Artists at Work \ Rules and Regs (2009)

AND and the Bluecoat teamed up to work with three artists, selected for their interest in live art, expanded cinema and leftfield approaches to new media, for a specially tailored Rules and Regs residency. Rules and Regs was a national development initiative in which artists create new work in response to rules tailored to challenge their usual ways of working. Artists at Work was night of live performance, interventions into new media and re-imagined analogue strategies. Featured artists were: Rod Maclachlan, Gordon McKenna and Peader Kirk.

The Bluecoat and AND collaboration stemmed from a shared interested in artists working in between and at the edges of their disciplines. The Bluecoat and AND are particularly keen to help develop artists working in multimedia, digital media, expanded cinema and projection who are excited by the prospect of moving their practice into a more performative arena. During the development period artists had support from curators Richard Kingdom (Bluecoat Performance Programmer) and Kate Taylor (former AND Festival Director 2009).

The selected artists:

Rod Maclachlan
Maclachlan achieves stunning projections through intentionally crude kinetic assemblages, regularly accompanying musicians such as Leaf record’s Murcof. His live presence on stage is, as Fact magazine put it, as ‘a tall mad professor type’ at the controls of his Heath Robinson devices.

Gordon Mckenna
Mckenna’s fascination with ‘dematerialisation’ – the changing perception of human presence and material environment in an increasingly digital age – led him towards action-generated film works where the laborious processes of their making tempt the audience to doubt the reality of what they are seeing.

Peader Kirk
Shaped by material and social architecture, drawing on biography and structured around compositional patterns, Kirk’s performances balance the familiar with the performed to create a heightened awareness of the social narratives woven through our daily lives.

Exchange, Rod Maclachlan – Inbetween Time Festival, Arnolfini, Bristol, 2010. Developed with the support of Rules & Regs, Abandon Normal Devices Festival and The Bluecoat.