, and rust, suggesting perhaps, the compression of flesh during a hospital examination, or the vulnerability we feel when inside the medical machine. The work also speaks of resilience and transformation, and the possibility of adjusting and adapting to change, bouncing back and pushing back in the face of adversity.
Janet Currier lives and works in London. She completed an MFA at Goldsmiths College in 2017 winning the Warden’s Art Prize for her year. Her work is held in various private and public collections including Goldsmiths Collection. She was awarded the Elephant Residency at Griffin Studios in 2017.
Make a wish and let it sail away…
Make your own paper wishing boat with Janet Currier
Sarah Doyle | The Pods
“My initial proposal for Hell or High Water was to develop my work along the theme of isolation which became much more relevant this year.
I love the space inside the Light Vessel 21 ship and particularly the area beneath deck, which to me resembles the images of spacecraft from sci-fi in TV and film. Ships are so closely tied to how we view space travel through the lens of sci-fi, we picture spacecraft slowly gliding through space like boats.
For Hell and Highwater I use the lower deck as a space to explore and extend my work inspired by sci-fi themes, isolation and the alien figure. Using the air receiver tanks as a starting point for the work as they resemble the isolation helmet designed by sci-fi pioneer Hugo Gernsback, editor of Science and Invention magazine. I picture these spaces as isolation booths or container pods for the work I made for the show.”
Submerge yourself in Sarah Doyle’s 360 immersive video piece The Pods
This is a 360 video, so put on your VR Headset to be totally immersed with The Pods! No headset? No problem. Move your mobile phone around and catch the total 360 experience. If you are watching on a desktop computer click and drag with the mouse to look around.
A Facefilter is featured inside The Pods in the video for you to try on the look of the creatures hiding in them at home. To access this Facefilter function log in with your Instagram or Facebook account to:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ar/362623764846257/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fbcameraeffects/tryit/362623764846257/
sarah-doyle.com
Instagram: @sarahdoyleart
Facebook: @sarahdoyleart
Twitter: @sarahdoyle
Blog: http://sarahdoyle.blogspot.com/
Rosalind Faram | Ripples
In this exhibition Rosalind Faram uses personal photography, combined with digital gifs and writing, to create Instagram posts which are screenshot and printed, likes and comments included, in a process that explores alterity or otherness.
Questions around the feminine and the psychic/physical interface that accompany it are brought into an arena that combines the traditional art practice of painting with a newer trope, that of social media posts and the interaction therewith as art.
In her exhibit, a heterotopia is created where female art history (Elizabeth Vigee LeBrun in the painting ‘Elizabeth’s Eyes’) reaches from the past through op-art and pop-art into the present, the ripples of time and feeling/thought manifesting visually in paint and digitally through gif effects in her printed works, echoing the tidal waters that surround the Light Vessel 21.
rosalindfaram.net
Instagram: @rosalindfaram
Twitter: @RosalindFaram
Tracey Francis | The weight she has to carry
“My piece for Hell or High Water is a series of four short experimental films, reflecting how being at the edge of the sea evokes untapped emotions. These explore the small period of time when a female is free, much like being born at sea and your identity is not truly defined as you are not a national of anywhere during that moment. However, 2020 has redefined everything and nothing simultaneously about race and gender.”
Part 1. Stones
This part was made to reflect being a young girl in the UK today* and was part of the Black British Girlhood Exhibition.
*Originally made in 2015 and edited in 2020
Part 2. The Weight She Has to Carry
Continuation from Stones - when a girl moves towards womanhood and everything changes including the weight of 2020 in light of #BLM and COVID-19.
* Film and text 2020
Part 3. For a Moment
This part explores the moments we all need to breathe
* Film and text 2020
Part 4. I Sometimes Wonder
The still images in this part were stand alone pieces in the 2018 Nunhead Art Trail that was a reaction to the Windrush Scandal and what the word Status means to a child and descendants of immigrants/people.
