ROAMING – Spring Season Open Weekend 2019

Spring Open Weekend
ROAMING
26 – 28 April 2019

Artists: Rachel Adams, Sarah Rose, Rania Stephan, Fergus Tibbs 

Our open weekends at Hospitalfield always offer the opportunity for a stroll around the grounds, a historic tour and lunch or tea in our café which, stocked with delicious things, will be popping up for the weekend.

To launch our 2019 Programme we invite our visitors to consider the importance of the movement of people from place to place through ROAMING. Every aspect of our culture as we know it relies on the continuous transit, vital for the development of ideas, knowledge, technologies and culture. It is the movement of people with their skills and new and evolving ideas that has made our rich and complex culture what it is today.

ROAMING includes the work of artists who consider the outcome that emerges from processes of travelling, observation and dialogue while walking pathways, travelling railways and moving through their rural and urban vistas. Each art work created having been inspired by their routes, sights and conversations along the way.

Throughout the weekend we will screen the film ‘Train-Trains 2: A bypass’ (1999-2017) by Lebanese artist and film maker Rania Stephan. The work documents a coastal train route built by the British in 1942 that once linked Lebanon to Palestine and Syria and Turkey. The artist makes her journey speaking to the communities of people along the track, a route no longer in use. We can identify with the dislocation and loss in a region that was once so closely connected. We are bringing Rania Stephan to Scotland especially for the Spring Open Weekend. She will give a talk about the research and development of this much acclaimed film on Saturday.

‘Hothouse’ by artist Rachel Adams is the Sculpture Commission for 2019. Sited in the Paddock just outside the walled garden with a clear view to the sea, ‘Hothouse’ is a blue intrusion to the surrounding pastoral and residential landscape, creating an uncanny and dystopic vision of nature, farming and the machine. Three large cubic structures encased in digitally printed mesh occupy the Paddock. The interior reveals an exuberant image of a surreal colonial garden of towering palms and popping up mushrooms. The project takes its title from Brian Aldiss’s dystopian science fiction novel where a future earth has been overrun by vegetation and plant life, and humans, literally shrinking to fit their new world, fight for survival. The work will be sited until the end of the year and we look forward to seeing the buoyant Paddock grow up around the sculpture.

‘Byproduct’ by Sarah Rose is a commission that emerges from her residency as part of the Meander programme at Hospitalfield, funded through Paths For All. In this work, Rose uses waste materials of the agricultural fruit industry and found wild fruit to create a new sound and sculpture work inspired by ancient understandings of right-to-roam and the emergence of berries, cherries and apple varieties through movement of animal and human life.

The Free Drawing School offers a yearlong residency. In 2018 it was awarded to artist Fergus Tibbs. Nearing the end of his twelve months working at Hospitalfield, Tibbs invites you to join workshops throughout the weekend that will include drop-in drawing and natural pigment making.

Natural Selection a birdlife inspired exhibition by Andy Holden and Peter Holden at the Arbroath Courthouse is open throughout the weekend.

Friday 26 April

6-6.30pm: Talk with Sculpture Commission 2019 Artist Rachel Adams

6.30pm: Drinks reception and Sculpture viewing

7-7.30pm: Screening of Rania Stephan’s ‘Train-Trains 2: A bypass’

6-8pm: Performances of Sarah Rose’s Byproduct

Saturday 27 April

11am-12.30pm: Ornithology Walk and Talk starting at the Courthouse

12-1pm; 3-4pm: House tour of Hospitalfield

11am-5pm: Performances of Sarah Rose’s Byproduct

11am-5pm: Screenings every 30 minutes of Rania Stephan’s ‘Train-Trains 2: A bypass’

1-1:30pm: Informal Q&A with Sculpture Commission 2019 Artist Rachel Adams

2-4pm: Make and Use Natural Pigments in the Free Drawing School

3pm: Talk by Rania Stephan followed by Q&A

11am-6pm: Natural Selection at the Courthouse in Arbroath

Sunday 28 April

11am-12.30pm: Ornithology Walk and Talk starting at the Courthouse

12-4pm: Free Drawing School Drop In workshops

12-1pm; 3-4pm: House tours of Hospitalfield

2-2:30pm: ‘Cut up by the railway’, a talk on the effect of the railway arriving in Arbroath and the Hospitalfield estate

11am-5pm: Performances of Sarah Rose’s Byproduct

11am-5pm: Screenings every 30 minutes of Rania Stephan’s ‘Train-Trains 2: A bypass’

11am-4.30pm: Natural Selection at the Courthouse in Arbroath

Café open on Saturday and Sunday. Tea and cakes will be on offer all day and lunch is from 12-4pm.

