Written by Nicky Getgood on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 ( Start discussion )
Tags: bostinbloke, curtainshow, eastsideprojects, gavinwade, links, toblog, weareeastside
YouTube – We are Eastside #2 – Bostin Bloke interviews Gavin Wade, Director for Eastside Projects at the launch of We Are Eastside.
Written by Nicky Getgood on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 ( Start discussion )
Tags: 7 Inch Cinema, aggressive localism, alex lockett, Arlene Burnett, behind closed doors, ben waddington, Birmingham International Jazz Festival, Birmingham It's Not Shit, Capsule, claudia borgna, craftspace, curtain show, Custard Factory, east stride, Eastside Projects, flatpack, Friction Arts, gavinwade, gongoozler, grand union, Ikon Eastside, James Langdon, jim simpson, jon bounds, juneau projects, lombard method, old crown, pip mcknight, project pigeon, rea garden, rhondawilson, rhubarb east, rhubarbrhubarb, st basil's, The Edge, Vivid, we are eastside, Yasmeen Baig-Clifford
The Old Crown by Tim Ellis
There was a definite chill in the air last Saturday afternoon but that didn’t stop a good crowd braving the great outdoors for We Are Eastside’s East Stride, a tour of some of the area’s key arts venues led by local historian Ben Waddington.
We started off from The Old Crown, which as Ben pointed out, perhaps isn’t as old as it purports to be. We then made our way to where much of what makes up Digbeth all began, at Bennie Gray’s The Custard Factory. Those hanging about didn’t appear to be the usual skater kids that frequent its skate park, they seemed to be a much more rag-tag bunch.
'Aggressive Localism'
It turned out they were the creations of people participating in the Craftspace Collective ‘Aggressive Localism’ workshop led by Juneau Projects. You’ll be seeing these Morris dancer inspired costumes worn by skateboarders in the Lord Mayor’s Parade later this year.
The Uses of Enchantment at Rhubarb East
From thereon we visited the newly opened Rhubarb East Gallery in Rhubarb Studios on Heath Mill Lane, which is exploring The Uses of Enchantment with some lovely fine art photography from The Jackson Twins and Vee Speers, whose child portraits I found particularly captivating. Rhubarb-Rhubarb’s Creative Director Rhonda Wilson spoke of her joy in at last having a space to display work:
For years we have watched while the sometimes extraordinary talent emerging from our reviews and mentoring schemes, has been shown by other people, both in the UK and in international spaces. Now we have the pleasure of exhibiting the results of our efforts, in collaboration with some of the world’s most interesting image makers.
The pod space in VIVID
We carried on down Heath Mill Lane, stopping off at Eastside Projects to enjoy The Curtain Show and hear Gavin Wade talk about the artist-led, ex-industrial space and VIVID, where Director Yasmeen Baig-Clifford told the story of its versatile pod space developed by architect Ranbir Lal, a perfect solution for an arts organisation renting rather than owning their premises.
Jim Simpson
Ex Black Sabbath Manager and Birmingham International Jazz Festival founder Jim Simpson popped by and chatted with Lisa and Jenny from Capsule about the rougher, tougher type of music that seems to stem from industrial Birmingham.
St Basil's by Steve Cadman
Ben’s tour also included elements of local history and interest, such as the amazing brickwork on St Basil’s headquarters, which used to be a High Anglican Church.
Pip McKnight
Whilst we were oohing and aahing who should pass by but Pip McKnight, who told us all about how 7 Inch Cinema began whilst Birmingham Film Festival was folding, which was a cloud with a silver lining as they got a lot of the old equipment!
Spacesuit at Grand Union
We got to have a chat outside Ikon Eastside, where many of the tour later got to enjoy Flatpack and Capsule’s screening of Burning, before crossing the road to find the tucked-away Grand Union. The current exhibition Gon-goozler is well worth a look with a fun space-travel theme that includes a spacesuit, a weather-balloon and of course, cheese, some of which had disappeared before the night was out.
Grand Union artist studios corridor
What was really impressive about Grand Union was the studio space, where about 8-10 artists get their own, cheap self-contained work units to get creative in. The artists we met were as happy as pigs in mud in this place and spoke of the need for more like it. Like VIVID, Grand Union are tenants rather than owners of the old industrial space, but the units are flatpack so should they need to move, their studios can move with them to be reassembled in a new home.
