We Contain Multitudes

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey

A reflection on our connection as artists to Arts House 

A vital thing about being an independent artist for the long haul is the relationships with the people who make art, make art possible and respond to art. In this piece of writing, through remembering the work we have made at Arts House over the last 15 years, we want to draw attention to the people who support, scaffold, elevate and connect. Because of the way Arts House sits in a local council ecology, the people within the structures are often unacknowledged.

We have tried here to list the projects that we have presented and been part of at Arts House over the last 15 years or so, and where memory allows, to include the producers, production teams, documenters, alongside the artists. As part of this ecology, we have been the audience: at development showings, at opening nights, in the middle of seasons, sometimes twice. Practice leaks, and being able to soak in, and respond to other people’s work has helped us all to be the cultural antennas we need to be..

A list of work led by us, or including us, or experienced by us.
Of Art works, or art work.
Always ephemeral, with trails of residue that we couldn’t predict.
Or the developments that allowed a flow of ideas, without production outcomes, but whose residues linger in our own, and our colleagues’ practices.

How Arts House works. Or art works.
It reads the direction of the wind, an antenna to the granularities of practised culture/lived experience.
A lens on politics without being the politics.
A lens on activism, or activists, without being the activism.
A courage to believe that unheard voices and unseen faces must enter the halls of culture and run the place.
Leaning into the wind, and its opportunity to take us somewhere new, or needed, or unheard/unseen/unrealised.
Art Works as beacons for possibility.
The experiment.
The springboard to new relationships, new places, new art.

The scaffolds
Cash. Resource. Belief. Trusting support. Relationship. Cash. Audience.
Testing. Cash. Matchmaking. Failure.
We dipped in and out, not always for the cash.
Sometimes it was our time. Sometimes not.
Not generational, but more like casting for inclusion
The happy delirium of unexpected new encounters.

The space
From wide bluestone floors and blackout space of scale at the Meat Market
To concentrated engagement in a frankly absurd colonial Town Hall architecture, where we knew where the staff were, and could knock on a door or even enter without knocking.
The weird overlay of settler heritage, cheese platters and audience surveys

An incomplete list:
A footballer dances.
Aseel’s voice.
A person moves deliciously and very slowly around a large space.
A lack of weddings.
A show about funerals.
A notoriously bad party.
The luscious era of many well-tended indoor plants (thank you Trudy)
Thrilling to language or in thrall to the sensational non-verbal.
One star reviews and glorious failure.
The moment before the applause starts.
Failing to avoid dairy.
A madness to the House.
A river of bees and a dreaming space.

The trajectory of projects
In 2012, we were commissioned by Arts House to create Gauge, an interactive sound work that connected to the weather. While the Gauge season was running, we hosted within the installation a series called Going Nowhere. While our installation was closed, their work came alive. Together with Angharad we thought of this as nestling. Angharad encouraged us to put Gauge forward to APAM: it was a very large work. APAM accepted our work as a large scale pitch, and on the last day we gave a pitch presentation. The international programmer from Brighton Festival was there, and invited us to present at Brighton. This first presentation led to Brighton Festival commissioning and presenting our work over the following ten years, building a bridge for us into presenting complex sound and site works in the UK and EU at many festivals.

So, a three week presentation in one venue led to an ongoing international practice over many years. Not just for us. Our work, everyone’s work, connects people, so as part of that we all bring other artists and audiences with us.

Imagine if Arts House had not been here.

This municipal anomaly
Projecting onto the world

You may not notice it building
Inside a building

—–

*We wrote this without an intersection with artificial intelligence, despite working with it since 2015. It is an incomplete, unreliable memory based collection. It’s also a live document. If you are missing from this list and want to be included, please let us know and we can add your name in.

Image Credit: Stampede the Stampede, Tim Darbyshire, 2015. Photo by Gregory Lorenzutti
Image Description: A person appears floating against a black background. They are horizontal, with their torso and face covered by a large rocky object.