Tracey Francis is a graphic designer and visual artist based in London. Her practice incorporates printmaking, photography and film. She draws inspiration from the ordinary everyday object to reflecting on race and culture for her visual work. She curates film screenings and community events.
https://womeninfilmse15.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @WIFSE15
Instagram: @nunheadarts
Mikey Georgeson | Full Fathom Five
“This work seeks to find meaning in tone of voice and a tapestry of analogous and accidental sounds above and below waves of magnetic tape in a way that echoes my experience of hearing loss. The work displays a family treasure* – an interview conducted in Rochester, Kent by my Aunty May with her father, my grandfather, Senior Petty Officer Charles Ernest James Salter, recorded on a cassette tape and sent to me by my cousin Richard Cady. Aunty May made creative use of the music on the wireless that day as my grandfather relates his stories of lifeguarding in Deal and out into the world’s oceans as a ship’s stoker. Somewhere in the depths of this recording is a tale of a shipwreck he survived after embarking on a fated voyage aboard a ship carrying a tombstone – a cargo that had initially caused the crew to refuse to set sail. The installation attempts to summon the temporal qualities of memory embodied in lived experience and to survive the maelstrom of data that threatens to wreck identity on the rocks of certainty.”
*My permission to include this intimate dialogue in the installation was respectfully given by Richard Cady, the son of May Cady. The recording was made by May Cady as she talked to her father in the back room of his home in Katherine Street, Rochester some time in the early 1990s.
My Grandfather on my mother’s side began his working life as a boy in the coal mines of Tonypandy, Wales, where his father was a saddler. The conversation follows his life at sea and within the rising and falling of the waves of static and magnetic warp and woof are his accounts of surviving a ship wreck as well as other personal trials and losses.
I am hugely grateful to my family for sanctioning this process and allowing what has become an embodied understanding of matter, memory, trauma and acceptance to emerge.
Experience Full Fathom Five and join Mikey for a sing along of this hymn based on Shakespeare’s lyrics in the Tempest:
AUDIO INSTALLATION
in the lookout
CHARLES ERNEST James Salter (GRANDAD)
FULL FATHOM FIVE
ACOUSTIC REHEARSAL
mikeygeorgeson.com/
Instagram: @bloodandbrambles
Rachael House | Raise your voices to the genderqueer deities
Rachael House’s new work is informed by her research into witches’ bottles, often made from Bellarmine jugs in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
Rachael’s wall hanging sculptures take the form of apotropaic charms. Rather than warding against witches’ spells, her genderqueer deities protect us from gender conformity and those who would attack the rights of women, womxn and those with less power than the ruling elites.
Come Inside
Reading of the special printable zine.
Raising The GenderQueer Deity
Learn a ritual to perform at home.
Julia Maddison | Found
“I find Gravesend particularly interesting because of its unsettling, liminal nature; a place teetering at the beginning and end of journeys, of arrivals and departures, and blurred, contradictory histories.
The fragile paper garments/pyjamas I have made might have been washed up upon the shore; perhaps they belonged to somebody lost at sea, somebody searching for an impossible refuge.
I tend to (romantically) think of myself as a foundling, and this huge expanse of water in Gravesend, speaks of voyages, of searching; I am always searching.”
Instagram: @juliamaddison
Facebook: Julia Maddison
Twitter: @WhatJuliaMade
Joanna McCormick | Soundings in Fathoms
For Hell or High Water Joanna McCormick presents Soundings in Fathoms, comprising an audio visual installation in the Captain’s Dayroom, and a soundscape in the Generator Room.
Soundings in Fathoms explores combining mediums of live art, painting and printmaking. Joanna has created a new piece for voice around the themes of migration, entrapment and vulnerable masculinity. Researching the history of LV21 Jo presents new artworks, including imaginary portraits of the sailors who worked the vessel and got lost on a voyage in the nineteenth century. The work examines notions of history and technical meanderings. Weaving across formats with a roaming live art performance that pushes the boundaries of vocal comfort and explores themes of love, loss, metaphor and naval architecture.
- PRINTS
“Using images of unknown sailors as inspiration, I created a series of seven monochrome and hand coloured monoprints, to celebrate the lives of sailors who have worked the LV21.
Recently, after several years, I’ve returned to linocut as a medium, developing artworks inspired by Karen Stallard’s children’s book “Little Bee”.
For the LV21 Sailors series, I explored monoprinting techniques, using monochrome and colour, working with relief printing inks and watercolour. I’ve always been fascinated with imagery from old photographs and the hand colouring techniques from the nineteenth century, before coloured photography was invented. First attributed to Swiss painter and printmaker Johann Baptist Isenring, the method became popular in Japan, and turned into something of a fine art. I love the delicacy and evocative sadness of the muted colours in these photographs, which seem appropriate to the themes of Hell or Highwater.
