Category: Student placement at the Theatre Collection

Hello again, sadly for the last time. Here we are, at the end of my time with the University of Bristol Theatre Collection and on the other side of my installation which showcased my artist-in-residence work in the Wickham Theatre back in early June.

Looking back on this project, I am met with both immense fondness and sadness now that it has come to an end. The Where The Bonnie Heather Grows installation was my last practical installation in the university that I have called home for the last three years, as well as being the end point of my artistic-orientated research. I spent the best part of four solid days working very closely with the University of Bristol Theatre Department technicians to fully rig the space, construct from scratch the structure which had been in my mind’s eye for so long, and to calibrate the projected videos to perform in their intended way. After such a gruelling and physically exerting process, the installation was complete and finally ready to open to members of the public.

Throughout this project, I have personally reflected on the relationship that artists share with archives in the creation of new work. However, this period of time highlighted something which I feel needs drawing particular attention to: the relationship effected by archives on artists. More specifically, how artists serve as a conduit which connects the archive and its need for precision and accuracy with the pragmatic nature of technicians, producers and those who may work on a project like this one in some capacity but, having not done the research directly, might not understand the need of the artist for things to be done in certain ways.

For others who walk a similarly intertwined path between these two elements, don’t underestimate the need for clarity and the distinction of open communication with those who you are working with.

The installation itself comprised two central elements: the projected space and a scrapbook which featured a response photographic series taken by me, which, when combined, asked its audiences if the destruction of something was more artistically beautiful than something which has been preserved.

Each of the elements had been directly extracted from my detailed research in the archive. The projected images, now turned into videos to accentuate their decay, were high resolution scans from John Vickers’ original 1920s glass plate negatives. The series of photographs taken by me were all initially monochromatic until double exposed with replicas of the mould-infested structures from the same series by Vickers. Each of these elements, interwoven together, served as a thought-provoking site for my question and for the exploration of my overall interest during the course of this placement: the relationship between the artist and the archive.

On entering the curated space, audiences were met with work that one visitor described as a “stunning use of the archive”, but which also served as “an extra dimension to the preservation and decay interrogation” (audience comments book). For me as the creator, it was really encouraging and enlightening to see people coming up to me with questions and becoming genuinely engaged and enthused by the materials in such similar ways to how I was first drawn to the series in the archive. I felt incredibly proud of what I had created, of course, but also an added sense of pride that I was able to bring John Vickers and his work from out of the depths of the archives again, after so many years, and to breathe new life into it again; for his photos to hold and similarly captivate as they did during his lifetime.

Beginning this process of learning, I felt lucky to have had prior experiences with using archives. At the end of this artist-in-residence placement, I feel a great privilege to have been taught the value of the archive even more so, but to a point where I feel I have formed a working relationship with John Vickers. I’ve learnt that age and time really are just constructs in this kind of work, and that incredible work may just simply be another shelf away, wrapped neatly with archival tape, in an unsuspecting box.

On a final note, I would like to say a massive thank you to Jill Sullivan, Laura Dow, Nigel Bryant, Julian Warren and all the other members of staff at the University of Bristol Theatre Collection for welcoming me into your organisation and being some of the most well versed and knowledgeable people I have had the pleasure of working with. A massive thank you to Dr Kirsty Sedgman, James Lisk and Beth Bransome from the University of Bristol Theatre Department; without your attention, support and incredible capabilities, none of this would have been possible. Thank you to Becky Coster, Ines Sallis, Tommy Tang, Athena Gibson-Diamond and Jesse Prince for volunteering on this project, your support has meant the world, you’re all very dear to me. Finally, I wanted to say thank you to all those who managed to make it to the installation space! It was my pleasure to welcome you and the responses I collected will stay with me for the rest of my professional career.

Bobby

If you want to learn more about this process, or view the materials related to this project, all my physical and digital exhibition work has been donated to the University of Bristol Theatre Collection.

 

Hello again, it’s been around a month since my last blog post and I’d like to update you with what’s been going on in my artist-in-residence placement with the Theatre Collection, because lots of amazing things have happened!

When we last left off, I spoke about the discovery of an incredible series of photographs taken by the photographer John Vickers. Upon finding them, I have undertaken extensive periods of research to specifically pinpoint the dates and locations of the work, all of which will serve as groundwork that I can build on artistically when creating my final public installation. Alongside this, I have been working closely with Assistant Keepers Jill Sullivan and Laura Dow, who have provided me with invaluable expertise in the world of archival research and analogue photography. Although carefully catalogued and stored within the safety of the John Vickers archive, the re-discovery of this glass plate series has caused quite a buzz in the Collection as the incredible details and colours of the mould-fill glass plate negatives have come back into the light.

