‘...With the North Sea’
peacock & the worm (associates)
2019-2020
The Associates is run by Peacock Visual Arts and began as a pilot program in 2018. This years (2020) programme brings together five practitioners working in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire and is Scotland’s first fully - funded Curatorial Fellowship for visual arts. This year’s cohort includes; Joss Allen, Caitlin Dick, Phoebe McBride, Svetlana Panova and Abby Quick. The Fellowship will run until March 2020 through a series of intensive sessions, reading groups and a collective exhibition. The content of the programme is informed by the needs and interests of the Fellows and developed by the collective group, with support from PVA staff.
The programme is supported by the Aberdeen Place Programme, a partnership between Aberdeen City Council and Creative Scotland.
For more information about the programme and the fellows visit this link: https://worm.gallery/
The Curatorial Fellowship presents: With The North Sea
The Curatorial Fellowship at Peacock Visual Arts presents its culminating programme With The North Sea - a series of events, workshops and screenings, which aim to explore the familiar body of water in its poetic, economic and political capacity. The programme is formed around ideas of the history and identity of the region, the oil economy, various ecological imaginaries, as well as thoughts around sustenance and the exchange of goods and knowledge. Working with local and international artists from a variety of disciplines, The Fellowship is looking to engage in an exploration of What Does It Mean To Think With The North Sea?
With The North Sea will take place in The Worm and various external locations between 6th February and 21st March. Individual events to be announced closer to the time. Please keep checking this event and Peacock Visual Arts Facebook page for updates.
Join us for the opening event of With The North Sea on Thursday 6th February between 6pm and 9pm at The Worm, 11 Castle Street, Aberdeen for a presentation of photographs and hand-drawn maps by Frances Scott, storytelling by Grace Banks and a specially commissioned reading by Kirsty Logan, as well as to find out more about the programme and The Fellowship.
Frances Scott’s works will remain in the window display of The Worm until 23rd February.
For the duration of the programme The Worm will operate as an alternative library and resource hub, presenting a changing selection of texts, objects and artwork, aiming to provide further insight into the complex discourse around The North Sea.
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Between Urgencies and Curatorial Desires
'Between Urgencies and Curatorial Desires: The Fellows in Conversation with Sadie Young & Viviana Checchia'
15th August 2019, 6-8pm
At The Mercat Cross, Castle Gate
You are invited to join Peacock Visual Arts Curatorial Fellows for the second public event in the programme, ‘Between Urgencies and Curatorial Desires’. The discussion will be framed by topics related to socially engaged practice in Scotland's arts sector. This includes curatorial approaches to urgency, community engagement, public usefulness and sustainability within specific geographic and institutional contexts.
These approaches will be located in the practice of two curators; Sadie Young, Director of Timespan in Helmsdale and Viviana Checchia, Public Engagement Curator at CCA Glasgow. The event will be moderated by the Fellows, with plenty of space for audience participation.
If the weather is poor, the event will be held indoors at Peacock Visual Arts.
With The North Sea: The Perception of The Resource
The Curatorial Fellowship invites you for an evening film screening of three films from the LUX Scotland Collection of Moving Image. This film screening asks you to take an extractive view of our familiar body of water and consider the landscape through an ecological and political perspective.
Starting with Emily Richardson’s toxically beautiful Petrolia, we begin our journey at North Sea oil fields. Petrolia portrays a fluid interaction between landscape and population, sea and machine. Filmed in time-lapse, giant oil platforms begin to resemble organic forms and our sense of scale is gradually eroded. Emily Richardson’s films explore landscapes and environments to reveal the way that activity, movement and light is inscribed in place.
Expanding out across the world, we dive beneath the surface of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico with Some Part of Us by artist duo Semiconductor. Some Part of Us Will Have Become is the lament of a lone robot bearing witness to a man-made disaster. Made using internet streams captured during the Deepwater Horizon disaster Semiconductor have created a science fiction, narrated by the voice of a remotely operated vehicle. Whilst declaring hopelessness and despair it attempts in vain to quell the disaster, systematically arranging man-made debris. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology, questioning how they mediate our experiences.