The individual prints became an exploration of vulnerable masculinity, memory, absence and loss.”
Prints are available for purchase. Please email vox@joart.info for details.
- SOUNDSCAPE
“Having pushed my live art practice of voice work to its limits, I felt ready to introduce accompaniment to my previously purely acapella sound pieces. Working with sound artist Andy Rowe, I created a new digital soundscape, inspired by the rich sounds and domestic architecture of LV21, and Robert Egger’s 2019 film The Lighthouse. Weaving these inspirations together with snippets of recordings from my own domestic home life, including my children’s explorations of music technology, and my daughter Martha practising and improvising on keyboard and piano, the soundscape presents a fragmented cacophony of ethereal, eerie and dreamlike segments. An imaginative meandering journey of evocative momentary fractions from unnoticed moments of everyday life. “
Listen to the soundscape on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/vox-wonder/soundings-in-fathoms
- FILM
“As a development of my live art interaction “Singing Ghost”, the film Soundings in Fathoms is a composite of the performance that took place on LV21 on Thursday November 11th 2020. Singing Ghost Sailor was originally planned to take place with an audience on Nov 21st, but due to covid-19 restrictions it was filmed aboard the vessel on Nov. 11th instead. From footage of this, mixed with fragments of footage from the Light Vessel’s interior, equipment and domestic architecture, as well as the surrounding landscape and abstract film fragments collected over the course of several years, the film Soundings in Fathoms was born.
The film takes the viewer on a dreamlike journey. The protagonist, Singing Ghost Sailor, surrounded by artworks, including the large scale oil painting HMS Impregnable, has conversations with an unknown entity, meditates, explores and sleeps.
Finally, having found her way below decks, she sings from the bowels of the vessel, cradled and engulfed in light from the boat’s original optic, which was donated back to the ship in 2013.”
joart.info/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/vox-wonder
Instagram: @joartmcc/
Facebook: @joannamccormickvox/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnEVEKONjYyD3P47cfJz-Ow
Zealous: https://zealous.co/joannamccormick/project/HMS-Impregnable-triptych/
Andrew Rowe: slatepipe.co.uk/
Sarah Sparkes | Azure, Chained and Quilled
“5 rowers hooded and cloaked, with oars and anchor...steered by a porcupine, Azure, chained and quilled’ - Description of Gravesend Coat of arms from 1619
Sarah Sparkes' work explores the Gravesham legend of the giant blue sea porcupine. This magnificent and magical creature features on the old Gravesend and Gravesham Borough Council coat of arms, appearing, in the former, at the helm of a vessel rowed by five hooded figures. In heraldic symbolism the porcupine symbolises invincibility and the oarsmen demonstrate the importance of Gravesend's position on the Thames.
Sarah Sparkes' work Azure, Chained and Quilled is drawn from her research into Gravesend's wonderful heraldic emblem and culminates in a performance from the Gravesham Arts Centre, along the Thames foreshore and on to the deck of LV21.
Will the giant blue porcupine be released from her chains and willing to navigate us to safety?
Chapter I - Chained
Chapter II - Quilled
Sarah Sparkes is a London based artist and curator, exhibiting in the UK and internationally. Her work explores magical or mythical narratives, vernacular belief systems and the visualisation of anomalous phenomena. Her work is often research led and an exploration into the borderlands where science and magic intersect. She works with installation, sculpture, painting, performance and more recently film. She leads the visual arts and creative research project Ghost.
Instagram: @thesarahsparkes
sarahsparkes.com/blog/
ghosthostings.co.uk/
theghostportal.co.uk/
Monika Tobel | Prehensile Pow-wow
Monika Tobel has created an imagined sonic conversation between different earthly entities towards a possible liveable future.
Monika Tobel is a London based Hungarian artist interested in interspecies communication and the nature culture dichotomy. Her work consist of performance video and sound works alongside installations. She investigates modes of moral distinctions that enable us to commit atrocities against the signified other, be it race, gender, or species. The main focus of her practice is interspecies communication, the possibilities of non-lingual communication between different entities, and the potentials of information exchange via scents, sounds, touch.
Tobel graduated from Chelsea College of Art, and exhibited nationally and internationally.
monikatobel.com
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/partizangrl
Instagram: @tobelart
#ecofeministart #soundart #performanceart #ecoart #plantsentience #animism
Hell or High Water was curated by Caroline Gregory and developed in partnership with LV21.
