Edward Thomson, Showcased, 2007, installation view of “This is how it must feel to be there”

This project explored issues in presenting and disseminating art, using a remote rural location as site and/or subject. The project started with an immersive experience in a rural location in Northumberland, England, at Allenheads Contemporary Arts. How do rural sites inspire work? How would you approach an artist’s residency in a rural location? How does a presentation in a rural or landscape context affect the idea of the ‘exhibition space’ and how does this contain and frame the work?

The project also looked at how and why other artists’ practices in remote rural locations have been presented in all these different ways. The American Land Artists addressed remote locations as sites for art in the 1970s. Robert Smithson, Robert Morris and James Turrell have all made work in Holland. More recently artists such as NVA, Michael Landy, Andrew Sunley-Smith, Simon Starling and London Fieldworks have contemplated ecology at an international level through visual art practice – they mess with ingrained and habitual assumptions about how we live and how we relate to the natural environment.

Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson, Trapper’s Hut, installed at Allenheads Contemporary Art at mid-Summer. A virtual daylight panel was activated at mid-day, and only became apparent as light in the environment faded; during twilight, night and early morning, light appeared to have been “trapped” withn the hut from the previous day.

The project resulted in the exhibition This is how it must feel to be there at Pakhuismeesteren, Rotterdam and the parallel event Inquiry in Location at one of the former board rooms of Hotel New York. For more information on the exhibition and event click here

Egle Budvytyte, Fish On Air, 2007, radio transmission at “This is how it must feel to be there”

Margo Onnes, Number Four, 2007, video still

Esme Valk, Mappings may themselves dance along with dancers dancing, installation view “This is how it must feel to be there”

Tracey Warr (UK) is a curator and writer who has worked with a number of artists making art in and inspired by remote rural locations. She is currently working with London Fieldworks on Outlandia: Imagining Ecotopia, a proposal for international artists residencies in treehouses in the Scottish Highlands. She is the editor of The Artist’s Body (Phaidon, 2000) and has written on a wide range of artists including James Turrell, Marcus Coates, Joan Jonas, He Yun Chang, Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic. She was also course director of the MA in Arts Management at Dartington College of Art, UK, and is a researcher at the Glasgow School of Art.

Guests for the project will be artists Bruce Gilchrist & Jo Joelson from London Fieldworks.