Finally, we present Miranda Penell’s The Host. Particularly poignant in today’s political climate, The Host investigates the activities of British Petroleum (BP) in Iran; a tale of power, imperial hubris and catastrophe. The film asks us to look, and look again, at images produced by the oil company and personal photos taken by its British staff in Iran– including the filmmaker’s parents– not for what they show, but for what they betray. The Host is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by and their consequences.
To round off the event we welcome an open, speculative discussion of the topics portrayed in these films.
The title of the event comes from the first chapter of ‘North Sea Oil and Gas: A Geographical Perspective’ by Keith Chapman. This book is generously on loan to us from Aberdeen City Library and can be accessed from our resource hub at the Worm Tuesday to Saturday 12pm-5pm.
With The North Sea: Body of Land, Body of Water With Amy Gear
The Curatorial Fellowship invites you to join Shetland-based artist Amy Gear in a performative workshop exploring the question - What Does it Mean to Think With the North Sea? through the processes of drawing, writing and spoken word.
Amy will introduce participants to her practice and guide them through a series of tasks, each building towards creating a final piece of collaborative group work, which will then be presented in The Worm. This is a very gentle introduction to the processes of making and spoken word, designed to make the participants feel comfortable and confident while exploring the human connection to landscape through storytelling.
No experience is needed to attend this workshop and it is open to everyone.
The workshop will take place on the 8/3/20 in The Worm, 11 Castle Street between 12pm and 3pm. 8th March also celebrates International Women’s Day. We welcome you to share this wonderful occasion with us this Sunday!
Amy Gear graduated with a MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in 2015 and a BA in Printmaking from Gray's School of Art in 2012. She lives and works in Shetland, where she runs Gaada - a visual workshop with her partner artist Daniel. Amy's practice explores possible (and impossible) interrelationships between land and the body, knotting together notions of identity, language, knowledge and imagination. Amy works across a broad range of media: performance, printmaking, painting, photography, drawing, animation, sound, poetry, spoken word and installation.
The Associates is run by Peacock Visual Arts and began as a pilot program in 2018. This year’s programme brings together five practitioners working in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire and is Scotland’s first fully-funded Curatorial Fellowship for visual arts. This year’s cohort includes; Joss Allen, Caitlin Dick, Phoebe McBride, Svetlana Panova and Abby Beatrice Quick. The Fellowship has been running since May 2019 through a series of intensive sessions, reading groups and discussions with local and international organisations and practitioners. The content of the programme is informed by the needs and interests of The Fellows and developed by the collective group, with support from PVA staff.
With The North Sea: Kriss Zilgalvis - Stories Told By The Sea
‘All waters speak the same language’
The Curatorial Fellowship welcomes artist Kriss Zilgalvis to tell the stories of our North Sea waters. Stories told by the Sea explores our human desire to discover, hear and understand the unknown; to send a message and receive a reply, to understand and be understood.
During the initial research stage, Zilgalvis employs mapping and modelling technologies that are more commonly used in practices such as architecture, engineering and archaeology to document the unseen landscapes beneath the waters surface. As of the 3/03 the gallery will be transformed into an active working space, as this information is transformed into a series of sculptural objects. During this time, visitors to The Worm are still welcome to access the resource library whilst also having a unique opportunity to witness the work in progress and meet the artist.
Join us in The Worm on the Thursday 5th March 2020 to unveil the resulting objects. There will be an informal presentation on the project and the research behind it.
In a sense, Stories told by the Sea is the artist’s answer to the exhibition Stories told by Water – The River Daugava, (2015) which took place in Riga, both in the urban environment of AB Dam Park and on the River Daugava. With participants Dzintars Zilgalvis, Dace Zilgalve and Kaspars Avots, Stories told by the Sea connects Peacock Visual Arts with NOASS Arts Centre, one of the oldest independent cultural organisations in Latvia. Finding its home in two floating buildings, the arts centre has over 20 years of experience promoting interdisciplinary projects and supporting experiments in visual art.
As an artist, Kriss Zilgalvis’s work could be compared to a scientist whose research and creative process is equally as important as the end result. The instruments used in Kriss’s creative works are often comparable to other sectors, e.g. art, architecture, engineering and science. His works of art include performance art, multimedia installations and sculptures in the urban environment. His art projects, installations and performance art events have taken place in Copenhagen, Seoul, New York, Lahti, Riga, Rotterdam and many other places. He has recently completed work on a sculpture for Riga Cathedral (2018), which is dedicated to Latvia’s independence and is made from the world’s biggest ever glass alloys of their type.
