New Works for Coventry Market

May 12, 2011 by · Comments Off on New Works for Coventry Market 

Coventry Market

Last month I went up to Coventry Market to spend the day talking to traders and shoppers about set of works on paper I made last year as part of an ongoing series about markets, food and the informal spaces that draw communities together. The Coventry Market Traders found the works online, contacted me and bought them to hang permanently in the market hall. It was a honour to have the traders buy the work and bring it back home where it was created.  You can get a sense of Coventry Market from this film made by the traders. The drawings will be on permanent display later this year but for now you can see images of the 10 works on flickr here. They grew out of a commission from Dan Thompson of the Empty Shops Network to record some of the places the ESN Tour was going to. I was inspired by the vibrancy of Coventry Market and the care traders take over arranging and decorating their stalls as well as the range of produce; from pet food to ribbon, cards to cucumbers, roasting tins to yams, fishing tackle to carpets, cakes and cranberries, you  name it, someone will have it. You can find out more on the market website.

I want to say a big thanks to Bill and Sophie for looking after me so well last month and to Brian and all the Coventry Market traders for making me so welcome.

Coventry Market Coventry Market

Coventry Market

Seven days in Seven Dials, Books

August 6, 2010 by · 1 Comment 

Last month Proboscis and our FJF Placements Shalene Barnett and Karine Dorset worked with with participants on Seven Days in Seven Dials. Three download print & make books created by participants in the project are now available to download. The project involved the creation of a temporary exhibition of films, podcasts, photography and books in an empty shop in Covent Garden, put together in one week by participants from London’s Culture Quarter Programme, working with the projects initiator Dan Thompson from artistsandmakers.com and the Empty Shops Network, podcaster Richard Vobes, photographer Steve Bomford, artist Michael Radcliffe, Proboscis and Natasha Middleton.
The books, made using Bookleteer, are available to download from Diffusion.

Seven Days in Seven Dials; a week in the life of London’s Culture Quarters

July 28, 2010 by · 2 Comments 

For a week in early July Proboscis worked on Seven Days in Seven Dials a project by artistsandmakers.com and the West End Cultural Quarter to create an exhibition in one week with 30 young people on the Culture Quarter Programme of placements.

Proboscis currently has a scheme of placements funded by the Future Jobs Fund and the first two in the scheme, Shalene Barnett and Karine Dorset, joined Seven Days in Seven Dials to create download, print and makeup publications using bookleteer.com to accompany the exhibition. Here are their thoughts on the week:

My role was to put together and produce a publication of the walking tour that took place… First we mapped out the places we were going to go and the route that we were going to take then we set out on the journey. By the end of the day we had taken pictures, collected facts and had most of the content for the eBook. On the Wednesday I spent my time at the shop in Covent Garden, editing photos and text, rearranging the eBook template I had already done and actually start putting in some content.
Friday we were in the studio. I began to finish the book, did some editing and rearranging just to make sure that the eBook was correct., printed off copies and ran them down to the shop in Convent Garden for display for the opening show on the project. It was a great experience and I had great fun working with a big range of different groups of people, I would love to do it again in the near future.
” KD

Seven Days in Seven Dials for me was a lovely experience. I spent seven days in an area called Seven Dials which is located in Covent Garden. I spent the seven days documenting different groups of people as they gathered various information about seven dials….All in all I highly enjoyed my time at Seven Dials. It was nice to meet young people that are on the same FJF scheme as myself and are trying something new and out of the box. I think the Empty Shops project is very creative and I would gladly do it again. At times it was hard work but the hard work most definitely paid off.” SB

You can see images here

and read more on the artistsandmakers website.