The Sea In Legend & Tradition: Call for Papers

This two-day conference at the Time & Tide, the maritime museum at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, will be held on Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th September 2009 as the fourth Legendary Weekend of the Folklore Society.

We'd like to hear from anyone who can attend and present a paper - folklorists, performers, historians, singers and cultural or local historians. Come and celebrate mermaids, scrimshaw, ghost ships, shanties, shape-shifting seals, omens, lost lands and lucky beach-combings. Presentations, which should be 20 minutes long, can take the form of talks, performances, or DVD. There will be a limited number of opportunities for art installations. The main event will take place on Saturday with additional material and site visits on Sunday.

If you would like to attend or to present a paper or performance, please contact:

Jeremy Harte, Bourne Hall, Spring Street, Ewell, Surrey KT17 1UF
Tel. 44 (0) 208 394 1734 Email: JHarte@epsom-ewell.gov.uk

Tuning Forks - first workshop @ Bloc 28.6.09

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A42D Drawing Exhibition at Bloc

Bloc's current exhibition is drawing on A4 paper by studio holders and past exhibitors, under a loose theme around the financial recession. It's a fascinating range of work and the simplicity of the traditional format and ethos is appealing. I'm very happy to have a piece of work alongside established and new talented artists, which I called 'Index' with eighty lines drawn with a found marker pen almost blacking out the paper representing potential further drawings. We had a very busy opening last night but today is almost dead, perhaps the hot sun is drawing people to the fields and gardens. The exhibition continues until Sat 27th June and all the works are for sale by 'silent auction' with a reserve price of £20.
www.blocprojects.co.uk

Introducing the future Octave Doctors...

News of our first tentative workshop at Bloc Space. It will be very informal and more like a fun get together but we should have a couple of games and exercises as well as loads of musical instruments to play with.

TUNING FORKS. Percussion and Music Workshops.
(provisional informal meeting #1)
Sun 28th June. 11am - 1pm. Bloc Gallery. 71 Eyre Lane Sheffield. S1 4RB

An opportunity for children ages 5 - 12 to mix and interact with other children while playing with a broad range of musical and percussion instruments (and bring their own) in a relaxed, informal setting.
The two hour session will be fully supervised and will consist of some loosely structured games and exercises based around rhythm and song as well as free time to explore the equipment and make as much noise as possible.
Emphasis is on fun while stimulating creative learning. The gallery is 6m square and there is a small yard we can use.
Refreshments provided. Bring your own earplugs.
Booking advised by return email / phone. Maximum 12 children.
info@freenoise.co.uk
tel: 07754 910156

Amazing virtuoso Mick Beck has agreed to pop down with his bassoon for a free impromptu gig and demonstration for us all!
This is the first experimental session and hopefully launch a broad programme of developing creative workshops for children, adults and other groups.
No charge for this first workshop.
For safety, no cars will be allowed through the Eyre Lane gate between 11am and 1pm, thank you.
Jonny Drury is an experimental musician and artist currently based in Bloc Studios. He established the improvised music concert series Freenoise in 2004, organising well over 50 successful concerts at numerous venues in the Sheffield area. He has facilitated art workshops for children and adults, is a parent, currently working towards his MArt Contemporary Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam. He will be joined by Katie Owens, an artist, musician and one of the directors of Bloc Projects.

Threee great gigs starting this Saturday!

Freenoise got off to a great start this season with White, BLISTRAP and Hunter Gracchus at the Shakespeare last week. Brilliant to see our old school regulars and loads of new faces! Great room and an excellent pub too. Here's what's coming up at OTT in collaboration with the superb outfit Notes and Sounds who've been putting on alternative gigs in Sheffield for nearly 35 years!!
Check out the main Freenoise site for all the latest news and reviews.

New studio / address

Really happy to have a new studio at long last. This is the first time I've had a studio outside of my house or uni since 1995. Bloc is a really great place to be and I really thought it would be nice to be there before I even thought it would be realistic. Lovely big, light room shared with two other artists. This Sat and Sun we'll have a few paintings and drawings up as part of the Open Up art festival which is taking place all over Sheffield. It continues the following weekend too. We'll be soon organising some great music, art and other events in the gallery.
Come down and see the Bloc complex including gallery, courtyard, open studios and the other artists displaying and selling original work! Have a drink and bring some sunshine and smiles! Be great to see you there!

Jonny Drury / Freenoise
Studio 26
Bloc Studios
198 Arundel Street
Sheffield
S1 4RE
tel: 07754 910156
BLOC PROJECTS

Kelvin Records Launch organised by Freenoise at Bloc Gallery 17th April 2009. Pictured: Martin Archer/Film by J Drury #

Public contemporary art show.

My piece in our Yr2 Contemporary Fine Art Group Show - in an empty shop on The Moor, Sheffield. More pics here. I took voyeuristic close-up on faces video of people walking down the street outside the venue. The intriguing, often apparently miserable features of many a shopper echoed the current economic recession. The faces were captured and frames blown up and overlaid with my notes, posters placed around an existing hole in the wall of the empty shop (being known as 'slack space') in a rosette style. Inside the hole the rules around printing banknotes. A pile of fake banknotes on the floor (adhering to said rules) in a shape which mirrored said hole. Interesting responding to the space but a pretty heartless and shallow exercise really, in order to fulfill this part of the course requirement. I made a short compilation video of the said shoppers' faces which I might make public.

Flame, gong, strike...

