Position Unpaid

Position Unpaid is a collaboration between Emma Leach & Natasha Vicars. The project asks awkward questions about arts internships, and moves towards some constructive answers.

A manifesto developed by arts interns within this project can be viewed at:
www.position-unpaid.blogspot.com

Initial action presented at RCA within Friends of the Divided Mind

The project was also featured in Labour Practices from the Live Art Development Agency as part of the wider show At Your Service from the David Roberts Art Foundation

LIKE WHEN YOU, Vyner Street

LIKE WHEN YOU is a two-week research project into the process of making artwork, using a collaborative studio space to generate ideas, artwork and discussion, lead by Tamarin Norwood.

I interviewed artists about the role of coincidence and accident in their practice, using the game pictured above to select from my pre-written questions by chance. One response from another artist is sampled below:

“I say I embrace chance as part of my practice – but I embrace it in a control-freakish way! It happens and then I take it into my power instead of letting it continue to be something that I can do nothing about. For example, I was doing a piece of performance work in a lecture theatre, and some one had drawn something on the white board and left a note saying ‘please leave’. So I thought, ‘oh, it’s going to have to be part of my performance now.’ So I put out a note saying: ‘Please contact me as soon as you see this, I need to have an interview with you’… I need to record it, I need to turn it into a transcript, I need to justify it in my sketch book, I need to reflect on why it was part of my performance… So already something that was – that I could have left to be - accidental and unexplained, had become rationalised within my process.”



LIKE WHEN YOU, what it is to make an artwork

Photo credit: Tamarin Norwood

Pecha Kucha: A broken record

Using the Pecha Kucha format I presented a word-image performance using my photographs from revisiting a former home in Eltham, at a peer group showing event hosted by Red Gate Gallery in Camberwell.

"There are changes though, I didn't expect changes somehow. Though of course the Woolworths has gone. Replaced with a '99 pence store' that's having an opening event today. A new Lidl on the high street. The library's reopened... seeing that time has passed here, seeing people living here; it had stood still for me. It had existed as a closed tomb. It had existed as both a time and a place. That 10 months with her seemed interwoven with the fabric of these streets. The routes we walked together. This path to Sainsburys. The shoes at 'Fashion World'."

Side by Side Show, Petticoat Lane Market

Further details at: Side By Side Show website


Borrowing elements from Victorian fairground entertainment, Side by Side Show tells a story peopled by playing cards and animated by the artist's hands. A live yet mediated performance which questions relationships including that of audience to performer.


Previously shown by Whitechapel Gallery's Street Project in November 2008.

Locomotion

Locomotion, Crewe Railway Station, England
performed as part of Station/Stationary

"Highlighting dance, live music and film, the station will be pulsing with over 150 performers including professional dancers, first time performers and local groups of young and older people from Crewe and the wider region."

Locomotion was a collaboration between performers Ania Bas, Rachel Jane Dean, Patricia Derrick, Hannah Pantin and Natasha Vicars, inspired by the classic film Brief Encounter (1945), the group gave a subtle performance on parting in the railway station's halls, corridors and lift.

Portraits by Ania Bas & Natasha Vicars

Curios and Wonders of the Barge

A version of a peep show where the performer's hands animate found objects from Battersea Barge, the location for the show.

Format:
A show for one person to view at a time; the performer greets visitors to the stall inviting them to contribute a small object of theirs which would appear in the show, before entering the stall - a kind of make-shift booth. The brief performance in the booth sets the objects as characters within a simple narrative animated by the performers hands.

The photos above are of the nooks and crannies in the barge, referring to places the 'found objects' came from.

Each viewer was presented with a card showing a detail from these photos.



My Site | In Space 3, Battersea Barge

Curios and Wonders of the Barge was presented at a site-specific performance workshop and showing event curated by Switch Performance, held on Battersea Barge in Vauxhall.

Switch Performance website

Whitstable Biennale, Telling Cards

In Telling Cards, individual visitors are invited to sit at a roadside stall and select a sequence of specially made cards. Each card is read as a visual mnemonic, based on stories harvested by Vicars from different sources. Moving between sites around Whitstable, she uses the format of a card teller to entice passersby and release these surprisingly specific tales, each belonging to an absent other. Chance plays a part in deciding whether a story holds personal significance for its target – whether they find or reject the potential connections that lie in every tale.

New work commissioned as part of the Performance Programme at the 2008 Whitstable Biennale.

Whitstable Biennale

My interest:
In turning the stories/memories/anecdotes I had collected from other people into a pack of cards, I was generating a way that audience could pick them out by chance as part of a kind of game. I was interested in what connections the audience might find or elaborate from the stories as I told them.
Playing cards have a history of use for gambling, fortune telling and as means of organising knowledge, and all these aspects engage my interest.



Image: Four cards from the series (Photo: Natasha Vicars)