November 2008

The Compass Rose at CHAT Conference

Katharine will be presenting The Compass Rose, an interactive installation, one of the selected practical location based engagements at CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) Conference 2008 on Saturday 15 th November.

The Compass Rose is a new interactive installation exploring the physical mapping of memory. The precious moments of scores of people will be recaptured and planted as a garden of personal history.

Participants will be offered a template from a stack of variously coloured pre-cut paper windmills. They will select a personal memory to locate whose bearing and position will be calculated using a GPS. The co-ordinates of the chosen event will be inscribed in the centre of the windmill as participants are assisted with its final construction. The finished windmill will then be added to the growing field with each one pointing towards its chosen place.  

The stories of lives, their meanings hidden as codified co-ordinates, are gridded out across a lawn. This grid is gradually personalised, its stark geometry eventually becoming lost in the tumult of voices as it shimmers with directional accounts of memory. The effect is akin to a field of honour, a field that is at once a celebration and cemetery of memory.

Clustered in their thousands, each windmill points its face not to the sun but to the homing signal of a chosen memory transforming the rigidity of cardinal points into individual experience.  

my site | in space

Katharine has been selected to take part in my site | in space 4 on Saturday 22 nd and Sunday 23 rd November.

my site | in space is a series of site-specific performance events. A group of artists work under time pressure to create performance in response to a space. Each event is ephemeral: created in a flash, never to be performed again.

The fourth version of my site | in space will take place at Resistance Gallery, a double-height railway arch in Bethnal Green. For this event guest curator Katja Hileevaara works with Ewelina Kolaczek to facilitate and curate the work.

For further details see: http://www.switchperformance.co.uk/mysite/

February 2009

Embodying Moment at FRM Conference

Katharine will be leading Embodying Moment, a practice-led participatory workshop at Feminist Research Methods Conference 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden 4 th to 6 th February.

Embodying Moment is a participatory workshop that will examine ideas of moment against time and duration. It will question how we perceive and experience moment through an investigation of physical gesture. A moment, or a gesture contained within a moment, may either continue or repeat opens up suggesting two very different systems of time. The relationship between these systems and notions of freedom and control will be investigated from both inside and outside this moment, in terms of direct experience and indirect perception.  

Visual artist, Katharine Fry, will use her practice as a starting point for discussion. A single female figure or a number of identical female figures are shown in a constant state of flux, travelling on stairs, in lifts, spinning, pacing or carrying out highly stylised domestic object-based rituals.

Seen as a heightened distillation of everyday life, the content of the videos and their live enactment will broaden to a discussion of our perception of the passing of time, the concept of duration, how these relate to ritualised behaviour , routine and habit, how we 'spend' our time and, ultimately, how systems within which we place ourselves imply either imposed or self-imposed freedom or control.

Participants will be invited to watch extracts from the series and comment on their reactions, the artist will then physically enact the work in parallel to its presentation after which the participants will have the opportunity to physically explore an individual idea of moment.

The workshop has been designed to open discussion around the following areas:

•  How do the systems present in everyday life impact on us, particularly in terms of subordination, freedom and control?

•  How might an understanding or repetition and continuousness alter this impact?

•  How do we construct time / How is time constructed around us?

•  Is there such a thing as female time?