After such an intense and well-needed exploration of the glass plates in the archive, I have now entered into my experimental phase: a period of time where I try out a range of ideas and concepts. In any project that I work on, this period of time is both incredibly exciting but also quite unnerving, especially working with such a wealth of source materials. My time in this placement has really allowed me to reflect on some of my own practices as an artist and to be critical about how I engage with elements like problem solving and generating ideas. It’s something that would not have been nearly as poignant to me if it wasn’t for this connection that I feel for the archival materials that inspire me.

Moving forward into a more hands-on production phase, I’m bringing in ideas and plans to encompass the world within this series of photographs. There are ideas of bold splashes of colour in the form of mould, once on the photographs and now going to be digitally presented in the installation to emphasis its beauty and incredible composition. I plan to bring in projections to display Vickers’ work in a much larger scale and, after careful curation from myself and the incredible video editing talent of another freelance artist, I will show this photography series in a completely new light.

 

I’m incredibly proud and excited of the work that has been going on recently to begin to tie everything on this project together and to reinvigorate glass plate negatives that are over 100 years old, so that you can also see the beautiful images that originally captivated me. I have every assurance that the big ideas that I am bringing to this project can be realised with the support of the incredible technical team in the Wickham Theatre, and the continued guidance from the Theatre Collection.

The last month hasn’t been without its twists and turns, but the journey has been really positive and productive, moving me ever closer towards curating a powerful installation that will be open to the public very soon.

In my last blog for this project, I will reflect on my placement and offer my final thoughts about my work with the Collection. But, in the meantime, I hope to see you at my installation in the near future!

Bobby

Hello, my name is Bobby and I’m a third year joint honours student in the Department of Theatre and Performance, and the Department of Film and TV here at the University of Bristol. As a part of my final semester with the University, I have chosen to work on a unit called ‘professional development in theatre and performance’; a unit that is designed for students to connect with organisations outside of the academic context of the course, and to learn to develop soft skills relevant to working in industry as an artist and creative. After conversing with the brilliant staff at the Theatre Collection, I chose to work as a Artist-in-Residence with them. The project aims to create a performative installation work at the end of an archive-based research and experimentation period.

As a third year Theatre and Film student, I’ve been lucky enough to have been exposed to the archive in previous units and have gained an understanding for both how their systems work, but also the process of thought required to interrogate material and to carefully piece together the histories of productions, projects and people. A previous project titled ‘Awaiting its Fate’ was performed last year at the Bristol Old Vic and was designed by myself. Aimed at blurring the history of the theatre into the buildings’ foundations, I worked closely with archival materials to inform a soundscape of an auction for the building in 1942 and the final performance allowed audiences to imagine that they were listening through the walls of the BOV at events that happened in the 40s. It was the first time where I had found the value and interest of the cross section between archival materials and technology; the blurred lines and creative possibilities that it holds as a way of reinvigorating once forgotten material, but also showcasing to others the capabilities that the archive itself holds.

My own passion in theatre is rooted in set and AV design. I have experimented with technologically mediated spaces and performances that utilised elements like projection and three dimensional audial soundscapes as a way of world building but also informing creative choices to highlights relationships, themes and motifs. I strongly feel that a playful perspective on bringing technology into performance is a brilliantly versatile way of doing this, while also allowing that traditional ‘magic’ held at the theatre to continue.

Before I pursue a postgraduate degree in performance design, I’m taking time to broaden my understanding of how we can use the past as a way of informing our future artistic expressions, and how archives such as the theatre collection aren’t just valuable for researchers, but also for active and freelance artists. During the first few months on my placement, I have taken time to dig deep into materials otherwise unknown to me.

Beginning with an interest and past experience in analogue photography, I began there, exploring key individuals that may have led lives as photographers. This is where I discovered John Vickers, an experimentalist photographer right from the age of 12 when he picked up his first ever camera at a church jumble sale.

 

The life and work of Vickers is extensive, and the Theatre Collection’s archive of his prints and negatives drew a kind of curiosity out of me, and led to my choice to centre my installation around his work. Namely, there is a fascinating collection of glass print negatives from early in his life that left me speechless when they were uncovered. Described in the Theatre Collection catalogue as 27 monochromatic exposures, what I discovered was something far more amazing. As I begin my experimentation process with these prints, I’m excited to not be able to see what unique twists and turns are in my creation process. It’s a brilliant example as to why rabbit holes in the archive aren’t so bad after all, in fact they can sometimes be quite the opposite and find you somewhere you would never expect.

Keep checking the Theatre Collection’s blog page for updates about this exciting project!

Bobby

It’s been nearly two months since my last blog post, and during my hiatus, my designated placement time with the Theatre Collection has been spent developing my research skills, as well as learning more about archiving and museum curatorial practices with Jill Sullivan (Assistant Keeper: User Services) and Athene Bain (Archives Assistant). These conversations have brought up some important context and theory behind archiving, as well as thought-provoking considerations about the preservation and access strategies of archives and museums. Furthermore, my gained understanding has supported my artistic process as I’ve begun to synthesise connections between particular archive items of interest, leading towards the creative conceptualisation and design of my performance.

