Eggebert-and-Gould

‘Transmission: Speaking and Listening' is a publication developed from an annual lecture series organised by the School of Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam University in collaboration with the Site Gallery.

'Leading and emerging artists from the UK and abroad are invited to discuss their work in relation to a particular theme with an audience of students and the public. The discussions, along with examples of the artists’ work and specially commissioned essays, are published each year and make a significant contribution to current debate about artistic practice.’ (Kivland, Sanderson and Cocker 2004)

We were invited to participate under the theme of Responsibility as an exploration of the ideology of artistic production. We presented a paper, ‘How to Speak? Drawing, Discussion, and Discourse’, on our collaborative practice in which terms of responsibility and irresponsibility were explored in relation to the ideas of responding to another, an ethical relation to the other, and the taking and giving of responsibility as in the assumption of some type of moral authority.

We discussed strategies for working (particularly as a response to institutional contexts) against the privatisation of experience; how we are constituted through our access to discourse, and how an art practice as narrative or conversation might function to bring the voice of the individual into the presence of others; how agency in the public realm through art practice can reveal how we are culturally and socially placed.

The resulting panel discussion that followed our talk forms the chapter ‘Eggebert-and-Gould’.

Anne Eggebert

Research Interests

Eggebert's site-specific and situated practice, uses video, photography, drawing and installation to explore national cultural identity and the articulation of landscape.

Current Research

Eggebert's practice explores the complexities of cultural identity, particularly the deconstruction of the notion of Englishness. Located within the framework of site-specific and situated practice, and using video, photography, drawing and installation, her work critiques the role of authoritative devices in the construction and projection of national cultural identity.

Eggebert is developing a body of work that explores the concept of the 'betweeness of place' (Entrikin 1991) and our facility in the 21stC to describe landscape. Key to this research are the ideas of place as anecdotal and how our understanding of place can both be disrupted and enhanced through the process of teletechnologies (Virilio 2006) i.e. through speed and slowness - and the impact of these on the imagining of nature and the cultural articulation of landscape. How the distinction between finding and losing one's sense of place might be blurred is key to her reinterrogation of landscape.

Eggebert's recent video work Chigwell Row Wood for Border Dialogues (the second of her Epping Forest Arts and ACE funded commissions) reveals what the woodland means to local people, and place as spatio-temporal event (Massey 2005). Members of the local community - those who use and shape the forest - were asked to describe their landscape. Most struggle to describe the forest, the topographical features, the aesthetic and material nature of the woodland, and turn to their narratives revealing how they and others activate the space.

The first of these EFA commissions, Matching Green, asked community members of a rural Essex village to describe their landscape - the village green. Similarly they turn to the anecdotal. The green, a space of soft edges, is revealed as a theatre of change and, paradoxically, permanence - the precious and fragile heart of the village.

Eggebert has shown at Aine Art Gallery, Finland, at Kettle's Yard and Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (in collaboration with Julian Walker), the Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, Southampton City Art Gallery, Tate St Ives, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, and RCA. She studied Critical Fine Art Practice at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and MAFA Media at the Slade and now teaches at Central Saint Martins.

Polly Gould

Research Interests

Landscape and the sublime
Contemporary fine art
Drawing
Performance and narratives
Public art and remembrance
Mourning and Melancholia in the arts
Relating theory to practice and the visual to the verbal.
Antarctica
Death
Representations of nature

Current Research

I work with drawing, sound, video and performance. I combine drawing and writing in installation works that also examine the narrative urge in our lives; the things we say to each other, the way we end up quoting favourite books, living our lives like scenes from films, or finding the words of a popular song to do our talking for us. I explore the 'writing oneself backwards' of autobiography and the work of memory. My work is concerned with our relationships as speaking subjects exploring questions of voice, power and desire, and presented in a live form as performance lectures of performance video works. I was short-listed for Jerwood Drawing Prize 2007, and had my short story included in The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B, a collection of fiction by contemporary British artists, in 2006.
I also collaborate with Anne Eggebert as Eggebert and Gould. We work on public art commissions, site-specific works and exhibition curation. We engage with the history and architecture of a place in order to uncover forgotten stories. We are currently researching Landscape and Anxiety in contemporary fine art practice with the view to developing a touring exhibition. We are interested in sustainability, representations of nature and landscape, and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

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