Electric Egg’s new experimental commission

From Electric Egg:

Production is well underway on a new and exciting piece of experimental moving-image work. The work is being created for the craft exhibition “Beauty is the First Test” curated by Liz Cooper and will soon be exhibited at the National Centre for Craft and Design (NCCD) in Sleaford Lincolnshire.

To date we have completed filming all five artists, weaver Margo Selby, basketry artist Stella Harding, furniture maker David Gates and two lace-makers Carol Quarini and Gail Baxter. Each of the shoots has taken place in the south of England at the artists’ own workshop spaces, taking us to Kent, London and Oxfordshire. Each shoot has been an interesting learning process as we shun our usual working methods in our approach to these artists. This will make for a very interesting, and we think liberating, editing process as we seek to explore the artists and their work in a non-narrative, conceptual way.

The exhibition, which explores the mathematical principles intrinsic within the work of a series of artists, opened at the Pump House Gallery in London last year. The success of the exhibition has led to the exhibition expanding, with five additional artists being profiled as case studies. As part of this expansion, Electric Egg were approached by the curator to create an artistic response to these case studies in a piece of conceptual moving-image.

In this, our first piece of work directly funded by the Arts Council of England (via their Grants for the Arts scheme), we are seeking to explore the work and methodologies of the five artists working within these different mediums of craft and design and to examine how mathematics shapes and forms their practice. The work is currently being produced in a way that marks a stark departure from approaches we have used before. This film will be highly experimental, non-narrative and deal with the concepts and inherent mathematics of the work of the five artists. The film will feature the practitioners in a dialogue comparing and contrasting their works and exploring the many common themes and methodologies we have uncovered during our research.

The work is due for completion in mid May and will be added to the exhibition at the NCCD in Sleaford which opens on the 27th of April until the 30th of June before moving to the Bilston Craft Gallery in Wolverhampton from 6th September 2013 to 2nd of November and Platform Gallery in Clitheroe from 16th January to 19th of April 2014.