James Langdon and Ben Waddington talk the We Are Eastside typeface
We bumped into artist James Langdon whilst we were there, who spoke with Ben about his development of the distinctive We Are Eastside typeface. If you look carefully you’ll find the A’s are a particularly curvaceous treat and as Ben pointed out, not unlike the outline of Eastside itself, although whether this is by accident or design I’m unsure.
Claudia Borgna installation at Rea Garden
Last stop on the tour was the Rea Garden on Floodgate Street, where Arlene Burnett of Behind Closed Doors spoke about their development of the space, and resident artists Claudia Borgna and Alex Lockett of Project Pigeon explained their very different installations. Claudia’s plastic bag flowers looked like seeds from another planet had landed in the bottom half of the garden and taken it over.
Bluen with her chick by Project Pigeon
Project Pigeon is a longer-term installation in the space, which means we get to see the pigeons develop from eggs to fully-grown birds. I got to stroke Bluen’s tiny chick (above), which is now the healthy, strapping 28-day old bird below.
Alex Lockett with Bluen's fully-grown chick
Unfortunately Ben didn’t have the time to take us to see Friction Arts’ The Edge or The Lombard Method, but both are well worth taking the time to venture over to the other side of the High Street.
Curtains at Curtain Show, Eastside Projects
There’s been some interesting online discussion about We Are Eastside since its launch, including a brilliant post by Jon Bounds at BiNS about increasing engagement in the arts, both by simple awareness raising and more in-depth local collaboration. The latter is something I’d like to see lots more of Digbeth – there’s some amazing cultural stuff going on around here, such as Irish Heritage and St Patrick’s Festival Birmingham which, for whatever reason, feels completely unconnected to much of the arts activity in the area.
Cheese at Grand Union. Mmmmmm....
From my resident’s perspective, both camps are making interesting, creative and exciting stuff happen, so it would be great to see them bounce off each other more. I suppose that’s why I’ve kind of fallen in love with Friction Arts, because they are so embedded within the community. I’d love to see arts organisations reach out more and work with local people who are already getting together and doing brilliant things under their own steam, my guess is that all involved learn an awful lot!
Written by Nicky Getgood on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: carolinebeavon, eastsideprojects, gavinwade, hashbrum, links, theevent, toblog
YouTube – The Event Talks: Digbeth, Birmingham 7 Nov #theevent09 – Caroline Beavon of Hashbrum talks to Gavin Wade of Eastside Projects about The Event and Digbeth creative stuff in general. “There’s a little ecology that can get a lot bigger and can impact on the city in many interesting ways.”
Written by Nicky Getgood on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 ( Start discussion )
Tags: eastside, eastsideprojects, gavinwade, links, nikkipugh, toblog
nikki pugh | Blog Archive » Why I’ve been talking about Eastside a lot recently – Nikki takes a walk around the boundary of the ‘Anti Talent Zone’ (where ‘anything goes’) that is Eastside:
I’m at once amused, baffled, frustrated, and in concordance with this demarcation: it makes perfect sense in terms of following the existing lines of major roads etc, but I’m galled by the idea that what was once intended to be the ‘Cultural Quarter’ (I don’t know if that’s still the case) can be defined by a staked out territory and then filled in. Of course departments and policies need to name and define, but I have trouble mapping that onto creativity and culture which I conceive of more as bubbling out from particular points where circumstances collude to allow things to transpire…
As well as a lot of building sites and demolition, Nikki also finds uncertainty from her GPS devices, resulting in pretty pictures of lines:
Written by Nicky Getgood on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 ( Start discussion )
Tags: eastsideprojects, fact, gavinwade, ikoneastside, jozefrobakowski, mikestubbs, myverywncinema, ranhuang, sculptureshow, Vivid
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The spring reopening of Ikon Eastside this Friday evening is coinciding with exhibition launches by VIVID and Eastside Projects as well, which means it’s Digbeth Art Crawl time again. I asked Gavin Wade, curator of Eastside Projects, about this and the Halloween 2008 crawl and it seems that these three spaces do get together and consciously arrange this. Great stuff. So here’s the drill:
VIVID’s launch of new work by artists Ran Huang (UK) and Nika Oblak & Primož Novak (Slovenia) starts earliest at 6.00pm and goes on until 9.00pm. Get there on time to see Mike Stubbs, Director of FACT in conversation with VIVID resident Ran Huang. Exhibition continues to Sat 16 May.
