Leeds Art Fair 2007

Thursday 3rd May was the day that the Leeds Art Fair arrived at the Light complex on the Headrow. This annual festival is a platform for emerging and established artists to display their work in a high profile venue. For the first time this year, the Leeds Art Fair was introducing student and post-graduate work.

Congratulations to Andrew Lister, one of our tutors at the college who won the ‘Best Work in Show’ prize with his paintings of Simon Weston and Francis Bacon.

We wanted to buy this year’s catalogue for the archive and enquired about back catalogues and were lucky enough to talk to Andrew Wade, the Chairman this year. Who after hearing that we sere students wanting to create a public resource, he very kindly gave us the collection of past catalogues spanning back to 1984!

Meeting with Lucy Gibson

ResourceCITE is an archive project by Leeds based artists, Lucy Gibson, Yvonne Carmichael and Lisa Boudreau.  It seemed a fitting starting point of research since their travelling archive has been going for two years and is established, having travelled to different cities in the UK.  ResourceCITE is a national archive for site and context-responsive art works “to increase awareness, develop understanding and open up dialogue about visual art in the public realm” (www.emerged.net/resourcecite).

We were keen to have a meeting with Lucy to clarify for ourselves how our archive is different to any other archive based project.  As artists we are keen to produce original projects that facilitate a real need within the city.  There were concerns that we were ‘stepping-on-peoples’-toes’ by seeming to be encroaching on other peoples’ projects. We are keen to promote the ethos of sharing information in a way that is very open by creating a blog, documenting the processes that we go through.

Lucy was encouraging but forced us to be quite critical of ourselves.   The process of explaining our project to Lucy enabled us to articulate and clarify our aims, which gave us confidence in the originality of our idea.  The most constructive criticism was the urge for us to make our aims clear to the public through our promotional material.  This could include the re-wording of the name ‘Archive: Leeds’ or the tagline.  We have yet to finalise our manifesto, which again will give people a clearer indication of what the project is about.

Although there are similarities between our project and ResourceCITE, we are intending our archive to be unique in that

a) it will be accessible for at least a year in a fixed space in Leeds (and hopefully, funding permitting, for longer)

b) rather than dealing with artworks and specific artists, we are providing information on the art scene in Leeds and how to be involved.  This makes our archive specific to Leeds.

Although the Leeds Visual Arts Forum (LVAF) is an important resource for artists in Leeds, it is by no means comprehensive as it deals mainly with established spaces and groups.  As artists at the start of our career, we are keen to discover alternative spaces and document DIY activity in the city.

New flyers

Here’s a preliminary design for some flyers that we will be handing out to promote the archive and to encourage people to donate information during Situation Leeds.

New Flickr Group Art Archive: Leeds

Alicia set up a Flickr group called Art Archive: Leeds allowing anyone to post their images of art spaces and events in Leeds. A Flickr group is a great way to share photographs of a specific theme and generate discussion about common interests. We hope that people will become interested and make use of this group.

Photographing venues

Sarah and Alicia have been trekking around the streets of Leeds taking photos of venues and spaces for their archive. Concentrating on exterior and interior shots and enquiring about contact information along the way. We even got a free drink along the way: Thanks to the kind man at the Reliance!

Here’s some examples of photographs that we have been taking. To see more, click on the link to Flickr on this page. We are wanting to set up a Flickr group to allow anyone to post their images of spaces used for art in Leeds. Here’s The Art Market…

The Leeds Met Gallery…

Cabinet travelling to college for a quick fix

Sarah and I wheeled the cabinet on its temporary unattached wheels into college to get them fixed to the base of the unit. We began to appreciate any newly laid smooth pavements on the way there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the metal workshop in college we were able to get help from the fantastic Kevin to get these wheels firmly screwed into place by taking apart the wheel unit. From this old unit, we created a new base that slotted into the bottom of the cabinet that the wheels could be screwed into. We were rather proud of the resulting unit and found it a much easier journey rolling it back home.

 

 

Bringing the cabinet home

IMG_4079

Originally uploaded by AliciaYeah.

After searching the nooks and crannies of Poverty Aid Warehouse, we found this this little treasure: a filing cabinet, for a mere £20. The addition of the television stand enabled us to roll it home, but we soon discovered that the pavements of Leeds are not meant for travelling fiing cabinets, especially when the wheels are not attached. Look how happy Sarah is with our find!