In our Spring 2013 brochure we indicated that two of Warboys’ films, Stone Throat (2011) and Pageant Roll (2012) would be included in the exhibition. As planning progressed, the decision was taken not to feature these works, but they can now be viewed here and on our Vimeo page for the duration of the exhibition. Jessica Warboys, Pageant Roll (2011) Jessica ... read on →

Artist, writer and curator Lucy Reynolds has been invited to select moving image works submitted by Spike Island studio holders and members of Spike Associates for this year’s Open Screening Area. The chosen videos and films move between technological performance to camera, documentation of live works, glimpses of the everyday and surreal gardening advice. Katie Davies, Looking for Abraham (2005) Filmed in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Looking for Abraham is a four-minute ... read on →

We look forward to welcoming you this weekend to our annual Open, an opportunity to explore the work that is made, exhibited and discussed here throughout the year by artists, designers and audiences. Below are just a few highlights that you can expect to find this weekend; take a look at the event page to view the whole programme. No matter what you see ... read on →

Our first experiment in crowd funding, undertaken with artist Melissa Gordon, has been a success! With the support of 58 generous backers, we not only reached but exceeded our goal of £4000, ending with a final total of £4,478.  The money raised will contribute towards Melissa's residency at Spike Print Studio, starting next week and running through the end of May. The funds will cover materials as well as travel and ... read on →

Members of Spike Associates have been invited to undertake a series of residencies in the Curfew Tower, a unique location in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. Read more about the residencies. Marie Toseland, who is based in a studio here at Spike Island and is also a member of Spike Associates, followed Holly Corfield Carr in the February slot. She shared ... read on →

We’re excited to share with you a new experiment in crowd funding that we’re undertaking with artist Melissa Gordon ahead of her exhibition Material Evidence, which opens here at Spike Island on 5 July. If you’re not familiar with Melissa’s work, she’s an American-born, London-based artist who has exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. Her work as a painter and printmaker follows the cyclical relationship between surface and ... read on →

To coincide with our Winter 2013 exhibitions, we are pleased to launch two new Spike Island Editions by Becky Beasley and Uriel Orlow. These beautiful limited editions offer the opportunity to own original artworks at an affordable price, and all proceeds from the sale of editions go to support Spike Island's exhibition programme. Uriel Orlow, Porous Present (#1)(2013) This image was taken by Uriel Orlow in 2009 during research in ... read on →

This collection of materials has been compiled by artist Uriel Orlow for anyone who would like to investigate further the themes and issues of his exhibition Back to Back. The list features a broad range of subject matter and formats that have informed his thinking, from history and architecture to memoir, poetry and cinema. Robert Bevan The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War Fethiye Çetin My Grandmother ... read on →

Becky Beasley is a voracious reader, and she draws from a range of literary writers and texts, as well as canonical works of art and the history of photography, in making her work. The title of her current exhibition, Spring Rain, is taken from a short story by Bernard Malamud, for example.  The artist has suggested the following texts for those who would like to dig deeper into her interests ... read on →

Uriel Orlow's new exhibition Back to Back opens here on Friday, marking the first time he's shown recent films Remnants of the Future (2010–2012) and Plans for the Past (2011–2012) together in the UK.  Both films centre on towns called Mush – one in Armenia and one in Turkey. Here Orlow discusses what drew him to these locations and how the projects relate to concerns in his wider practice about history, memory, representation and ... read on →

Last week's One Night Stand event was the last in a series of three evenings throughout the autumn that explored the grey areas between visual art and other contemporary practices: moving image, literature and performance. One Night Stand: Performance featured visual artists and writers who use performance in their work as well as live art and theatre makers. Though their approaches differed, contributors shared overlapping interests, for example in the ... read on →

Earlier this month we hosted One Night Stand: Readings, a salon evening featuring artists and writers who move across boundaries and genre. From a poet to a visual artist via a live performer with a sideline in fiction and a novelist who also produces plays, the event traced the many ways in which language is being used in contemporary creative practices. Each invited ... read on →