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The programme is supported by the Aberdeen Place Programme, a partnership between Aberdeen City Council and Creative Scotland.
For more information about the programme and the fellows visit this link: https://worm.gallery/
The Curatorial Fellowship presents: With The North Sea
The Curatorial Fellowship at Peacock Visual Arts presents its culminating programme With The North Sea - a series of events, workshops and screenings, which aim to explore the familiar body of water in its poetic, economic and political capacity. The programme is formed around ideas of the history and identity of the region, the oil economy, various ecological imaginaries, as well as thoughts around sustenance and the exchange of goods and knowledge. Working with local and international artists from a variety of disciplines, The Fellowship is looking to engage in an exploration of What Does It Mean To Think With The North Sea?
With The North Sea will take place in The Worm and various external locations between 6th February and 21st March. Individual events to be announced closer to the time. Please keep checking this event and Peacock Visual Arts Facebook page for updates.
Join us for the opening event of With The North Sea on Thursday 6th February between 6pm and 9pm at The Worm, 11 Castle Street, Aberdeen for a presentation of photographs and hand-drawn maps by Frances Scott, storytelling by Grace Banks and a specially commissioned reading by Kirsty Logan, as well as to find out more about the programme and The Fellowship.
Frances Scott’s works will remain in the window display of The Worm until 23rd February.
For the duration of the programme The Worm will operate as an alternative library and resource hub, presenting a changing selection of texts, objects and artwork, aiming to provide further insight into the complex discourse around The North Sea.
Between Urgencies and Curatorial Desires
'Between Urgencies and Curatorial Desires: The Fellows in Conversation with Sadie Young & Viviana Checchia'
15th August 2019, 6-8pm
At The Mercat Cross, Castle Gate
You are invited to join Peacock Visual Arts Curatorial Fellows for the second public event in the programme, ‘Between Urgencies and Curatorial Desires’. The discussion will be framed by topics related to socially engaged practice in Scotland's arts sector. This includes curatorial approaches to urgency, community engagement, public usefulness and sustainability within specific geographic and institutional contexts.
These approaches will be located in the practice of two curators; Sadie Young, Director of Timespan in Helmsdale and Viviana Checchia, Public Engagement Curator at CCA Glasgow. The event will be moderated by the Fellows, with plenty of space for audience participation.
If the weather is poor, the event will be held indoors at Peacock Visual Arts.
With The North Sea: The Perception of The Resource
The Curatorial Fellowship invites you for an evening film screening of three films from the LUX Scotland Collection of Moving Image. This film screening asks you to take an extractive view of our familiar body of water and consider the landscape through an ecological and political perspective.
Starting with Emily Richardson’s toxically beautiful Petrolia, we begin our journey at North Sea oil fields. Petrolia portrays a fluid interaction between landscape and population, sea and machine. Filmed in time-lapse, giant oil platforms begin to resemble organic forms and our sense of scale is gradually eroded. Emily Richardson’s films explore landscapes and environments to reveal the way that activity, movement and light is inscribed in place.
Expanding out across the world, we dive beneath the surface of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill off the Gulf of Mexico with Some Part of Us by artist duo Semiconductor. Some Part of Us Will Have Become is the lament of a lone robot bearing witness to a man-made disaster. Made using internet streams captured during the Deepwater Horizon disaster Semiconductor have created a science fiction, narrated by the voice of a remotely operated vehicle. Whilst declaring hopelessness and despair it attempts in vain to quell the disaster, systematically arranging man-made debris. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it through the lens of science and technology, questioning how they mediate our experiences.
Finally, we present Miranda Penell’s The Host. Particularly poignant in today’s political climate, The Host investigates the activities of British Petroleum (BP) in Iran; a tale of power, imperial hubris and catastrophe. The film asks us to look, and look again, at images produced by the oil company and personal photos taken by its British staff in Iran– including the filmmaker’s parents– not for what they show, but for what they betray. The Host is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by and their consequences.
