Higgins is currently undertaking a 3year NESTA fellowship and on sabbatical leave from Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design, UK, where he was joint course leader of the BA Hons Fine Art programme.
What is unloud?
I am currently exploring how physical and emotional spaces within visual culture might be a test site for the exploration of both personal and shared imaginative alternatives. What critical approaches might be useful in order to understand what needs to be done in trying to re-imagine particular preconceptions about our relationship to people, ideas and cultures?
The workshop would be broken down into short sections:
Ideas of negotiation, reception and dialogue as conditions of critical practice
The workshop would use inter-related video and still images as a means to explore these ideas, speculative questions and critical methods. I will run all these images from dvd.
Northern Russia has been described as being shrouded in a rare serene stillness and beauty undermined by the decaying presence of evil. As I stepped off the plane on SolovkiIsland in North Russia in December 2004 I experienced a sudden and significant shift in understanding about my cultural place in the world. Solovki is a remote archipelago in North Russia . It is a UNESCO world heritage site, a founding centre for Russian Orthodoxy and the site of Stalin’s first and largest gulag complex made famous by Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago”. Since then I have made 6 visits in winter and summer and have been developing a body of work collectively titled Unloud. I see this as an interrelated set of activities consisting of painting, drawing, texts and video. These elements are further explored through events: exhibition, talks, workshops, teaching and publication. I see this as part love story, part ghost story, part fact, part fiction, part narrative, part reportage and almost a painted film, something that might be linking fact or the imaginary, creating conditions that perhaps temporarily suspends us between those two poles.
The whole activity is lead by 3 prosaic questions: What is painting? What is a painting? What do I need in order to make a painting? I see painting as my most relevant language of creative invention, a marriage of craft and imagination, thought and action, an activity of imaginative possibilities inscribed with the autobiographical. The current series of 1600 paintings form a collective sequence, each painting measuring 10 x 7 cm . The use of video acts as both information for the paintings and also as potential time based reportage. I see drawing as a testing ground and activity of accumulated touches, currently informed by archival material from Solovki. Finally I see the use of text as an exploration of ideas and narratives of the gaps between the paintings, drawings and video.
For me the Solovki islands are a compelling and unique place of concentrated social and political history that touch not just my own but wider shared histories. It is for me a place of limits or an extreme situation incorporating the climate extremes, geographical extremes, extremes of faith, punishment, beauty and fantasy. In particular I am concerned with exploring ideas of testimony and social memory and to try and find the means to visualise how the personal and the historical meet.
If we value art in terms of it creating both possibility and free thought in the viewer, then what becomes vital to me is access to the work or to the physical and emotional sites that might realise this potential. It is also important for me to understand the notion of possibility not as a fixed condition but a slippery and changeable state made up of spatial, temporal and relational elements. By “possibility” I simply mean the space to think about the world differently. The format of Unloud is being constructed in such a way as to address and accommodate what I feel needs to be done in this respect. How far can the field of visual culture or art be a test site for the exploration of critical and imaginative alternatives and to try to re-imagine preconceptions about people, ideas and cultures? In doing so I want to create the circumstances in which people could question or explore their own relationship to such extreme conditions, histories and narratives. The possibility to have a small part to play in the emerging narrative speculations, regarding our current time are a major critical motivation for unloud.
” The mosaic-like walls of multiple images come across as convincing as documentary fact and as haunting as imaginative fiction.” Robert Clark, Unloud preview, The Guardian Newspaper. 11.11.06
I have lived and worked as an artist in Sheffield , UK since 1990. Since 1989 I have been exhibiting in an on-going programme of individual, group and curated exhibitions nationally and internationally.
Currently undertaking a 3year NESTA fellowship and on sabbatical leave from Nottingham Trent University School of Art and Design , UK , where I was joint course leader of the BA Hons Fine Art programme.
