John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

experience of the work we are involved in. This was much more, in my view,
focused around product and tangible stuff that people could more readily
experience. So it flipped back so we had been pushing and pushing around one
sort of agenda and it also sat within us and how we do work in the gallery space
and then moving out of the gallery space, working in a different way which is
incredibly intangible actually and that’s the strength of what we do, but for
audiences that’s quite hard to grapple with. So this gave us the opportunity to
flip that back again and show some stuff that people could actually physically
experience and see the tangible value in it and give them that kind of experience
as a way in really. So that was a really important part of it. So there’s that
physicality of it which is the primary thing and then specifically working within
Lancaster with an audience of predominately Lancashire and Cumbria this area
of work is still very new to people. It is still that area of is it art or isn’t it, how
do we engage with it? We are still struggling with what on earth do folly do and
I think that this exhibition really helped us a lot in that area because it touched
across all sorts of different art form areas obviously with the general ambition to
be what ever it was. It had a relationship to technology in some way and
without that relationship to technology those pieces of work wouldn’t exist. I
think that it probably quite strongly did achieve that and start to introduce those
sorts of ideas to people that up to now we haven’t always managed to achieve.
The other thing for us (totally selfish reasons) is that it was fantastic to be able
to draw something which is rooted somewhere in a big urban centre like
Manchester and be able to showcase that with folly within Lancaster.
Something of that quality of that nature being to draw that out of the big urban
centre was quite a bit of a scoop and also the scale of the ambition of the work,
the mix of work, the mix of artists within it. Again it’s not something we have
had the opportunity to do before. When we are working with the gallery space
we are either working in partnership as we are now with venues or have a
history of working within a very small restricted gallery space where really only
one piece really works well within it. Very difficult to do group shows in that
context.
5. How would you describe folly’s role in the curatorial process for
PBB?
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