Rania Stephan (born in Beirut, Lebanon) is an artist and filmmaker. She graduated in Cinema Studies from Australia and France.

Rania Stephan is an artist and filmmaker, her films offer a personal perspective on political events. By using archival material as still and moving images, her work investigates memory and its workings. Her first feature-length film, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011), won the Artist Prize of the 10th Sharjah Biennale, the 2011 FID Marseille Renaud Victor Prize, and the Best Director award at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. She intertwines raw images with a poetic edge, where chance encounters are captured with compassion and humour. Archival material, have been an underlying enquiry in her work where she investigates still and moving images and sounds that haunt the present. By juxtaposing them with new ones, she explores a diversity of meanings, triggering renewed narratives and emotions.

Her films have been shown internationally including in exhibition a biennial contexts such as Kochi Biennale (India, 2018) ART-O-RAMA (France, 2018), MAXXI Fondation, Rome, 2017 – 2018), Imagio Mundi (Italy, 2017), Aub Gallery (Beirut, 2016), Alt Space (Istanbul, 2016), Marfa’ Gallery (Beirut, 2016) Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2015) Marian Goodman Gallery (Paris, 2014) Serpentine Galleries (London, 2012), MoMA PS1 (New York, 2011).

She lives and works in Beirut. Her artistic work is represented by Marfa’ Gallery, Beirut.

Rachel Adams (born Newcastle upon Tyne) lives and work in Glasgow. Her new work Hothouse is the 2019 Hospitalfield Sculpture Commission.

Working within creative, menial, domestic and administrative labour, Adams’ work considers the linked systems that govern the world. She observes the incomprehensible systems that detail the current shifts in society and technology, in dialogue with the environment and the natural world. Using sculpture, printmaking and textiles, Adams’ work uses the collapsing boundaries between natural and synthetic, hand-produced and machine-made, to consider the entangled relations of technology, labour and nature.

Recent exhibitions include, Noon, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; Lowlight, Bloc Projects, Sheffield; Right Twice a Day, Jerwood Visual Arts Project Space, London (all 2018). Adams was the Sainsbury’s Scholar at the British School at Rome 2015-16 and is a current AHRC Doctoral Researcher at the University of Edinburgh and Dundee Contemporary Arts.

http://rachel-adams.com/

Images: Details of Hothouse, 2019, Rachel Adams. Photos by Ruth Clark.

Sarah Rose is an artist based in Glasgow. She graduated from Fine Art and Writing Studies at the University of Auckland in 2010 and with a Master of Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2012. Sarah Rose is the Meander artist in residence and in Autumn 2018 spent three months walking and talking with our regular walking groups.

Sarah Rose’s overall practice engages with processes of translation, abstraction, mutation, and transformation, using sound and materials to think through the lifecycles of material resources and information. While on the Meander residency she became interested in the fruit industry, and the ancient understandings of the right-to-roam law influencing new work made at Hospitalfield.

Exhibitions have happened at Glasgow International (2018), CCA (Glasgow, 2017), Scottish Museum of Contemporary Art (Edinburgh, 2017), Baltic 39 (Newcastle, 2017), SWG3 (Glasgow, 2016), Darling Foundry (Montreal, 2016), Elizabeth Foundation Project Space (New York, 2015). She co-hosts the project tenletters, in Glasgow.

Fergus Tibbs is an artist based between Glasgow and Dundee. Tibbs has been the Free Drawing School artist in residence since June 2018. In his year at the helm of the Free Drawing School he has explored ways of engaging different community groups in workshops and slowly creating an archive of found objects and experimental drawings.

Fergus is interested in the different methods and rules that can be used to build and realise collaborative projects. He is interested in the catalytic possibilities that these frameworks can have on a group engaged in creative activity and the way that these systems can emulate and critique infrastructures in society.

He graduated from fine art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 2016. He has been a committee member at Generator projects. As an artist he acts as a facilitator, maker, participant, director, curator, promoter. Past works include discussions, experimental club nights, workshops, ephemeral happenings, exhibitions and publications.