- Hilary Jack - 1.2.18

Hilary Jack Artist talk – 1.2.18 

Jack introduced her practice with her collaborative venture with Paul Harfleet, Apartment www.apartmentmanchester.blogspot.com . Running from 2004 to 2009. The artists hosted a plethora of residencies and exhibitions in Harfleet’s sixth floor flat at the heart of Manchester. The artists explored ‘the politics of space’ – an interest close to Jack as evident in the way she articulated her work.
Exhibiting in the flat subverted the ‘white cube’ tradition for contemporary art; maintaining the lived-in feel of the space was important in this project. It opens up a number of socio-political conversations surrounding the nature of housing space in large cities. As Jack noted, the playfulness of the work created bought a lightheartedness to an otherwise serious and important context.
‘Joined’ by Zak Ingham and Cath Corlett, married Apartment’s tower block – Lamport Court -with an opposite tower block – Lockton Court. Accomplished with a 10m piece of fishing wire.

The execution of joined received a lot of bad press with assumptions that public money was spent in the making of it; when in fact the work costs nothing but the artists’ time and resources to make. What’s interesting is how the work evoked split opinions surrounding the purpose of this kind of contemporary art. For some this work represented the ‘selfishness’ of fine artist’s only after the next bigger and better artwork.
Digging deeper, beyond the aesthetic values of the fishing wire attaching two buildings. The work bound a community in conversation around social divide. It’s almost as if in the tower block, inhabitants of large cities are pushed further away from the heart of the place they reside in, cast-upwards in the illusion of a luxury where in reality, they’re cast-aside.  The loneliness that can be felt in the one-bedroomed sixth floor flat was abolished by the uniting of two singular buildings. The subtlety of the fishing line, a metaphor, for the invisible communities hidden in the Manchester tower blocks.

Jack finished her talk with HOST. A project carrying parallel ‘weighty’ sociological commentary to her Apartment period.  The Spinningfields commission featured cast bronze sculptures of weeds sourced from her studio location.
She spoke of the location of the studios- Crusader Mill -as a place where homeless people sleep in doorways and drug users and prostitutes litter the street. Where the commercial Spinningfields is a location with high security, no loitering policies, luxury business property and high-end shops.  Bringing cast bronze weeds to this context from the mill re-opens this commentary on a glaring gap between richer and poorer communities in large cities. The poor are left to fester where the rich build and empire around it, banishing the under-privileged from being a part of the growth.

Jack spoke of the difficulties from a number of the high-end orgaisations residing in Spinningfields. Her work quickly evolves into discussions around power as global CEO’s express their unwillingness to allow an artist to ‘taint’ their gleaming façade. I’m reminded of Michel De Certeau’s “Walking in the City” as she talks – the text sums up the ‘totalitarian’ glare of the businessman in his office block . –

“When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators.” – De Certeau

Its fitting that Jack brings back the mass hidden within the mass of the bronze (a mass more appealing to the rich) –  as an attempt to ground these businesses in their initial real location and open up their world to the wider city. To be faced with rejection from the people at the very top of these lavish worlds only highlights the power complexes still dividing our cities and the world.




NOTES


- Budapest residency- collaboration – Artists / Peers /  Tutors / Students
- APARTMENT- Friends home in a tower block.
- Dialectic/ politics of space – maintaining the look and feel of the lived in space.  How is art received in the home?
- Site-referential – Playful
- Social connotations
- “Art, or is it just fishing line between two flats?” “Joined symbolises unseen community”
- Why are certain objects regarded as valuable and other objects regarded as waste? – The umbrella project.
- “Mixing Humans and NonHumans together: The Scoiology of a Door-Closer” – Jim Johnson
- Personification of the object?
- TREBLINKA – found objects. – The objects that remain tell the story of our lives. Warsaw exhibition.
- The plastic carrier bag. ‘Turquoise bag in a tree’
- What meaning does the blue plastic bag have to Hilary Jack?
- The Late Great Planet Earth – 1970s – Hal Lindsey. – Biblical end of the world prophecy.
- Toxicity , doom – capacity to choke / kill . – Cast in bronze (value of art) – ‘the un-useful side to the useful bag’
- Monumental piece. – Gravitas, economic value – everlasting. – apocalyptic blast – instability ( fits with the title- the late great planet earth)
- Symbols of human waste. – intervention on the planet.
- Social and political notions of the countryside. ‘Green and pleasant land’
- ‘Christ is coming’ – doomsday prophets. – Why do people return to archaic- ridiculous end of the world prophecies.
- Doomsday log cabin – sound created by scientists that signals the end of the world.
- TATTON HALL – Public space commissions
- Flights of fancy – lord Edgerton – childless/heirless.
- Ideas around crows / nest building – crows repairing nests generationally. Leaving their nests once babies are no longer born.
- Works involving planning permissions – structural engineers – architects. -Different way of working to the white cube / formal gallery exhibition.
- The inside-out house
- HOST – Spinningfields Art commission – the artist would reference urban development.
- Banking district – monolithic. Corperate. Cleansed . Big boulevard avenues. Socio-political commentary.
- Crusader Mill – opposing economies and building structures.
- Metaphor – unwanted weeds – unwanted social class.
- Critique of their activities. – poetic
- Conversations around power? – Having to get her commission approved.
- Aesthetic value.