The Live Preview Show: ‘SCHOOL OF CHANGE -the recruitment‘ at Camden Arts Centre went well
Artist Jennet Thomas and composer /performer Simon Bookish present a live show
exploring a hybrid, cross-over space between art, film, music, speculative fiction and performance, including a recruitment presentation, songs, film clips, lessons, a quiz and prizes.It’s in the Style of an illustrated Recruitment Drive; a preview for my current epic Film project SCHOOL OF CHANGE- a Sci Fi Musical collaboration with Composer/ performer Simon Bookish – which is to show fully realised as an 45 minute Film/sculptural Installation at Matt’s Gallery June- August 2012.
SCHOOL OF CHANGE is a new franchise of girls’ schools, existing in a post-apocalyptic future, so radical it threatens the working of reason itself. SCHOOL OF CHANGE attempts to shore up against this breakdown, to educate a new generation to adapt, building an alternative ‘hive mind’ that has a new, stronger kind of logic.
Each student’s learning is bio-technically monitored and assessed through the Personal Circle lodged inside them. High-scoring pupils perform their learning through a rhythmic song and action practise: ‘the Production’. This trance-like group activity produces small solids – Units of Knowing – the currency through which the new economy tries to function.
The first SCHOOL OF CHANGE open day will take place at Camden Arts Centre on Saturday 17th December 3.00pm- also featuring Frances Scott, Nikki Tomlinson and Catherine Thomas. ENROL NOW!
SCHOOL OF CHANGE- a new work for Matt’s Gallery 2012
I’m developing a new longer film work for a second show at Matt’s Gallery in 2012 called ‘SCHOOL OF CHANGE’
SCHOOL OF CHANGE is a project that collides genres and ideas; a sci-fi musical + experimental narrative film, based in another reality where a number of rapid changes; geographical, organic, mathematical – even mutations in the workings of reason itself- are threatening the viability of human society.
This work will be a musical collaboration with composer and performer Simon Bookish
The film will last 40 minutes, the action taking place over one day inside a School – its classrooms, canteen, staff room, playing fields, will be filmed in my old secondary school. We see the results of ‘the Changes’ played out within this microcosm, during the first- and last- day at school of the New Girl, who has been brought in to replace a student who ‘faded away’. She is ‘The New Tenth’ and as she joins her class, 2a, an exact replica of her also joins class 2b, 2c, and 2d. The School appears to be part of a franchise of ‘Schools of Change’: an initiative to shore up against this breakdown, to educate and prepare a new generation to adapt. Ritual, music and rhythm are deployed continually in the daily routine to help stitch together the community, raise the spirits, and possibly build some kind of alternative ‘hive mind’ that has a new, stronger kind of logic.
Students learn a New Mathematics to cope with the increasing difficulty of all attempts to measure or calculate objectively – now that mathematical laws only work for the very old – and a New Geography to map the rapid flattening out of the surface of the planet and its consequences. Some of this is very familiar- a teacher stands at the front of the class disseminating facts,
manipulating diagrams and doing demonstrations, but then it frequently becomes strange; each student’s learning score is continuously, biolo-technically monitored, and those who score the highest perform their learning
into an actual, physical result through a peculiar rhythmic song and action practise- a kind of clapping, conjuring game called ‘the Production’. This trance like group activity produces small colourful solids; the Units of Knowing -
these are of immense value, fit together like a puzzle, and are evidently the currency through which the new economy functions.
This project is an ambitious development of core themes that run through my work; a skewed reflection on contemporary fears and desires for radical change, both social and spiritual, as well as a critical play on current dilemmas in education and economic philosophy.
‘ Echo vs Gown ‘
Performed on June 18th as part of ‘This is not a Performance or a Lecture’ for RADAR Was apparently a HIT…so we did it again…on Monday 17th October 
I was commissioned by RADAR http://www.arts.lboro.ac.uk/radar/ to make a new work for their programme ‘This Is Not A Performance or a Lecture!’ presented on Saturday 18th June 2011, at a kind of festival of 7 of these commissions around the campus at Loughborough University. Other artists include Janice Kerbel and Pil and Galia Collectiv. I’m developed a new 2- handed performance piece ‘ECHO vs. GOWN’ which takes two very different local texts as its material starting point; the Loughborough Echo newspaper, and the Loughborough University website ( specialist subject: Sport Science and Systems Engineering) A dialectic-cum- duel will be fought as a 2-handed illustrated lecture between the costumed personifications ‘Echo’ and ‘Gown’; a live collage of absurd collisions in rhetoric, sound, text and image, mining through explosions the latent ideologies, varied human aspirations and mysteries of Loughborough life. The methodology is poetic, analytical and mischievous, sometimes making hard sense, sometimes making a structured anarchy of sense-making nonsense.
Life of the Mind- at New Art Gallery Walsall 21 January – 20 March 2011
My Video installation ‘Return of the Black Tower [after John Smith]‘ showed from January to March 2011 as part of ‘ The Life of the Mind’ at New Art Gallery Walsall, curated by Bob and Robetra Smith. Click HERE for info about the work as it showed at PEER. The group show at Walsall also features work by Bobby Baker, Anne Bean, Sarah Lucas, Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Chadwick,Tracey Emin, Chris Ofili,
Janette Parris, amongst others. The exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall will ‘ feature a key number of powerful female artists who give form to the interior world. Each artist resists easy interpretation and in Bob’s word, “sticks a sharp pair of scissors into the soft underbelly of male hegemony”‘
21 January – 20 March 2011
‘Return of the Black Tower [after John Smith]‘
