Mine Searching Yours Podcast: Recent Episodes
Forma Arts and Media
After a year of radical challenges, we’ve all shared periods of isolation, separating us from friends and loved ones, and resetting the ways in which we keep meaningfully connected. Mine Searching Yours is a publishing project borne out of this distance — it seeks to bring us together, one page at a time.The brief was simple. Forma invited 15 artists and writers to start a conversation with a peer and explore what might come of this correspondence. Drawing inspiration from mail art projects that foreground printed matter, correspondence and exchange as a form of artistic creation, the resulting collaborations were thoughtfully gathered together by designer Mathias Clottu, then sent to friends and colleagues in late 2020. Today we continue this exchange, by hosting paired artists from the project for a series of recorded discussions.
In this episode Forma's Chris Rawcliffe speaks to Alice Hattrick, Crabtree & Evans and Gareth Bell-Jones from Flat Time House.
For their contribution to Mine Searching Yours, titled A particularly pernicious weed, Alice, Julia and Will collaborated on a series of four botanical pressings presented alongside a new text by Alice. It references their concurrent collaboration on a major new project for Flat Time House’s garden during which they will ‘excavate’ the John Latham archive, as well as the garden itself, to consider the conceptual and material aspects of the site.
In his younger days Latham (described once as "a particularly pernicious weed") was a market gardener and his lifelong passion for gardening is demonstrated by the integration of a conservatory into the studio that he built for himself at Flat Time House in 1985.
Alongside research into Latham and the site, the trio will consider permaculture, care, community, collective action, deep time, and issues of classification. They will use Latham's thinking on making and living, and his inquiry into time and ecology, to investigate the relationship of the garden and botany to authority and power.
Alice Hattrick is a writer and producer based in London. Her book on unexplained illness, intimacy and mother-daughter relationships, titled Ill Feelings, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in August 2021. https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/ill-feelings
Julia Crabtree and William Evans are artists living and working in London. For over 15 years they have been collaborating together, working mainly in sculpture and large gallery installations. https://crabtreeandevans.co.uk/
Gareth Bell-Jones is the Director and Curator of Flat Time House, a gallery, education space and archive located in the former home of artist John Latham, in Peckham in South East London. The artists took advantage of my invitation to collaborate during the pandemic to develop their research project into a garden commission for Flat Time House.
Our theme music for the series is courtesy of Endgame.
To learn more about Mine Searching Yours or to purchase a copy visit our website.
In this episode, Leila Hasham speaks with artist Erica Baum, and author and poet Idra Novey. Erica is known for her photographic practice, using enigmatic close-up images of books, newspapers, library indexes and sewing patterns to reveal an unexpected poetry in the language of everyday life. Idra likewise works across the complexities of language as a poet, translator and author. Her most recent novel, Those Who Knew was a finalist for the 2019 Clark Fiction Prize and a New York Times Editors’ Choice.
Having collaborated already in the past, I was keen for Erica and Idra to revisit their creative correspondence for the context of Mine Searching Yours, being drawn in particular to Erica’s use of obsolete 20th century media, as we experienced an oversaturation of digital screen time under lockdown. We discuss their collaboration, life in New York over the past year, and the creative landscape of a post-Covid world.
Our theme music for the series is courtesy of Endgame.
To learn more about Mine Searching Yours or to purchase a copy visit our website: forma.org.uk/
In this episode Forma's Caroline Heron speaks with London-based artists Gery Georgieva and Kasia Wozniak. For their contribution Mine Searching Yours, the pair collaborated on a photoshoot in the final weeks of Gery’s pregnancy. The work took place in the courtyard of Kasia’s studio to the backdrop of Gery’s Full Bodied Gentle Woman. We meet in person at Peacock Yard to discuss dealing with uncertainty, the body as an archive and time in different places.
Gery is an artist working in video, musical collaboration, performance and installation. Through a process of performative self-staging and improvisation, she uses the immediacy of her own body as material to consider the construction of taste, personal empowerment and cultural configuration. @_gery_georgieva, http://gerygeorgieva.com/
Kasia is a photographer and friend, working with predominantly C19th Wet Plate Collodion techniques. Her work explores the idea of photographic truth, tension and control. Further she is interested in the act of making, dissolving and the deterioration of the photographic image. @kasiawozniak, https://www.kasiaw.com/
Our theme music for the series is courtesy of Endgame.
To learn more about Mine Searching Yoursor to purchase a copy visit our website.