To round off the event we welcome an open, speculative discussion of the topics portrayed in these films.
The title of the event comes from the first chapter of ‘North Sea Oil and Gas: A Geographical Perspective’ by Keith Chapman. This book is generously on loan to us from Aberdeen City Library and can be accessed from our resource hub at the Worm Tuesday to Saturday 12pm-5pm.
With The North Sea: Body of Land, Body of Water With Amy Gear
The Curatorial Fellowship invites you to join Shetland-based artist Amy Gear in a performative workshop exploring the question - What Does it Mean to Think With the North Sea? through the processes of drawing, writing and spoken word.
Amy will introduce participants to her practice and guide them through a series of tasks, each building towards creating a final piece of collaborative group work, which will then be presented in The Worm. This is a very gentle introduction to the processes of making and spoken word, designed to make the participants feel comfortable and confident while exploring the human connection to landscape through storytelling.
No experience is needed to attend this workshop and it is open to everyone.
The workshop will take place on the 8/3/20 in The Worm, 11 Castle Street between 12pm and 3pm. 8th March also celebrates International Women’s Day. We welcome you to share this wonderful occasion with us this Sunday!
Amy Gear graduated with a MA in Printmaking from the Royal College of Art in 2015 and a BA in Printmaking from Gray's School of Art in 2012. She lives and works in Shetland, where she runs Gaada - a visual workshop with her partner artist Daniel. Amy's practice explores possible (and impossible) interrelationships between land and the body, knotting together notions of identity, language, knowledge and imagination. Amy works across a broad range of media: performance, printmaking, painting, photography, drawing, animation, sound, poetry, spoken word and installation.
The Associates is run by Peacock Visual Arts and began as a pilot program in 2018. This year’s programme brings together five practitioners working in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire and is Scotland’s first fully-funded Curatorial Fellowship for visual arts. This year’s cohort includes; Joss Allen, Caitlin Dick, Phoebe McBride, Svetlana Panova and Abby Beatrice Quick. The Fellowship has been running since May 2019 through a series of intensive sessions, reading groups and discussions with local and international organisations and practitioners. The content of the programme is informed by the needs and interests of The Fellows and developed by the collective group, with support from PVA staff.
With The North Sea: Kriss Zilgalvis - Stories Told By The Sea
‘All waters speak the same language’
The Curatorial Fellowship welcomes artist Kriss Zilgalvis to tell the stories of our North Sea waters. Stories told by the Sea explores our human desire to discover, hear and understand the unknown; to send a message and receive a reply, to understand and be understood.
During the initial research stage, Zilgalvis employs mapping and modelling technologies that are more commonly used in practices such as architecture, engineering and archaeology to document the unseen landscapes beneath the waters surface. As of the 3/03 the gallery will be transformed into an active working space, as this information is transformed into a series of sculptural objects. During this time, visitors to The Worm are still welcome to access the resource library whilst also having a unique opportunity to witness the work in progress and meet the artist.
Join us in The Worm on the Thursday 5th March 2020 to unveil the resulting objects. There will be an informal presentation on the project and the research behind it.
In a sense, Stories told by the Sea is the artist’s answer to the exhibition Stories told by Water – The River Daugava, (2015) which took place in Riga, both in the urban environment of AB Dam Park and on the River Daugava. With participants Dzintars Zilgalvis, Dace Zilgalve and Kaspars Avots, Stories told by the Sea connects Peacock Visual Arts with NOASS Arts Centre, one of the oldest independent cultural organisations in Latvia. Finding its home in two floating buildings, the arts centre has over 20 years of experience promoting interdisciplinary projects and supporting experiments in visual art.
As an artist, Kriss Zilgalvis’s work could be compared to a scientist whose research and creative process is equally as important as the end result. The instruments used in Kriss’s creative works are often comparable to other sectors, e.g. art, architecture, engineering and science. His works of art include performance art, multimedia installations and sculptures in the urban environment. His art projects, installations and performance art events have taken place in Copenhagen, Seoul, New York, Lahti, Riga, Rotterdam and many other places. He has recently completed work on a sculpture for Riga Cathedral (2018), which is dedicated to Latvia’s independence and is made from the world’s biggest ever glass alloys of their type.
