COLOUR WHEEL

Cardboard CD sleeves, discarded objects.

The protective sleeves for now obsolete CD Rom storage technology forms the structure of this wheel of objects arranged and matched to commercial paint colour charts. The objects are all items which have been rejected as worthless and obsolete by their owners. They are given a new  purpose or order, referencing archive processes of museums.

SORTING

2018

(SPACE) GALLERY,

Discarded objects, Horticultural colour charts published by The British Colour Council (BCC).

‘Sorting’ is a presentation of discarded objects grouped into colour and matched with horticultural colour charts. The arrangement mimics a formal scientific or Museum display, but is made through participation, using colour matching and also audiences aesthetic or personal decisions. ‘Sorting’ invites the audience to be the buyer, the collector, the curator and the museum visitor, skills that we are all familiar with as adept consumers. The changing and evolving arrangement often throws up new links  between objects and provokes conversation around our relationship with consumerism and our uneasy relationship with plastics.

The piece reflects upon the conventions of museum collections and their classification systems, and draws attention to notions of value, our relationship to objects, and our addiction to accumulation and display as a method of making sense of chaos.

The objects were collected by open call from local Hackney homes.

Photos: Floro Azqueta

MIRROR BOX

Cardboard box, mirrors and Lino Cut print.

ALL ALONG

Greensands Country

Lottery Heritage Fund

2020

A residency exploring the ‘Greensands country’ a unique landscape running across Bedfordshire, Cambridegshire and Buckinghamshire. Drawing upon local archive and conversation, this project will uncover  its historic parklands with local people, to create a series of constructed artist books.  Commencing in February 2020. Exhibition May 2020.

LIGHT CONSTRUCTORS

London Borough Southwark

Output Arts/ Emergency Exit Arts

2018

Collage, LED cubes, transparencies, tape.

Innovators Imaginarium was an event created with young people in Southwark by Emergency Exit Arts and Output Arts which celebrated local innovators. This interactive artwork reflected research and drawings by children from St Georges Catholic Primary School of local artist, social reformer and innovator Octavia Hill whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities in the nineteenth century. Hill campaigned for better housing for the poor and for the availability of open spaces for all to enjoy. She said “We all need space; unless we have it we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently.”  Using inspiration from block puzzles and games, each side of the cube were covered with collage of buildings and plants, geometric shape and patterns to allow the construction of buildings and gardens in infinite combinations. The cubes were illuminated with programmed LED lights and accompanied with a soundscape.

THROUGH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES

TIDEWAY LTD, BRIDGET SAWYERS LTD, ART CONSULTANT

2018- 2020

HOARDING, 2.5 X 24M

Medium: COLLAGE.

‘Through Kaleidoscope eyes’ is a public art commission for Tideway which is constructing the immense Thames Tideway Tunnel, a major new sewer, urgently needed to help protect the tidal River Thames from increasing sewage pollution.

The completed piece represents a body of work responding to the ecology of King Georges Park, Wandsworth, and reflects a public programme of events in November 2017. The participatory programme,  managed by the artist included an opportunity for families and children attending The West Hill Childrens’ Centre to engage with a local bee keeper, The Wandle Trust, and The Garden Classroom. Local residents were invited  to create their own collages, generate ideas, gather reflections and stories about King George’s Park.

Using the kaleidoscope as inspiration, the act of looking and examining the park and its ecology  became the focus of the workshops. Through a series of events, participants explored the plants and animals, and also the human activity, past and present within the park. The result was 6 site specific collages with a Kaleidoscopic form, interspersed with unfolding geometric forms,  inspired by the science of Kaleidoscopes.

 Public Artist Tom Pearman created and arranged the digital artwork and designed the geometric forms.

Photography Floro Azqueta

ARTIST BOOKS

 The Bloomsbury Festival

  Partners: U.C.L and AGE U.K

 2016-2019

Paper, collage, dictionary

Festival in a Box is a project that offers people who can’t get out to the Bloomsbury Festival  an opportunity to participate in an enjoyable cultural event. The project was conceived in 2013/14 and was a collaboration between the School of Advanced Study, University of London, University College London, Bloomsbury Festival, and Age UK Camden. Artists, together with trained staff from Age UK Camden’s Dementia Befriending Service visit participants in their own homes and during these visits participants are encouraged to engage with different art forms.  The project  offers participants an opportunity to share their knowledge and stories of the area.  Some participants have lived in the Bloomsbury area for many years, so the project is not only an opportunity for them to actively engage with community life, but also to participate in re-narrating the history of Bloomsbury itself. The constructed book acts as  a starting point for conversations and activities, and acts as a memory jogger. Memories are added to the book as it travels around so that they are shared and recorded.

Queensbridge Shopping Centre, Peterborough.

CLUTTER BANK

Planet B Festival

Peterborough Environment City Trust,  Metal (Peterborough).

2017

Planet B was a two-week programme of events which encouraged discussion and debate on sustainability. Clutter Bank set out to count the number of objects owned by Peterborough households, and to have conversations about our possessions, how they come into our lives, collecting habits, material accumulation, and the effect it has upon the environment. Collections and consumption can be seen as a way of creating order, to ease insecurity, a quest, or a way of presenting ourselves to the world. We all have a relationship with objects and an understanding of curating, valuing, arranging, systemising, rejecting, articulating and reasoning why certain objects are important to us. It is these very familiar activities which this project attempted re-frame within issues around climate change, inviting shoppers to create a unique collection of objects, displayed with personal stories and  reflections.The project programme included workshops at a local primary school, a car boot fair and an installation at Queensgate Shopping Centre. Participants were invited to and to take a survey which estimated their total number of possessions, known as a ‘Clutter-rating’ and to donate clutter, share their thoughts and stories which were attached to our wall of objects.