Next to open is Ikon Eastside at 7.00pm with an exhibition of work by Polish video artist Józef Robakowski, a pioneer of independent Polish film, between 1970-2000. Exhibition continues to Sun 07 June.
At 7.30pm Eastside Projects will open their doors to launch The Sculpture Show, which features: Athanasios Argianas, Art & Language, Mel Bochner, Susan Collis, Michael Dean, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Lothar Hempel, Torsten Lauschmann, Marko Lulic, David Medalla, Scott Myles, Elizabeth Price, Tommy Střckel, Sue Tompkins, Franz West. Exhibition continues to Sat 13 June.
After that, I don’t know about you but I’m heading to the pub for a pint as I’ve a feeling my head will need some serious clearing. All exhibitions are free admission.
Written by Nicky Getgood on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 ( Start discussion )
Tags: billdrummond, chu, cushendall, eastsideprojects, fiftyonedegrees, floodgatekino, gavinwade, jibberingart, linesteppers, selfridges, the17, thecurfewtower, thespoteddog, wildbuilding
I celebrated St George’s Day in a rather weird and wonderful way. After a busy day’s work at ACE dance and music I went to street artist Chu’s solo exhibition at the Floodgate Kino Wild Building, curated by Jibbering Art.
What was most impressive to me was Jibbering’s use of the old warehouse exhibition space. They closed off the downstairs entrance to the main area, forcing punters to go directly to the upstairs gallery to see an impressive range of Chu’s work.
This meant our first sight of the main warehouse space, and Chu’s big box, was from the very best viewpoint – above at the upstairs entrance.
Be sure to stand on the Sweet Spot whilst you’re in there. The Fifty One Degrees exhibition is on until 6th May. Jibbering Arts’ next exhibition there, Line Steppers, is on 22nd-31st May, with a private view on the evening of 21st May. Chu will be back with a range of graffiti and street artists including Cyclops, Kid Acne, Pure Evil, Rowdy, Sickboy, Timid and Vermin. They sound like a nice bunch. Like the Seven Dwarfs of my nightmares.
After the Jibbering exhibition I headed to Eastside Projects, where I was lucky enough to take part in one of Bill Drummond’s The 17 choirs. It basically consisted of standing in a darkened room making non-verbal noises on given sharp notes to vocalise the 5 Ages of life, which was a lot more fun than it sounds. After we’d completed the exercise, our efforts were played back to us, the five different notes laid over each other to reach what felt like a physically crushing crescendo. It sounded scary and amazing and I wish I could play it back to you. But I can’t, because after each 17 choir hears its work, the piece is immediately deleted.
After this Bill chatted to us about his work to date on The 17. He would like to return to Birmingham to see a choir to perform the Cast score on a manhole cover in Selfridge’s car park. Only silly Selfridges won’t let him. Please make some on and offline noise about this if you can to try and convince them, Bill feels he’s found his perfect spot and it would be sad for The 17 to miss out on it because Selfridges are too blind to see what freakin’ fantastic opportunity this is.
He also told us all about The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland, where artists stay for temporary residencies and leave behind them any form of work inspired by their surroundings. At the moment the space is being curated by a Belfast gallery but their time there is due to end later this year. Gavin Wade expressed an interest in Eastside Projects being the next to curate the space as he saw some parallels in the cumulative, collecting nature of visiting artists leaving their mark behind them in the tower space and Eastside Projects. Looks like something interesting could potentially happen here.
After that I stopped off in The Spotted Dog for last orders, where they’re building a huge smoking shelter in their back garden.
Considering I stayed within one square mile, I fitted an awful lot into St George’s Day!
Written by Nicky Getgood on Monday, October 6th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: anotherbyteofbanality, BirminghamInternationalComicsShow, Custard Factory, Digbethisgood, digbethslacker, eastsideprojects, gavinwade, Hang Playing Hedge Monkeys, inspiraculum, links, Melinda Schwakhofer, midgediabolik, millenniumpoint, steve coxon, toblog
We Are Eastside – arts and culture Birmingham Post: Digbeth articles
