Space Place Practice

Space Place Practice: a research station through which visual artists and multi-disciplinary researchers meet to engage with issues of space, place and site.

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Rob Irving works with photography, moving image and text. He and Michele Whiting's site-responsive walk saw them ponder what Jesus did when he visited Hotwells (“we haven’t made it up”). The resulting text and image work "And Did Those Feet..?" is a glorious, rambling rumination.

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Victoria Walters photographed niches in and around the Soapworks and Gardiner Haskins interiors store, considering uses of the word in architecture, capitalism and ecology and wrote an essay on what inviting artists to respond to this ‘meantime’ might initiate going forwards.

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Artist Alyson Minkley created a film installation for projection at the Soapworks; 'Whitewash' depicts hand washing, soap suds popping, washing machines churning and water going down the plughole, in a comment on the covering up of money laundering and the state of our economy.

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Artist Melissa Mahon photographed the Soapworks, exploring the relationship between interior painted surfaces and the exterior. Interrogating the photograph as both 'object' and 'message', she asks “whether reality can ever be present or shown in a photograph”.

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Artist Carol Laidler responded to the Soapworks by researching the link between soap and whaling, constructing a collage including poetic texts created from old accounts of soap manufacture, abstract shapes and drawings by Palladio, in reference to its Byzantine architecture.

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Artist Linda Khatir's remote response to the Soapworks involved researching the history of soap advertising. Discovering its blatant racism even until recently, she focused on the word ‘dove’ and its spiritual associations to explore this, acutely aware of its sensitivity.

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Artist Victoria Kaye has responded to the Soapworks by creating a game that allows players to revisit competition between the Thomas Brothers of Bristol and the Lever Brothers of Warrington for dominance of the soap market, enabling possible alternative outcomes...

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SPP artist Roxanne Jackson responded to the Soapworks by creating a film combining photographs and ambient sound captured on site with sound “developed from the predicted tide heights at Cumberland Basin, the entrance to Bristol Docks”. See her film here: https://t.co/qr3r7LkEWh

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Artist Lydia Halcrow sought to collaborate with the Soapworks. Through experimental printmaking and concrete poetry, she explored both her own role as witness and that of the site itself, as witness to events past and present, by responding to found objects, residues and traces.

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Artist Maureen Gamble’s response to the Soapworks involved collecting and then photographing used soap bars that “contain individual and collective memories shaped and formed through time, yet all are connected through the function of working together for the common good.”

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Artist Pippa Galpin used soap, ink and wax to create evocative rubbings of the Soapworks' interior, "an exploration of surfaces that are mostly unseen and unremarked. Yet they hold a history: the haptic impact of movement over time, of the opposing forces of wear and accretion."

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Anwyl Cooper Willis' contribution to SPP's book for Centre of Gravity is "a hypothetical installation...to capture the various contrasts of a polluting manufacturing process...the fresh, wholesome and sentimental advertising of the soap, and the awful conditions of the people."

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SPP's Michelle Keegan has prepared "drypoint and copper plates in response to the Soap Pan building...made in situ using the walls from the building...In response to these marks I have expanded the plates into etching on copper using Edinburgh etch." See https://t.co/9LCYatBpvk

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Space Place Practice is delighted to be part of Centre of Gravity, an upcoming exhibition at the Old Soapworks building near Temple Meads, Bristol. SPP will contribute a book featuring members' diverse creative responses to this iconic site.

https://t.co/DNnt7OmkkA

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Just started reading 'On Looking: About Everything There Is To See' Alexandra Horowitz - intriguing.

[Space Place Practice @SPPresearch]

stand and stare, listen and learn