Summer 2024
It’s a long story! I was invited to take part in a residency in Osnabrück last May/June by Artcore Gallery, Derby (https://artcoreuk.com). As part of my practice, I engage in what I call poetic mapping. This is exploring the hapticity of a space. During the residency, I began to make strange, stringed instruments. On a day of wandering through the city, I noticed a brush with a very bent stale leaning against a fence outside the Felix Nussbaum Museum. This would have made a perfect support for a guitar string. I searched for the owner not knowing that it was part of the local tradition to leave unwanted items in the street to be taken if needed. By the time I returned, the brush had gone. Knowing how ridiculous it all sounded, I took along a German artist to ‘interrogate’ the museum, I talked to the gardeners but to no avail. I accepted I had missed the opportunity.
November 2024
I return to Osnabrück to meet with artist, Margit Rusert (https://margit-rusert.de) who hosted the residency in her studio, and see her fabulous retrospective exhibition Mash-Up. We had discussed collaborating in the summer and this was a visit to see how we could make it work. She co-runs a gallery (https://skulptur-galerie.de) in Osnabrück and last week, a brush handle had turned up at the gallery, it was the same one, a little bit weathered and no brush.
Amazing coincidence and timing. Next, I will return to play some ‘music’ using the Felix Nussbaum Stringed Brush using with pre-owned strings which have in the past been given to me by a guitar shop in Derby (https://fouldsguitars.com) from their scrap metal box. Not forgetting Rainer who deliberately changed his guitar strings for me. Thanks everyone for their support.
This visit has consolidated two collaborations of which more later. It is going to be an exciting year in 2025.