CREATIVE CITY SUMMIT

Join us for the Creative City Network of Canada Summit in Hamilton this week! We will be participating as both keynote speakers and in the Peer-to-Peer Presentations!

For more information click here.

VIDEO UPDATE

We are working on a series of videos to share the innovative working process of WATERSHED+. For this first video city managers and engineers of this City of Calgary Business Unit talk about the ground-level integration of professional contemporary artists in their day-to-day working process:

A Walk at the Edge of the World

A Walk at the Edge of the World is touring again this summer. We worked on this last year with director Nicholas Bone and performer Ian Cameron. More information to come!


A Walk at the Edge of the World - trailer from Magnetic North on Vimeo.

CREATIVE CITY SUMMIT, HAMILTON 2014

Just confirmed we are Keynote Speakers for Creative City Network of Canada Summit in Hamilton, Ontario from June 11-13 and also taking part in the Public Art Round Table and panel discussions.  We are delighted to be invited and hope to see you there!

Bristol Promenade Update

Our project for the end of the Brunel Mile in Bristol is near completion and here are a few more pictures of the progress!

It started life as an exploration of spaces and planes defining a public space, and later morphed into a design responding more precisely to the particular man-made conditions to create a landscape specific to the space.

Photo Credit Cullinan Studios

Photo Credit Cullinan Studios

Photo Credit Cullinan Studios

The final design is a boardwalk promenade space along a meadowy landscape fed by the runoff rainwater from the adjacent building. In collaboration with Cullinan Studio Architects and Grants Associates the journey of the rainwater is celebrated with the visible drain pipes, collection dishes and open rills distributing the water onto the grassland slope.
The different growing conditions (slope, orientation, rainwater runoff) are highlighted by the use of a variety of biodiversity and habitats (grasses, damp grassland, marginal vegetation and woodland groundcover). Combined with these conditions the experience of the harbour side (ruderal plants and riparian habitat) is drawn up into the Promenade.


This project was commissioned by Crest Nicholson Regeneration as part of the Harbourside development.

This week's talks

The first one is the Watershed+ artist in residence Rachel Duckhouse who will be talking about her work with the City of Calgary's Watershed + program. She will be joined for the talk by Twyla Hutchison, a Water Resources Engineer with Infrastructure Planning at the City of Calgary. Twyla is involved with river monitoring and forecasting, emergency response planning, design of erosion control and emergency mitigation as well as other development in the river valley. Together they will talk about Rachel’s work, data representation, collaboration between engineers and artists and complementarities of disciplines.

Date: Thursday, October 24
Time: 6:00-8:00 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Environmental Design
Kasian Gallery, Room 2145
Professional Faculties building, University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4

For the other talk we are very pleased to welcome Kevin Robert Perry from Urban Rain|Design for his first public presentation in Calgary. We first came across his work in a post in Pruned. Kevin will present his approach to green infrastructure visioning and planning developed through experience at the City of Portland’s Sustainable Stormwater Program. His innovative techniques to retrofit the urban fabric with sustainable stormwater management uses the landscape to not only manage stormwater, but to also create highly successful urban spaces.
RSVP to charles.blanc@calgary.ca

Date: Friday 25th October
Time:: Coffee and pastries from 7.30, talk from 8 till 8.45 AM
Location: Bow Room @ the Water Centre
625 25 Ave SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 4K8

A walk at the edge of the world

We are currently developing another exciting new production with Magnetic North Theatre. We've been working with Magnetic North's Director Nick Bone and performer Ian Cameron in Edinburgh over the last 2 weeks and now heading to Mull to complete the first stage of development.

A Walk at the Edge of the World is inspired by the act of walking. During the performance, the narrator leads the audience along the many paths his mind followed as he walked and the talk leaps from subject to subject, mirroring the way the mind works when there is time only to think. The hidden secrets of the landscape and the constantly shifting border between land and sea lead the narrator to understand that the past is always with us, whether we realise it or not.

Performances: Mull — June 29th and Iona — June 30th

Worcester Orchard developments

As well as the Bristol Promenade, the University Orchard in Worcester is getting near completion.
In this first phase of the works, the hard landscaping is pretty much finished and the seeding is taking place. The orchard terraces are now clearly visible, now just waiting for the tree planting at the next planting season.

Bristol promenade

After a few developments, our project for the end of the Brunel Mile in Britol is near completion!

It started life as an exploration of spaces and planes defining a public space, and later morphed into a design responding more precisely to the particular man-made conditions to create a landscape specific to the space.

The final design is a boardwalk promenade space along a meadowy landscape fed by the runoff rainwater from the adjacent building. In collaboration with Cullinan Studio Architects and Grants Associates the journey of the rainwater is celebrated with the visible drain pipes, collection dishes and open rills distributing the water onto the grassland slope.
The different growing conditions (slope, orientation, rainwater runoff) are highlighted by the use of a variety of biodiversity and habitats (grasses, damp grassland, marginal vegetation and woodland groundcover). Combined with these conditions the experience of the harbour side (ruderal plants and riparian habitat) is drawn up into the Promenade.



This project was commissioned by Crest Nicholson Regeneration as part of the Harbourside development.