The average number of possessions own by Peterborough households was calculated as 152,613 objects. (Figures are completely unscientific and added up with a complicated 1970’s calculator which had lots of unknown buttons on it.)

Photo credit:  Sandra Keating

GATEWAY

British Museum

Moving stories special event for Refugee week.

2016

Carbon paper, envelopes, correx, wood

‘Gateway’ or ‘gate’ derives from the Old Norse “gata”, meaning road or path.  As part of Refugee Week events at The British Museum,  visitors were invited to share their experiences of migration, whether as a recent or former migrant, or as a resident welcoming newcomers. It allowed a space for reflection on current migration and on historical migrations held in the collections at the museum. These drawings and messages of welcome were ‘posted’ in envelopes which covered the gateway to create a moving  gesture of welcome. The installation provided a poignant reflection on our place in the world over the Brexit referendum weekend.

DOT-DASH

HACKNEY COUNCIL

2019

Light installation Hackney Town Hall inspired by the Art Deco architecture and interior of the Grade 1 listed building. 180 lanterns created with local children and young people and paraded during the annual Lights On event.

MAKE CLUB

2019-2020

Make Club is a project which takes constructing, experimenting, testing and making art objects to young people. Make Club is a weekly club in the artists studio, and pops up at a wide range of schools, festivals and museums to make, learn and question. Make Club has appeared at The End of The Road Festival and The Bloomsbury Festival and Bletchley Park for Big Draw 2019.

WHITTON SMALL PRESS

Residency

Richmond Literature Festival, London borough of Richmond

Arts Council funded

2015

‘Whitton Small Press’ was an artist in residence project for Whitton Library, London Borough of Richmond, undertaken by Tracy & Hobbs.

The artists responded to the unique environment of this small library by setting up residence from a cupboard at the back of the reference section. Libraries are usually thought of as places to borrow books but this project invited participants to leave something of themselves behind. Filling the library with typewriters, rubber stamps and a photocopier they set about creating a set of small edition self published books.  During the month long residency the artists offered printmaking,  simple book binding, collage and other print based workshops to adults and children which explored artists books and bespoke books. A giant Praxinoscope was built for the project which was used to explore the meeting of books and animation. During the residency the artists produced a number of site specific artist books inspired by the local area and the library itself. These included ‘Whitton papers’; a collection of paper from Whitton high street, ‘A romance’; drawings inspired by novels from the romance section, a colouring book of local maps, ‘Whitton portraits’; a collection of portraits made by local children using rubber stamps, ‘Page 1’; a collection of first pages from each section of the library, ‘Removed’; a book made with rubber stamps from the library, and ‘Brian’; a collection of prints of a local cat seen at Whitton station.

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BUREAU OF LOST AND FOUND

Up Projects

Totally Thames Festival

2014

Emily Tracy and Lizzy Hobbs created  ‘Bureau of Lost and Found’ which was presented during Totally Thames Festival  with Up Projects.  The artists transformed the interior of the Floating Cinema into an imaginary lost property agency for lost and found articles from the Thames shoreline.

Participants were allowed rare access to the Thames foreshore with historians from The Museum of London. They were invited to search for items along the shore, which included anything from Roman pot shards to modern day objects. The Bureau hosts welcomed participants on board the boat and invited them to share  or examine mud-larking finds with them. The hosts handed out the official paperwork, asking for a drawn record of  findings, and imagining the story that may have brought the item to the shores of the Thames. The participatory process inspired visitors to imagine who may have owned it, how far it had travelled and how it ended up in the river in order that it could be re claimed by it’s owner. The process was an amusing journey through bureaucracy, forms, rubber stamps and carbon paper, alongside accurate archival observation and drawing.

KALEIDOSCOPE

2019

Mirrors and maps

Kaleidoscope attempts to depict our shifting landscapes and seas, now, and in the future due to climate change. Whole land masses and seas enlarge or disappear as the mirrors are moved.

X-RAY DEPARTMENT

Many different cultures use animals as a way of reflecting upon our lives. Examples include Medieval Bestiaries, Aesop’s fables to traditional fairy tales. Many cultures including Native Americans believe we have a spirit guide in the form of an animal. They provide guidance and wisdom in difficult times. The Institute of Animal Spirit Guides is inspired by this tradition.

Playing with our desire to know, order and understand our chaotic world, this project moved around the space between our rational and irrational selves. This participatory installation invited the festival audience to take part in a personality quiz which picked out their animal spirit guide, create a cardboard accessory and step behind the X Ray machine to reveal and commune with their inner animal. The installation was both a day and night time event.

RECORD

Record I and II sleeves with collage cut from National Geographic Magazines.

Playing with storage and archive containers ‘Record’ I & II reflect on our changing relationship understanding of  our environment, and our deepening loss of security. Record II reflects upon landscapes and resources we once took for granted and are now threatened are dwindling.

POP UP PICTURE PALACE

Wood Street Inside Out

London Borough of Walthamstow

2012

Tracy & Hobbs