www.slumgothiclivecollage.co.uk
Residencies usually have a timeframe. Michael Bowdidge's attachment to x-church however has led us to think that the experience of working there never goes away so we now actively seek to keep our residents attached. The SARC group is a extension of this position but so too is Live Collage and it has developed a wonderful knack of portraying life in and around x-church. It started with a few digital collages Michael made from photographs STAP member Fez took at our first festival, Drum for Syria, in 2013. There are now well over one hundred collages and the number of people providing source material has expanded considerably. After Festival x-24 2016 we formed the Live Collage Working Group and this now has members from the youth and mental health areas of the project working alongside SARC members. Adding photographs into the Live Collage mix is now becoming habitual and normal. Perhaps these collages best appear as fleeting moments flashing up in the social media churn. They get in the way of facebook traffic flowing in and out of the various groups intersecting with life at x-church.
"The Live Collage project has come out of my personal and ongoing artistic engagement with the physical, cultural and social fabric of x-church since 2007. Initially I engaged sculpturally with the contents of the then relatively empty church, but as time has passed the boundary between my artistic activities at the church and the educational workshops that I have designed and run there has become increasingly porous. I now find myself at a point where working with people has become as important to me as working with objects and images. These collaborative digital collages, either undertaken on site or remotely via Skype have allowed us to explore representations of ourselves, of each other and of the building we use in order to deepen our understanding of all of them. Work is constantly recycled and reprocessed. Ownership becomes ephemeral and transient, but this doesn't matter, as we all own all of it."
Live Collage Working Group: Bradley Allenby/Wayne Banks/Jazmine Bates/Michael Bowdidge/Donna Clark/Daz Disley/Leisha Jerram/Clive Maclennan/Aimiee MacPherson/Claudia Pilsl/Kevin Ribis/Jamie Simpson/Mary Ward-Lowery + others
Summer 2013 ongoing
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