Transmission: Hester Reeve and Rowan Bailey – Tuesday 27 November 2018
Rowan Bailey: There’s that lovely text by Heidegger – What is called Thinking? – where he calls upon us to catch ourselves in the process of doing it. Thinking is somatic. It is a life force. This is simultaneously the most destabilising of experiences as well as the most liberatory. I think we are in a world where this is a limited encounter.
Hester Reeve: I totally agree, this is why I find philosophy important. It helps me understand that there are important things to ‘sculpt’ in the world, and that includes the capacity for thought in myself and others. Making an artwork allows a different way of thinking to come about.
RB: I would also say that material manifestations of the mind are brought into the world to be shared. Thinking isn’t a repository, it is gifted. Thoughts have to be out there.
HR: Yes, I am interested that art, unlike philosophy, has to risk its manifestation through matter in order to exist as such, to take place in the world. Through that, it opens a space for a community of care.
Excerpt from recorded discussion, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2015
Hester Reeve is an artist and Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. She works across the areas of live art, philosophy, drawing, David Bohm’s Dialogue, and social sculpture. Recent works have been staged at Tanzquartier, Vienna, Tate Britain (as The Emily Davison Lodge) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A monograph on her work, Ymedaca, was published by Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2015. She recently completed a residency at the Centre for Philosophy and the Visual Arts, Kings College London.
Rowan Bailey is the Director of Graduate Education in the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. She is currently investigating sculptural materialities in artistic, scientific, and curatorial cultures. Her publications include: Concrete Thinking for Sculpture, an essay on the variegated plays of concrete as a material and as a concept (parallax, 21.3, 2015), Thinking Sculpturally, a catalogue essay for Tony Cragg: A Rare Category of Objects at Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and Where is the Brainbody in the Stories of Curation on the curatorial mechanisms and strategies of displaying brainbody phenomena.
Transmission: Hester Reeve and Rowan Bailey
Tuesday 27 November 2018, 4.30PM – 6PM
Adsetts Learning Centre Lecture Theatre 6620
Sheffield Hallam University, Arundel Gate S1 1WB
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Transmission is an annual series of lectures and symposia, now in its fifteenth year, and is a collaboration between Fine Art, the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and Site Gallery. Convened by Sharon Kivland in 2001, Transmission was developed collaboratively with Lesley Sanderson from 2001 to 2004, and with Jasper Joseph-Lester from 2004 to 2012. The series is now convened by Sharon Kivland, TC McCormack, and Julie Westerman, Fine Art, in association with Site Gallery Sheffield.
Transmission is the passing of information via a channel, and this is the intention of the Transmission project. We enquire about the aesthetic and discursive forms required by practices in the field of contemporary art and theory that address sociality and subjectivity. It has encompassed a lecture programme, seminar discussions, an annual symposium, a print portfolio, four series of books: Transmission Annual, The Rules of Engagement, Transmission chapbooks, and five volumes of discussions/interviews, entitled Transmission: Speaking and Listening. These are published by Artwords Press, London.