Busy time

Haven't even got time to write this... need some time management skills! Just been to many London galleries and played a couple of gigs (thanks to Jonny Mugwump on Resonance FM - download the prog archive and Cafe Oto)... Katie filmed (thanks!) and i'll get clips up when time allows. Fuck the parking in London - aside from the congestion charge and £15 overnight at Irish Jim's in Brick Lane, Sunday is £3.50 an hour on the street..! My 2 hour ticket (after getting up at 8am to buy it) sadly blew over on the dash when i shut the door resulting in a £60 penalty... wait that's not all - sure i had the ticket so i could prove i was innocent but then lost both during the day. Ouch! So.... what else... oh yeah, invited to join Sheffield Live media team in the hope to soon get my own long awaited show.. Got group show coming up in an empty shop on the Moor (main shopping area). PV 23rd 7pm then 11-5 on 24 & 25. Working along the lines of process and what art means to the general public so will set up a drop in centre of sorts. Also been filming shoppers up close and intend to get some reaction by posting A0 size prints under the title 'Lost & Found'... Got a show at Bloc coming up for Martin's Kelvin Records launch - I'm doing the film...when I get my finger out. One really good dialogue group on the go based on Bohm's principles and just signed up for some 'performative text workshops'. And some decent Freenoise gigs at Micks. So much going on though hard to keep track. It will be like this until May when the main essay deadline and assessments come. Then floating free into a Summer job I hope. Peace...

I am not an Artist

The Sonic Weapons of Vladimir Gavreau forms the main spoken part of this track I made around '06 for backing to a Tajalli Vortex gig. I feel like making a new compilation of early stuff as I had lots of ideas and some of them need resurfacing, such as Wipe Out as well, made around the same time. Playing live with BLISTRAP recently I've sometimes used samples of talking (usually Hakim Bey), live processed usually but listening to this stuff of my own is more interesting.
Thinking of these ambient textures also reminds me I'm getting involved (well, organising) a launch event along those lines in April at Bloc and putting together a film for the show. Please come! Info.

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Coming soon - University (Contemporary Fine Art BA) group show on The Moor, Sheffield. Mar 23 - 25.
Private View 23rd 7-9pm
Film premiere - part of Kelvin Records Launch, Bloc Space, Sheffield.
April 17th. 7.30pm

People... just going on... about stuff.

http://www.fearandoptimism.com

Good title... What's going on? Well, universities aren't just people spurting on about nonsense... Stood at a 'Do not use chairs at these PCs' PC... in the main atrium at Hallam City Campus, half way through my degree. Long time since I put anything here and just killing a few mos til the next meet. Boy has life changed recently..!!! Gigs, art, materiality, atoms.. blah blah. Still alive.

Gigs, McCarthy etc.

Trying to keep lots of balls up in the air as usual... considering a new anti-gravitational approach..
Just been asked to contribute to FAD - London based arts website so replicating posts as you see this blog is widening in view more to the arts in general away from just the free music aesthetic. Couple of nicely contrasting gigs coming up, first off this Friday a classically rich theme with Ask headlining and Weds launching into pure, thick electric noise with Jettatura from Brighton, locals Forest Creature and an idea I've been meaning to execute for ages; Throbbing Gristle recent era at very high volume in the dark. So, that's the plugs. Spent the day with John Welchman, speaker, author and expert and colleague of artist Paul McCarthy. The talk, slides and film shown of McCarthy's recent 'Caribbean Pirates' (not showing at a cinema near you) was totally engaging. Abject art has nothing on what's going on here, grotesque, ritualised, scatalogical, bloody, political and dangerous indeed. The informal talk after was on Institutional Risk and then I got a private tutorial. Top marks for the uni for arranging this, tickets for one hour talks at the ICA were recently £10, value for money counts in the current offensive mess Hallam uni have created for the arts dept. Audio recordings (each under 30mb, total around 90 mins) - Pirates pt.1 here. pt.2 here and Risk talk here.

Berlin arts

Berin
Originally uploaded by scrambledvision

SHU Arts outside Temporare Kunsthalle, Berlin. The exhibition was three large video pieces by Candice Breitz. More pictures follow here and video here

CIQ & SHU Live & Loony...

Yards from the boiler room of one of the tallest buildings in Sheffield which now sadly houses some of the uni's Fine Art studios, is the Workstation where Sheffield Live now live, the community radio station. Monday night I had the pleasure of being guest on The Loon Show for the whole two hours, having lots of fun with Tim 'Loon' and playing loads of my favorite music over the airwaves. You can listen to the 2 part archive (20th and 21st)here. Meanwhile back down at uni in the day many students, tutors and staff are working hard to make the best of what seems a very bad deal for the whole Fine Art university culture. Although we are now bang next to the Cultural Industries Quarter, the facilities are bizarrely poor and it seems the whole faculty is on shock. I was inches away from organising a formal complaint last week after a particularly bad day; we had to have a lecture in the pub, the grotty one with the roaming rottweiler in the shadow of that shiny big new building (that was sold to us as the new Fine Art department) with the gallery that apparently only graphics students can use. Last week the same lecture took place in the foyer surrounded by interruptions from people walking by talking, of course, it's a foyer. Then I made the effort to put up some evidence of work in my 30 inch wide allotted gap then headed to our mandatory Transmission lecture at the Showroom..where I wasn't allowed in as they had sold out. Anyway, less complaining and to get on with life. I ain't getting into politics... it's made me reassess my practice as an artist which can't be a bad thing and I'm not short of creativity - check out this new video. Tomorrow is the 2nd day of the Site Gallery Symposium on Process Art in galleries which I find intriguing and looking forward to setting some up myself, perhaps there'll be chance to do some in Bloc Gallery next month. Liverpool Biennial this week, Berlin next month then in December 6 UK dates with BLISTRAP to look forward to. Loony....

SHU - Scatology

Well the Sheffield Hallam Uni (Shu also means 'go away') have been treating the art students like shit so I'm making a comment on the huge shit coloured paintings hanging in the main atrium - nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. While I'm at it, wtf is this all about (below)? (text is mine, work it out). x