Friday, 16 November 2012

Elizabeth Price talk at Tate Britain


I had seen Elizabeth Price's work at Frieze - West Hinder- and had both enjoyed and fully understood the film, and have seen, a number of times, her Turner Prize exhibition piece at Tate Britain , The Woolworth's Choir of 1979, which intrigued me but I had struggled to fully understand how three distinct subjects, the architecture of a church and the Quire, The Shangri-La's singing Dancing in the Street and the Manchester Woolworth's fire of 1979, linked together  - both in the artists mind and what clues there were for the viewer.
Her interview relating to the show at the Baltic explains some of this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7NnbXjJr8o

The talk itself was absorbing and stimulating. As a 47 year old artist, she seems to be totally resolved as to what her practice is and how her final works capture what she is wanting to say. Her knowledge and use of the english language was inspiring - I will work on my own delivery of describing my work to capture some of her control and precision of vocabulary.
She makes clear decisions as to how much of the making process is included in the film, and gave an insight into her creative process when she gets bored with knowing the outcome - she goes for a walk and picks up boos that may lead her in a new direction of enquiry.
The way she thinks of her photo, video, audio and text collection as an active archive to be data mined through digital film editing software was insightful and allowed her very quickly to see if one piece worked well next to another piece. All the time she is looking for connections that do not obviously exist or appear.
She is very didactic in her use of text and creates drama through introduction of some form of dance allied to strong contemporary music ie the Buzzcocks, Aha and Genesis - again selected from her personal archive.

her final comment

Art is about Invention.




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