Posts Tagged ‘Field Study International’
OUR 2019 FIELD STUDY Submission: Tidal fire debris
Each year artists from around the world submit 100 copies of an artwork and mail them to an address in Geelong, Australia. Coordinator of the Field Study International mail art project David Dellafiora works with a team to collate and assemble the A5 sized artworks into books. Copies of the Field Study International are sold to collectors and institutional libraries around the world to raise funds for the workshop and to cover project costs. Contributing artists are also sent a copy.
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This has been a great yearly project for us for over 10 years. What follows is the story of our submission for 2019. At the end of the post there’s a brief story about Dellafiora’s Field Study Projects. David is also involved in many other mail art projects… LOOK HERE
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Narrabri roadside PHOTO: © Doug Spowart
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Surrounded by fire
Recently we drove through central western New South Wales and southern Queensland. The country was dry and hot with willy-willies and dust storms lifting and moving the precious soil across the landscape. There was little or no green and the dams were dry- even rivers that would normally have some water were just sand and dry dirt. Travelling on further we witnessed the great Brigalow forests of southern Queensland seemingly quivering under the heat of the summer sun.
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Overall the country was brittle and broken from the endless dry. Not even summer there was a concern for the future as country towns not used to running out of water were in dire situations. Coastal areas where fire is a part of environmental regeneration there was also widespread concern for this now unusual extended periods of dry. This was not a normal cycle… The country was about to explode… all it takes is a dry thunderstorm with lightning, a careless smoker driving past or sadly a deliberate act from criminals.
So then the fires started so much earlier than expected… the many brave souls rallied to fight for their community. But these were not just the normal local bush fires… They grew and joined to form huge firestorms, the fighters used all they could find from buckets to the fire fighting trucks… But much of the land was inaccessible and many areas of forest could not be saved from the onslaught of wind and heat… Some forests that had survived through the millennia without fire in unique and protected ecosystems were now potentially changed forever.
Fired forest near New Italy, northern NSW PHOTO: Victoria Cooper ©
We then came to stay at a friend’s family retreat on the coast of Northern NSW… The road to this place passes through huge areas of swamp and eucalypt forest that rarely burns as it is usually has good rain. But now we drove past kilometres and kilometres of burnt and dry country… We soon found that the regional area where our destination is located was surrounded by blackened country. The atmosphere, as with most of the coast in NSW was chocking with smoke and dust.
Even though we were assured that our town was safe these were not usual times and we felt uneasy and depressed by the enormity of this disaster.
We decided to dedicate our field report work to record this devastation. Our dismay was deepened when we walked along the beach and witnessed lines of leaves and twigs and other blackened material washed up with the tide .. like the dead bodies of victims discarded by criminals. Down the length of the entire coast of NSW where other fires raged, these waves of blackened and broken forests were appearing – the sea has returned the evidence to the place of the crime.
We began by gathering small samples of the material as symbolic references to vast amount of evidence left behind from these black tides. This Field Report is our first response as part of future substantive work on the contemporary condition of indifference, arrogance and ignorance towards a deteriorating environment.
Victoria Cooper
Ashed beach, Wooli northern NSW PHOTO: Doug Spowart ©
OUR SUBMISSION
COOPER+SPOWART 2019 Field Study submission
Signing the 100 prints…
100 prints…
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SOME BACKGROUND TO FIELD STUDY REPORT
Field Study International 2019 Call for Entries
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2011 Field Report cover
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2011 Field Report pages
2011 Field Report
2011 Field Report pages
A page of participants – 2011 Field Report
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Look out for the 2020 Call for Submissions …
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2012 FIELD STUDY MAIL ART PROJECT: Our contribution
On December 7, 2012 we mailed off to David Dellafiora in Geelong our contribution to the 2012 Field Study. We met David at the Artspace Mackay Artists Book Forum in 2010 where he presented a lecture on mail art and coordinated a collaborative project which dealt with the idea of the assembling book as a democratic multiple.
David Dellafiora Photo: Doug Spowart
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David Dellafiora is a quietly spoken person and not one to push his significant history and activities in the world of mail art. He was however an enthusiastic distributor of A5 fliers, call-to-action invitations to participate in numerous mail art projects that he coordinates. Field Study, Kart, Wipe and others are projects that are essentially ‘assembling books’, where artists worldwide submit multiple artworks by mail to David. At specific times throughout the year David coordinates a team that assembles, packages and mails out to all contributors a copy of the compiled project. A part of the production run is retained with copies being offered for sale to artists, galleries and collectors. The income from this activity finances the production costs and the return postage. Field Study publications are included artists book collections such as the V&A, Museum of Modern Art New York, State Library of Victoria and the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry.
The Field Study contributions are called emanations and can include all kinds of things including: ‘documentations of performances, actions and exhibitions, tracts, rants, instructions, manifestoes, reflections and experiments.’ A selection of pages can be seen in the illustrations from last year’s report at the end of this post. They are a mashup of Fluxus, DaDa, Surrealist inspired, zine-ish paste-up, rubber stamps, torn up letter ransom notes and concrete poetry. In its assembled form the power of Field Report is apparent as it becomes a snapshot of artistic, social and/or political commentary on the times that are current at the time of its publication.
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Our Field Study infographic about extractive mining industries in the Surat Basin
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This year we contributed a piece that related to our commentary on extractive mining industries overtaking our regional communities. This is a variant to the Artists’ Survey Book #12 that has featured in past WOTWEDID posts. The page was printed using a high quality photocopier and each page, 100 in all, were signed and numbered by both of us. It was remarkable to see our workbench covered with the repeating pattern of 100 pages taking up an area of about 3 square metres.
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Signing our contribution
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We look forward to receiving a package from Field Study International later on this year. And, for anyone interested in future Field Study projects, check out the Field Study Blog or review some of the accompanying documents that follow in this blog post.
Cheerio
Doug
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The call for 2012 contributions
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2011 Field Report cover
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2011 Field Report pages
2011 Field Report
2011 Field Report pages
A page of participants – 2011 Field Report
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Kart Mail Art Project
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