21st September - Fran Allison

Fran Allison trained as a jeweller but what she talked to us about in her lecture was the difference between collaboration and a collective. Basically a collaboration is a group of people working together on an artwork or project and when the work is resolved, authorship belongs to the group as a whole. A collective is more like a group of artists who work in similar concepts or the same space but make their own work individually. Allison raised the issue of a collaborative atmosphere which I found really interesting, how each person has their own ideas and interpretations but they have to fit and be agreed on by the others involved. For example you might have this idea that you really love and want to use but your collaborators might not like it and that would make continuance quite difficult. There is also this issue of authorship, like if a group's work involves audience interaction does that mean every audience member involved claims a share to ownership of the work?

Collaborating doesn't have to be like this of coarse, in a lot of situations it can be about getting help from other artists who have specialties in certain areas that you don't. A successful example of this is Cantilever, a mixed media by Deborah Crowe and Eldon Booth (one is trained as a weaver and one works in moving image).

Allison showed us a lot of groups and I really liked Unnatural/Naturally (Lauren Simeoni & Melinda Young) whose work explores ideas of botany and the body, also finding natural in the unnatural or unnatural in the natural and exploiting and utilising it.

Melinda Young, Fungal, Brooch, 2009, Pink Tourmaline, Artificial Plant Foliage, Marine Ply, 925 Silver, Acrylic Paint.

(www.dhub.org/articles/1233)

This work is an example of a collective as it is Melinda Young's individual work rather than a work made by both artists together.

One of the most famous collaborative groups is the Guerrilla Girls because they assumed the names of dead women artists and wore gorrilla masks in public. Their work uses provocative text, visuals and humour in the service of feminism and social change. They are pretty much the perfect example of collaborative art practice. From their website http://www.guerrillagirls.com/: Fighting discrimination with facts, humour and fake fur which I think is pretty much their approach to making in a nutshell.

The group Allison is a part of is called Weeds, the other members include Andrea Daly, Shelley Norton and Lisa Walker. After Bone. Stone. Shell allowed belief that these are the materials and this is the culture of New Zealand jewellery, Allison got together with these artists to change this view. They want to represent ALL the cultures NZ has today and they do that by working with all kinds of materials. Most of their work involves material exploration around domesticity. "For me, 'Weeds' is a platform for experimentation. Each 'weed' is different from the one before, and each could be cultivated into a body of work. Each piece is a new beginning, an exploration into new materials sourced from the domestic urban environment. The pieces explore the decorative possibilities of op shop discoveries, all containing previous histories and meanings." - Fran Allison

(www.quoil.co.nz/artists/fran_allison/)

Basically what she is saying is their work involves experimenting with found materials, domestic materials and these can be developed and re-worked, the reading or meaning of an object originally can be changed or continued in an artwork.

In her lecture she talked about this work or one very similar:

Ceremonial Daisy Chain

which is made from doilies, she talked about how she bought them from an op shop because she liked how they had previous lives. They used to belong to someone and they served a certain purpose but when she creates work out of them she is continuing their story and she can control the reading of the work she makes.

photo:(www.masterworksgallery.com/index.cfm?action=artists&page=work&artist_id=86&work_id=510)

Her individual work is inspired by ideas of found or discarded objects, of re-formatting and past histories. She likes to use pre-existing objects and mess with their original reading, they may start out as having a physical or decorative function and end up on the body as decorative fashion or jewellery objects but keep their original appeal about them.

photo:(www.fingers.co.nz/exhibitors/Allison_weeds_05.htm)