Ivan Seal’s work documents a cryptic shadow world in which the familiar is made tantalisingly strange. The artist works quickly from memory to produce his enigmatic paintings, pulling in fragments of narratives, shapes, textures and colours that have made an impression; titles and audio pieces are often composed by randomly generating or shuffling text with a computer programme. Though his work doesn’t refer directly to any specific sources, Ivan has ... read on →

Artist Ivan Seal is at Spike Island this week to install his solo exhibition In Here Stands It, which opens on Friday evening. He sat down with director Helen Legg last night for a conversation on humour, language and “hairy sticks”. An excerpt from the interview will be used in the gallery guide, but you can listen to the whole thing here. read on →

Each year Spike Island works with the University of the West of England and the University of Falmouth to identify and support promising graduates through an open call to their students. Joining us this month to begin their 2012 Spike Island Graduate Fellowships are Elisa Juncosa Umaran from Falmouth for three months and Sebastian Jefford and Menna Cominetti from UWE for a full year.  Each receives working space in our ... read on →

Rogue Game brings together three different sports staged simultaneously in the same arena, with each game played according to its own rules. In doing so, Rogue Game constructs a setting that gives rise to moments of improvisation, subversion, ingenuity and chance. These clips are edits of footage captured during the Rogue Game, First Play live matches. As the games unfolded, they were streamed into the adjacent gallery ... read on →

Last week Bristol-based artist cooperative the Collect hosted an evening of fun and games, exploration and experimentation. Bringing together games made by and inspired by artists, the Artists' Games Night featured dice games, board games, video games, drawing games and word games, plus a special Fluxus-style table tennis challenge. → Download the programme notes read on →

Sophie Warren, Jonathan Mosley and Can Altay share a selection of the texts that have inspired and informed their ongoing project Rogue Game. Warren and Altay are artists and Mosley is an architect, and these books and articles represent their broad inquiry into game theory, urban planning, performance, literature and cinema. Visitors are invited to peruse these materials in the Resource Area in Gallery 2 during opening hours. Claire ... read on →

Rogue Game kicked off on Friday evening with a live football-volleyball-basketball match and these photos, taken by Max McClure, show the transformation of the gallery into a hybrid sports zone. In addition to the game, the exhibition features text pieces, video, photography and installation. Proposition No. 25 invites visitors to run a circuit in the gallery, stopping periodically to “play dead”, while Rogue Game Replay ... read on →

Berlin-based British artist Ivan Seal is known for his ambiguous and slightly odd still life paintings, but he has also worked with sound for many years, using computers to generate aleatoric compositions. In this new spoken word piece, recorded exclusively for Spike Island ahead of his exhibition In Here Stands It which opens on 20 October, Seal exercises the words in the show's title, enabling new meanings and associations ... read on →

Spike Island and artists Jonathan Mosley, Sophie Warren and Can Altay are looking for video editors and camera operators to collaborate on their project, Rogue Game, which runs from 7 to 30 September. This is an exciting opportunity to play a key role in this live exhibition. Rogue Game brings together three different sports staged simultaneously in the same arena – a gallery converted into a multi-purpose sports hall ... read on →

As part of her contribution to Pull Everything Out, artist Ciara Phillips set up a working studio in the front gallery where she was based throughout July. Though Phillips has now returned to Glasgow, the workshop remains as it was during the residency, with inspiration and source materials pinned to the walls and ink and screens set out on the tables. → Read more about Phillips’ workshop and ... read on →

Ciara Phillips and Melissa Gordon joined Spike Island’s director Helen Legg and curator Marie-Anne McQuay on Tuesday 17 July 2012 to discuss their practices and processes. For both artists, printmaking and collaborative methods of production are central to the way the make art. As part of our exhibition Pull Everything Out, Phillips set up a screenprinting studio in the gallery where she worked with ... read on →

As part of our current exhibition Pull Everything Out, artist Ciara Phillips is working from a studio set up in the gallery for the month of July, collaborating with other artists and designers. Members of Glasgow-based Poster Club were here last week, Melissa Gordon is here this week, and Fraser Muggeridge and Jono Lewarne will be here later in the month. The Workshop is set up in the front ... read on →