Worcester Orchard

Last week we were in Worcester visiting our project for the University which is under construction. Over the last year we worked with BCA Landscape architects to realise this project, a public orchard in the heart of Worcester. The works are well under way and the land is taking shape nicely, exciting!

Here are a few shots from the day.

A couple of updates

After some quiet months without any posts on this blog, here are a couple of updates on some of the events we are taking part of in the coming weeks whilst continuing our work on Watershed+.

On January 17th we will be leading a conversation about innovative artist residency programs around the globe and the potential for expanded residency programming at the Lawrence Arts Center with artist Yvonne Mullock, and Lawrence Arts Center executive director Susan Tate.

The following week we'll be in Vancouver installing Limelight: Saturday night on its first venue in 2013. In partnership with Emily Carr University, the City of Vancouver, the Downtown Vancouver BIA, Limelight: Saturday night will be installed at 2 locations similtaneously

We will also take part of the 2013 Lulu Series: Art in the City on January 23rd.

If you're around for any of these events we'd love to see you.

Boston

We're delighted to be on our way to Boston to take part in a fascinating conference co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, Boston College, Northeastern University, M.I.T., Tufts University, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cutural studies, and punctum books:
"Cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university".

Thus I propose an abandonment of disciplinary grounding but an abandonment that retains as structurally essential the question of the disciplinary form that can be given to knowledges. This is why the university should not exchange the rigid and outmoded disciplines for a simply amorphous interdisciplinary space in the humanities (as if we could still organize knowledge around the figure of “Man”). Rather, the loosening of disciplinary structures has to be made the opportunity for the installation of disciplinarity as a permanent question. . . . [which would] keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past.
~Bill Readings, The University in Ruins

There's a fully packed programme over three days, and we'll be presenting the 3rd plenary session on Saturday.

Hydrant fountains in action

The fountains were installed on the river front in Calgary for Canada Day last week-end, and people were trying them even before we finished installing them! And this week end the Stampede and Water Services have been working together to get them installed this morning on Stampede grounds, more pictures soon.

In the mean time here are a few pictures from last week end:

Fire Hydrant Fountains

The fabrication shop have been working hard and have been fantastic at making this project happen, they finished the three different fountains and they're almost ready to be put in place for Canada Day this week end. Here's a sneak preview of the two other designs and the first one - "strangers" or the "dating fountain" - being used this morning for a TV interview.

More pictures of them in use next week.

W+ residency call

We just released a call for the artist residency with Watershed+: www.watershedplus.ca/residency/res-call01.pdf Feel free to share it widely! Looking forward to reading through the applications.

watershed+ developments

Finally some updates.
The organisation and the setting up of the first Watershed+ initiatives is keeping us busy. From the initial 10 "deliverables", we now have about 25, which is very exciting but takes time.


The bowls for the fountains have arrived today.

The first of these initiatives to become live is the temporary fountains. We've been working with the UEP Public Art Program and the City's metal fabrication team to develop some fountains that can be fixed onto fire hydrants for festivals and other events. Temporary fountains attached to fire hydrant are a fairly common practice in North America, but often limited to a very functional set up and/or as a bilboard for messaging. For Watershed+ the fountains design became an opportunity to play with their social role as gathering spaces and expressing the invisble systems underground. We've designed 3 different fountains which should be ready for Canada day, 1st July. More soon and we'll post pictures as they get built.

We're also having a blog/documentation/source site being developed for W+ which should be ready before the end of the month. In the mean time you can have a look at our daily picture on watershedplus.tumblr.

Fogo Island

Browsing the Fall edition of Canadian art, we just came across a very nice description of the project we undertook in Fogo Island 2 years ago:

"...Later, Gunnarsdottir gives me a present from the Arts Corporation: a publication the foundation produced, a booklet of an artist project called 4 dimensional mapping that she curated in August 2009.
The project included artists from France, Scotland and Switzerland, [rather anonymous, basically us and Erika Irmler] and involved local residents. It documented an investigation of the material culture of Fogo Island, and contained locals' verbatim descriptions of geographical markers and the sea, recipes of traditional dishes like Jiggs' dinner, drawings of local architecture and other cultural points of interest, photographical portraits of residents, and copies of postcards sent to Glasgow detailing aspects of the island life. In its careful documentation of the culture, the 4 dimensional mapping project was not so different from the careful documentation undertaken by the original Fogo Process."

Rock Haven, Fogo Island’s Newfoundland art-residency experiment
by Lisa Moore

Charmouth bridge opening

Yesterday we went to Charmouth, for the opening of the footbridge we designed with the Dorset County Council engineers.
In this beautiful location on the World Heritage Site of the Jurassic coast and the South West Coastal Path the intention was from the beginning not to create a bridge that would become a focal point but to create a place that would enhance the experience of crossing the river and become a viewing point for this landscape. The result is in keeping with the scale of the previous bridge but bows towards the sea and widens in its centre, creating an overhanging balcony over the river, almost a public space in the middle of the bridge.

It has been a really productive collaboration with the design team from day one, and yesterday was a great pleasure to see so many people enjoying the bridge.