Two recent collaborations

Here are a couple of recent artworks that I have created in London and Salford that continue to follow my interest in exploring the potential of everyday activities as performances and our everyday environment as a stage.

In May I collaborated with Anna Pharoah to create 'Out of Office' a performance day of absurd, humorous and playful activities for artists who work in offices. Playing around with jargon terminology to create 'blue sky treasure hunts' and 'critical path games' we invited artists to build their own desks from our specially designed flat pack installations and thereby form into temporary departments. Resources were swapped between departments using our negotiation telephones and inter-departmental pully system. This ties in with my curiosity about how the Nine Incorporated Trades of Dundee carried out their outdoor meetings. In the weeks leading up to the event I was quaking with fear that there would be a downpour (though this might have added to the irony of the artwork - but perhaps not the enjoyment of participants!), fortunately it was a beautiful sunny day.

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In April I was a guest at the amazing Islington Mill in Salford where I collaborated with Maurice Carlin on Box Office, a temporary booth sited in Salford Central Station from which we issued free tickets for ephemeral events in disused and overlooked spaces around the area. Events included Lowri Evan's So long series of performances that used the platform as a stage and the trains as an entry and exit device, Andrew Beswick's Rebound Diary Project in which he commemorated events that had been printed in his pocket book diary through a range of performative acts, Sarah Sanders created a series of games for children in the playground of the Islington Estate and staged a sing along there with local musicians, Amy Pennington touted tickets for Manchester's 'Ghost Ramp' and Maria Dada inaugurated Paper Records, a fictitious record label that signs up pipe-dream bands with a brainstorming meeting in one of the open office spaces in Manchester Civic Justice Centre. The project also included a series of gigs down the phone line of a telephone booth programmed by Maurice Carlin and a tour to the amazing derelict Pomona Docks where participants were given a proposed journey route to follow that positioned the participant in a historical period related to the site.