My research has been guided by my exploration into the presentations of memory in theatre, either in the content of the play itself or discovered within the memories of the people who made and enjoyed theatre. I’ve paid particular attention to the visual materials such as photographs of actors, costume designs and set models, but I’ve unexpectedly been thoroughly engaged –and at several moments, entertained– by the written archives, more specifically letters.

I was helpfully directed to the Jessie & Annie Bourke Collection of correspondence (Reference: BTC80), five boxes of letters detailing the professional careers and later lives of Jessie, her sister Annie, and their cousin Eva Watson, actresses of the 1860s and 1870s. In this unique collection, I found a single telegraph addressed to Annie Bourke to be particularly intriguing. Characteristically short, I spent quite some time trying to decipher this cryptic message, and its greater meaning between the lines of the faintly penciled cursive.

An uncatalogued item in BTC80 Box 1: a telegraph addressed to Annie Bourke that reads ‘Don’t come, I have to go away’

My mind instantly wandered; I began to wonder whether this message was a simple warning that Annie would be met with disappointment at a previously agreed upon meeting spot? Or was this note emotionally charged, with unwritten but potentially weighty cause behind the sender’s impulse that they had no other option than ‘to go away’? Alongside the manifold number of long letters addressed to Annie – some even addressed to the name of the character she was playing on stage at the time – these letters allude to the intense adoration male audience members had for their favourite actors and the discomforting tension between declarations of admiration and harassment. Did Annie keep the reason for this telegraph in her memory? Did she remember the letters from her many admirers? Did she have favourites? Were there admirers whom she genuinely admired back, or whom she charmed for her own pleasure as the subject of adoration? Without her own responses, documented in the letters she did or did not send, we can never know. Moreover, I had found this moment of wonder to be incredibly formative for the devising process of my performance.

In addition to the sector knowledge and skills I have acquired, I have also learnt a hard lesson that any researcher must accept: unfortunately, it is impossible to see or research everything. Whilst I allowed myself time to explore tangential archive items, given the time constraints of the duration of my placement and my own time management between my final year units, I had to decide what leads I wanted to pursue and which I regrettably had to leave behind.

My direction of research has not been linear these last few months, but despite the twists and turns, the journey has been productive and, most notably of all, joyfully absorbing. Supported by Jill’s knowledgeable suggestions, I feel I have a solid foundation of research to begin to build the design conceptualisation of my performance, which I will share with you in my next post.

 

Hello, my name is Violet, and I’m a third year student in the Theatre and Performance Department here at Bristol. One of the final year units is ‘Professional Development in Theatre and Performance’, for which students work in partnership with a professional or community organisation to develop their professional skills on a specific project. I chose to work with the Theatre Collection, as an Artist-in-Residence, to create a performance piece based on archives and archival research.

As a third-year Theatre & English student, I’ve been lucky enough to take several units that utilised the archives and knowledge of the Theatre Collections staff. During my degree course, I have looked into the set design for productions of Chekhov’s The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard in ‘Performance Histories’, statoscopes in ‘Immersive and Site-Specific Theatre’ and even a clown costume, believed to be worn by Harry Payne, in ‘Clowning through History’. I was mesmerised by the physical fragments from the past, and the exciting process of research-informed investigation into the greater context of the item and its relation to theatre. These items preserved the liveness and creativity of performance, which is inextricably linked to the theatre makers and the projects they were produced for. This sparked my interest in contacting the Theatre Collection to ask if I could have my placement with the team to learn about archiving, freelancing as an artist and exploring what creative and performative ideas could be inspired by materials in the Collection.

My own interest in theatre is rooted in design. I have experimented with designing set, costume, prop and makeup in theatre units, student productions and my own performance as a drag artist. Most of my previous work revolves around creating dynamic and intriguing performance spaces, experimenting with the bounds of absurdity and authenticity in costume and makeup artistry, and exploring the tension between exaggerated scale and practicality in props.

Before I pursue a postgraduate degree in performance design, I’m taking time to explore various avenues of artistry. As my interest was piqued by my previous encounters with the Collection’s archival materials, so I was intrigued to develop my own artistic practice, informed by researching designers and live art practitioners.

During the first month of my placement, I have taken my time to grasp the historical and contemporary works of live art, such as the work of Ian Smith, Nan Hoover and Crystal Theatre of the Saint. By investigating their creative process, promotional material, and recordings of their performances – with the support of the Theatre Collection team – I have built a foundation of archive research skills to begin my own process of producing a live art performance in early May. Please do look out for updates, as I will be posting regular blogs to show what archive items and artist influences have inspired me, the progression of my creative process and reflections on my placement with the Theatre Collection.