I’m very pleased to have been selected for a writing commission by Salt Road, run by artists, curators and researchers Sally Payen and Jaime Jackson.
For their Outrider project, Salt Road is working in partnership with Herefordshire Council, having received an Arts Council England Grants for Arts Libraries Fund bid 2014/15. The Outrider project has commissioned artists to make work taking as a starting point the Hereford-based Alfred Watkins collection of books and glass-plated photographs relating to bees and the environment.
One of the Alfred Watkins bee keeping photographs © Hereford Museum and Library
The other artists selected for commissions include Becca Harris, who will also be responding in writing, Megan Powell, Elizabeth Bond, Jane Tudge, Cath Keay and Ron Haselden.
For my commission, I intend to explore the ways in which photographs in the Watkins Collection might serve as moments of capture, not to freeze or solidify a subject, but rather to animate it into a living, breathing image. In such photographs, the viewer feels inclined to reach out and touch, to break through the surface of the photograph, deriving a haptic pleasure from consuming images.
Another of the Alfred Watkins bee keeping photographs © Hereford Museum and Library
The Outrider exhibition will tour to The Woolhope Room, Hereford; The Commandery, Worcester; Winterbourne House and Gardens, Birmingham, and Haden Hill House Museum and Art Gallery, Sandwell beginning September 2014. The artist commissions will become part of the permanent collection of Hereford Library and the Hereford Museum Service, and there will be a series of workshops and events.
http://outriderblog.wordpress.com/
http://www.saltroad.org.uk/pages/Current_projects.html
Anneka French 