29–30 November 2014
Talks, performances, events, tours and a great café.
29–30 November 2014
Talks, performances, events, tours and a great café.
Bob and Roberta Smith devised a project called The Arbroath Template which Bob, Hospitalfield staff, educators, other artists, school pupils and others worked together on. This was formed through conversations prompted by Bob asking the question “Where is innovation within education”. The Arbroath Template built into an inspirational, large resource of ‘Open Source’ imagery concerned with value in the arts.
Visit The Arbroath Template website… to hear how to make your own.
The Arbroath Template was activated by a core group of artists alongside Bob and Roberta Smith: Lydia Brownlee, Pester + Rossi and Anna Orton who were involved from the start. On the Spring Season weekend there were performances and interventions by these artists and 20 more. You can find out about that on the Spring Season page…
Renowned for his humorous, opinionated, polemical art works, Smith occupies a unique position in the art world as an outsider who was a trustee of Tate, is a trustee of the National Campaign for the Arts and has recently been elected as a Royal Academician. His work can be found in The Guardian and major galleries but also in the small unheralded spaces and in his garden shed in Leytonstone. Bob and Roberta Smith instigated the Art Party in 2013 and this Autumn his project Art Amnestywill be shown at MomaPS1 in New York.
Bob and Roberta Smith sees art as an important element in democratic life and central to his thinking is the idea that campaigns are extended art works which include a variety of consciousness raising artefacts. This campaign will span both our Winter and Spring Seasons.
A psychological system of making and sharing inspiring images.
The Arbroath Template, started in November 2014 and continued over that winter in Arbroath with members of the public, gallery visitors across the country and other artists getting involved and sharing their own Arbroath Templates. Bob and Hospitalfield staff also worked remotely with a group from Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle to roll out The Arbroath Template.
During this time there were two open weekends and National Arbroath Template Day on Sunday 29 March but the project continues, with public outings as part of a exhibition by Bob and Roberta Smith with the National Arts Education Archive at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015.
Arbroath Template paintings uploaded to Instagram
#ArbroathTemplate with their instructions for remaking:
Scroll down through the panel above and click ‘Load More’ to see all the Arbroath Template’s uploaded during the project.
Lydia Brownlee is an illustrator, artist and printmaker living and working in Glasgow. She graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2013 with a BA Hons in Communication Design and attended the Graduate Residency at Hospitalfield Arts later that year. In 2014 she founded Colour Hotel , a screen print and design studio, with Emer Tumilty which is already producing handmade projects including many posters and record covers for events and musicians. Brownlee’s work has an immediate graphic style and often integrates text and narrative language within the image – for the Winter Season she has made a new animation drawing entitled Minor Injuries which you can see below.
Pester and Rossi (Ruby Pester and Nadia Rossi), are a collaborative artist duo who have been working together for 5 years, producing performance projects across Scotland and beyond. Both graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 2008, receiving degrees in Fine Art and Time Based Art and are currently living in Glasgow. The duo’s studio practice is based in the Kinning Park Complex, an independent community centre in the South-side of Glasgow. They have presented projects at Stockholm Fringe Festival; Experimentica Festival, Cardiff; Retramp Gallery, Berlin; Queens Park Railway Club, Glasgow and Crawl, Dundee.
Anna Orton has a multi-disciplinary practice consisting of painting, sculpture, printmaking, theatre, model making and digital imagery. The autobiographical, explored through wider political and social context, is often at the forefront of her work. Orton’s individual practice often blurs boundaries with the collaborative practice Ortonandon, an ‘anything goes’ collaboration with her two sisters Katie and Sophie Orton. With the figure as a central motif, the sisters consider body-form in relation to social politics and how identity can be represented through actions and props. For our Winter Season Ortonandon will perform at intervals during Sunday afternoon. The new performance is entitled Wubby, Wubby, Wubby and takes its inspiration from a recent study by Travel Lodge which disclosed that thirty-five percent of their business clientele bring with them a teddy bear or another transitional object for their sleepover. During their performance, Ortonandon will become their own transitional objects or Wubbies (the name of the child’s transitional object in the 1983 film, Mr. Mum) taking on sentimentality, nostalgia and fear.
Henry VIII’s Wives are a group of artists who have worked together on projects since 1997. They are Rachel Dagnall, Bob Grieve, Sirko Knupfer, Simon Polli, Per Sander and Lucy Skaer, all graduates of the Environmental Art course at The Glasgow School of Art, who now live across Europe and Scandinavia. Recent exhibitions have been in Roskilde and Dundee and previous projects have happened in Amsterdam, New York, London and Glasgow.
After 17 years of working together they have decided to have a closing point for their official collective projects. For this weekend in November, Hospitalfield is hosting the last phase of the work of Henry WIII’s Wives.
Hospitalfield is very grateful for support from Office for Contemporary Art Norway for the Henry WIII’s Wives project.