Visiting Artist Talk Today – Thursday 14th November, 2013.
BridgeWardens College- Lecture Theatre,
6-8pm
Artist Fran Cottell will be visiting the School of Music and Fine Art to give a talk, on Thursday 14th November.
Fran works at creating visual presentations which harness the performative qualities of the ordinary and the mundane. Her structures are developed out of collisions and conversations.
“My work questions how to show the ephemeral, live experiences that make up the quotidian within the fixed frame of the art institution. Further: how to preserve life, or rather the breath of ‘aliveness’ ” says Cottell.
“The ‘House Projects’ (since 2001) initially focused on the honesty and truthfulness of mess over domestic order; the focus then shifted to the visitors who with the occupants discussed their relative status, bringing into play conflicting and contradictory power relations. I engaged in dialogue with museums and galleries about the static nature of collections and their inability to collect life, live art and time and created, through a hole in the ceiling, in a form of reverse collecting, a photographic collection of visiting curators’ heads. Building on a history of feminist artists, who initially addressed their own invisibility as house workers, the project was extended to include service work.
In the spirit of an active and lively conversation, rather than a social levelling, the work aims to challenge fixed hierarchies, to produce a dynamic democracy with different points of view coming into focus”
Fran’s recent and current projects include: an Ebook, House: from Display to BACK to FRONT 2012 (a series of live installations in her house as offsite projects for CGPLondon 2001-2012) available from www.ktpress.co.uk.
The installation for Concrete Geometries: the Relational in Architecture at the Architectural Association, London 2011. She continues to work with Concrete Geometries, recently co-presenting the project at Rethinking the Social in Architecture 2013, Umea School of Architecture.