Dilston Grove

WAKE
11 June - 17 July 2011
Dilston Grove
London
WAKE
Table of Contents
Concept
and Credits
Intro
11/12
18/19
25/26
Anne Bean
William
Cobbing
David
Cotterrell
02/03
09/10
16/17
Carl Von
Weiler
Rachel Lowe
Bronwen
Buckeridge
June
July
June
July
June
July
Epilogue
On WAKE
Rachel
Withers
In WAKE (visible tracks of turbulence), six artists worked sequentially
in a series of week-long mini-residencies. Each artist chose their
successor and each left behind their materials and structures for the
following artist to inherit and build upon. Picking up where the previous
artist left off, the newcomer responded to, recycled and added to what
they found, which they then revealed to the public over six weekends.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6
Anne Bean
William Cobbing
David Cotterrell Carl Von Weiler
Rachel Lowe Bronwen Buckeridge Concept by Anne Bean
Photographs © 2011 Hydar Dewachi
Text © 2011 Rachel Withers
Publication design by Hydar Dewachi
“
Planet Dilston, centre-point of a galaxy,
100km radius. Time and distance pouring two
heaps. Becoming desert, sand still cascading.
Luminescence, shifting rhythms over the surface.
Eclipsed, sucked into blackness. A phantom
heap escapes from this darkness, backwards
and shadowy. Returning to before the beginning,
existing only between ears, empty space.
Anne Bean
”
Anne Bean
11/12 June 2011
06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 June
06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 June
06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 June
William Cobbing
18/19 June 2011
13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 June
13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 June
13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 June
David Cotterrell
25/26 June 2011
20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 June
20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 June
20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 June
Carl Von Weiler
02/03 July 2011
June 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 01 | 02 | 03 July
June 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 01 | 02 | 03 July
June 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 01 | 02 | 03 July
Rachel Lowe
09/10 July 2011
04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 July
04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 July
04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 July
Bronwen Buckeridge
16/17 July 2011
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 July
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 July
Rachel Withers
On WAKE
To suggest that Dilston Grove,
the former Clare College mission
church in Southwark Park, has
the character of an ark isn’t
merely fanciful, because the
building that we see has an
unusual relationship to South
London’s waterlogged ground.
Both anchored down and buoyed
up by a massive underlying raft of
concrete, it effectively floats on a
soft sea of mud.
Buckeridge to bring the project to
a close. The six had just five days
to realise their individual plans
and one weekend to exhibit them.
Maybe the building’s nautical air
had some unconscious influence
on Ann Bean’s choice of a title
and a guiding metaphor for her
collaborative project WAKE. Bean
proposed that six artists develop
work there sequentially, in one
another’s “wake”, across a series
of six week long residencies.
Crucially, she also chose to
relinquish control over the list of
participants, inviting each to select
his or her successor. She chose
Will Cobbing to follow her own
Week One project not least, she
says, because she had no idea
who he would bring on board.
That person turned out to be
David Cotterell. Cotterell recruited
Carl von Weiler. Von Weiler
handed the space over to Rachel
Lowe, and Lowe invited Bronwen
| Epilogue |
All six exhibitions showed a
technical polish and sense of
resolution that belied their highspeed construction. All six also
(despite the decision of most to
redeploy the materials left behind
by their predecessors) succeeded
in expressing an entirely individual
and distinctive spatiality.
Contextualising the slow unfurling
of hundred kilometres of shining
golden gift-wrapping ribbon with
maps and photos, Ann Bean’s
simple, mesmerising two-day-long
performance poetically translated
“Planet Dilston’s” terrestrial
location into an episode in time.
Will Cobbing’s multi-image video
installation turned the building into
a peculiar kind of museum. Bean’s
ribbon, spread out and tangled
into a “desert” of golden dunes,
became the setting for a collection
of videos offering a series of wry
commentaries on relationships
between sculpture and the body.
David Cotterrell mountaineered
up into the roof to install video
cameras, landscaped the golden
mass of ribbon into a long roador river-like strip and projected
images downwards onto its
surface, turning the floor into a
rippling, dappled, flowing, liquid
continuum.
Carl von Weiler wrestled the
ribbon into five capacious black
sacks, and hoisted them into the
air. Dangling from the roof on
ropes tethered to the walls, the
lumpy, pendulous, boulder-like
sacks infused the space with
powerful feelings of tension and
suspense — even a hint of threat.
Rachel Lowe used “cool”
means — an obsolete video
camera’s struggle to cope with
a complicatedly-lit object — to
generate a subtly uncanny
outcome. The erratic, flickering
projected video footage magicked
away what once was Dilston
Grove’s altar wall, conjuring up an
illusory space and, lurking within
it, a hint of some arcane rite in
process.
gentle but authoritative voice
(“Look up”, “look down”, “look to
the left”, etcetera) whilst resting
their chins on an optometric
headrest. Buckeridge’s work
directed their attention both to the
spectacle of the empty, darkened
church, and their own eyes
adapting to the darkness; it also
set up a curious parallel between
the odd mixture of professionalism
and intimacy that’s present in the
clinical relationship, and the work
that artists do.
WAKE’s successes were down,
not least, to the raft of sound
thinking on which Bean’s plan
for WAKE rested: faith in the
creative possibilities of sharing
control and shrewd and extensive
experience of collaborative work.
And there was also her trust in
the positive influence of Dilston
Grove itself, whose superficially
stark, concrete-and-pebbledash
surfaces have finally proved a
deeply empathetic vessel for
the creation and exhibition of
contemporary art.
Bronwen Buckeridge’s project
reinvoked a common experience:
the visit to the optometrist. One
by one, visitors listened through
headphones to an optometrist’s
| Epilogue |
WAKE was a companion exhibition to ARCHIPELAGO which ran
concurrently in Cafe Gallery.
Produced by Artsadmin in association with CGP London.
www.artsadmin.co.uk | www.cgplondon.org
Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England