Esther Springett

Ear Drum at Nuit Blanche White Night

Esther — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:32:52 +0000

Here’s a short video document featuring my latest work, Ear Drum which was exhibited as part of LAUNDRY, an evening of live music and art in a local laundrette for the Nuit Blanche White Night festival, Brighton and Hove. White Night is an annual all-night arts festival which takes place when the clocks go back for winter. Venues across the city extend their opening hours, streets team with people, and pop-up art spaces crop up in the unlikeliest of places to showcase the city’s diverse artistic and cultural endeavors.

You can listen to a full excerpt of Ear Drum below

Laundrette Visitors Book for Brighton and Hove

Esther — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:38:25 +0000

Something I am working on:

A special kind of visitors book is currently travelling around some of the city’s laundrette establishments. The visitors book prompts users of the laundrette to reflect on their experience of the space. This city has one of the largest private rented sectors in the country, comprised of 28,000 homes – almost a quarter of the entire city’s housing [1]. A large proportion of these homes come without washing machines so it’s no surprise our Laundrettes are busy and well used places. This project aims to uncover a little bit more about the social significance of the laundrette in the local community.

Is it really just a place to wash your clothes? Come and find out at Brighton and Hove White Night, 29th October, where the culmination of this project will be on display in St James’s St Street Laundrette as part of Bouffant Collective’s evening of live performance, visuals and collaborative consumption.

At this precise moment the visitors book is taking up residence in Preston St Laundrette, Brighton.

[1] Housing Strategy 2009-2014: healthy homes, healthy lives, healthy city, Brighton and Hove City Council, 2009

One day in June

Esther — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 09:47:49 +0000

A one-day crowdscape of public spaces in Brighton and Hove – made as research resource for an introductory session on public art.

Doing the Rounds

Esther — Mon, 16 May 2011 21:43:15 +0000

Hi there,

The Laundry project has clocked up a whopping six live music sessions in Launderettes around Brighton and Hove. We’re hopefully going to be bringing a few site-specific performances and installations to the scene soon. Have a look at the google map for a taste of what your local laundromat has to offer.

View LAUNDRY in a larger map

British Art Show is 7 but we are 15!

Admin — Sun, 01 May 2011 10:53:45 +0000

British Art Show 7 gallery workshop, 08.04.11

Celebrate your age now while you still can!

The British Art Show takes place every 5 years and shows a selection of artists who have made recent and significant contribution to British and international art. BAS7 artists include Charles Avery, Wolfgang Tillmans, Christian Marclay and Juliette Blightman.

Some central themes in the show are histories, place, site and time. I have been leading tours and workshops for BAS7 with an emphasis on artworks that allude to being historical documents. Curated by Lisa La Feurve and Tim Morton, the show almost categorises work in to two categories, work critiquing historical narration and work creating its own historical trajectory all together.

This particular workshop was devised to allow young people visiting the exhibition to make and design their own artwork that would serve as a personal and eventually historic artefact. We kicked off with a collective ‘Birthday card to self’ activity, which then prompted an artwork design session influenced by the many cross-disciplinary approaches to art making in the gallery.

The Movers and the Shakers

Admin — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 21:52:10 +0000

A sketch in planning for my first workshop for MOVE: Choreographing You, a survey of contemporary art encompassing movement and dance at the Hayward Gallery, London.

This formed the first half of a workshop I led for Year 7s from Westminster City School who came to see the MOVE exhibition on a school trip. We then had a go at inventing and pitching ideas for our own social sculptures – making everyday places and situations more fun, exciting and sociable. Top contenders included:

A complete redesign of the London transport system

A flume-style slide down to the maths corridor with a suction function to get you back up again if you’re too lazy to take the stairs

An upside down staircase

Pac-Man Stadium – a stadium built in the playground for playing Pac-Man card game tournaments

MOVE: Choreographing You

Admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 19:40:17 +0000

Today I went to visit MOVE: Choreographing You, the current exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. I have been asked by the Southbank Centre to deliver tours and workshops for this show to schools, teachers and university students, which is fantastic. The exhibition is a survey of contemporary art from the 1960s onwards with dance and movement as the central curatorial theme. The show features some pretty iconic pieces including Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970) and, thanks to Franz West, some rather esoteric dances with mod-rock sculpture.

Franz West, Passstucke (Adaptives) 1975

Much of the work in the MOVE show appears to act as a conduit for communication or a prop for interaction. But I wonder whether this interaction is a good or a bad thing. Why should we? Although some pieces feel gimmicky, like a one-line joke there is a great sense of camaraderie. It’s the kind of place you might expect a staff team building day to take place. This is something that occurred to me as I saw a group of city bankers negotiate crossing from one end of a load of hanging gymnastic hoops to the other after a few post-work pints. Everyone is so talkative. And unlike my previous experiences of gallery attendants, no one tells me off for eating my cereal bar for a bit of mid-exhibition fuel. They are just as much a part of the exhibition as we are.

William Forsythe, The Fact of the Matter, 2009

What we see in the MOVE exhibition from Lygia Clark is the detritus evidence of a by-gone era of early experimental and conceptual art. Lygia Clark and fellow Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica founded the Neo-Concretist movement in the 1960s at a time when artists were breaking into new terrain, collapsing the invisible wall between the artwork and viewer by creating – an altogether new way of experiencing art with the emphasis being the actual interaction with art objects and the people around it.

Lygia Clark, Straight Jacket, 1969

For my workshops I think I’m going to use the work of Lygia Clark (Gestural Communication) and Franz Erhard Walther as a starting point. Their works pose the idea that the physical objects they make are subsidiary to the actual work, but it is only because of them that the work or conversation comes into being.

I’ll check in again to let you know how it goes.

Tuned in Kids, Coachwerks

Admin — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:12:31 +0000

Tuned in Kids, the kids radio project started at the beginning of summer in Brighton with lots of activities from map-making to dancing a landscape. I have been facilitating some of these workshops with the guys at Coachwerks. By the end of the summer we hope to showcase some of the work in a sound and story mash-up!

In the first session the kids customised t-shirts for the volunteers to wear. For inspiration they asked me what my favourite things were. Here I am modeling my t-shirt of chocolate, flowers and music.

Take a listen

Admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:58:59 +0000

After much hard work the London Road Sound Map is here. To find out more visit www.londonrdsounds.co.uk

Sound Maps of London Road

Admin — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:01:42 +0000

Hello. I am currently developing a very exciting community sound mapping project with Matt Weston – Slack Space and Graeme Walker – Coachwerks. The project rolls out in March 2010 as part of Brighton & Hove Adult Learning Festival which is happening as we speak. The festival is maximising on informal learning opportunities in unusual and unlikely locations. Take a look at all the workshops and events you can take part in here.

Find out more about Sound Maps of London Road and visit www.londonrdsounds.co.uk

Esther Springett

Ear Drum at Nuit Blanche White Night

Laundrette Visitors Book for Brighton and Hove

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One day in June

Doing the Rounds

British Art Show is 7 but we are 15!

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