Calling all sports enthusiasts! For three weeks this September, we will stage Rogue Game, a live exhibition that transports the architecture, tactics and actions of a multipurpose sports hall into Spike Island. This ongoing project by artist/architect collaboration Sophie Warren and Jonathan Mosley with Can Altay starts with a simple premise: the coloured lines of the courts are marked out in the gallery where three different games are played ... read on →

Want to learn more about the ideas and processes behind our current exhibitions Pull Everything Out and The Struggle Against Ourselves? These books have been selected by artists Ciara Phillips and Jesse Jones with input from Spike Island's director Helen Legg and curator Marie-Anne McQuay. Some are texts that have directly influenced the artists, while others give an introduction to the cultural and historical movements that inform the work. Visitors ... read on →

Starting next week and running throughout the summer, Spike Island presents a series of one night pop-up exhibitions selected and organised by representatives of our artistic community in a new temporary gallery. Each evening features a selection of pieces or project by one of the building’s groups who are taking an experimental, collaborative approach to using the space. This offers you an opportunity to see the artists’ work in a ... read on →

Dublin-based artist Jesse Jones visited this week ahead of her exhibition The Struggle Against Ourselves which opens here on 30 June. Here she discusses the way in which her film draws a connection between the rigorous gestures of Russian theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and the grand Hollywood spectacle of Busby Berkeley in the 1920s. read on →

Alias – a platform built by artists for artists for the development of artist-led groups in the South West – offers free taster advisory sessions for creative practitioners on Tuesday 29 May. These one-to-one meetings with Sovay Berriman can cover anything that an independent project at any stage of its development might need: funding advice, organisational review, marketing, networking, critical feedback or just a sounding board. Sessions are 20 ... read on →

As part of the Happenstance project, current creative technologist in residence Kevin Walker invited Spike Island artists, designers and staff to contribute a postcard design to Wish You Were Here, an interactive installation for the Spike Island Open. Within just a few days, we had the following beautiful cards with drawings, prints, photos and digital designs. Amy Mason, former Spike Island writer in residence, then wrote a non-linear ... read on →

As part of this year's Spike Island Open we have invited studio holders and members of Spike Associates to submit recent video works, reflecting the rich range of moving image work produced by the artistic community here. The artists variously explore analogue film's relationship to sculpture, live performative actions to camera and the influence of other genres on Video Art, such as science fiction cinema, theatrical melodrama ... read on →

The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image is a collection of newly commissioned texts that explore the relationship between the moving image, performance and theatricality in recent contemporary art practice. Edited by Bridget Crone and published by Picture This with Bridget Crone/Plenty Projects, the book is launched with a programme of performances during the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images, 23 to 27 May. To celebrate the launch of ... read on →

The following publications have been selected by our programme team and the artists to provide further information about our current exhibitions. These offer art historical, cultural and theoretical context to the works and their production. Dewar & Gicquel, Crêpe Suzette The Craftsman, Richard Sennett Mason Massacre, Dewar & Gicquel The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade, John Roberts Take Place: Photography and ... read on →

Artist and Spike Island studio holder Matt Davies has created a stunning audio portrait of Haroon Mirza's exhibition. Using a directional microphone and digital recorder, Davies walks through the show, capturing the sounds of individual pieces along the way. This saturation of sound highlights the audio content of the exhibition, exposing the quieter sounds within the space, such as the hum emitting from the various amps, TVs and other electrical ... read on →

If you can't make it down to our exhibitions resource area but would like to learn more about the work in our winter exhibitions, these titles have been suggested by artists Haroon Mirza and Suzanne Mooney. Haroon Mirza, /|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/| Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (ed.) British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton (ed). ... read on →

Big congratulations to artist Ruth Claxton who won the 2012 Arts Foundation Award for Sculpture last night. Claxton spent time at Spike Island in 2007 through the Arts Council England: South West Residency. Her three months here formed part of the research phase in the development of a major body of work, Lands End. The exhibition opened at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in April 2007 and was ... read on →

Sound Spill is part of a wider body of research undertaken by Haroon Mirza with curator Thom O’Nions and artist Richard Sides. They are interested in the curatorial problem of sound spill, when the audio from one artwork overlaps with that of another in a gallery setting. By and large, efforts are made to minimise sounds mixing in this way. This, to some degree, invariably fails. Artworks with an element ... read on →