Thank you for your global wide proposals and submissions. Artists have now been confirmed.

I will be reinterpreting paradise at The Renew Rooms in a multi-sensory solo show, simultaneously, the following artists have been selected to exhibit their work at The International Gallery, both Liverpool galleries.

The artists are:

Chong Boon Pok
Nice To Meet You- A shadow tracing event

Chris Eckersley
The Note C, installation

Didi Dunphy
Inside Skateboard, installation

Faye Peacock
This is for you, event

Jennifer Mehra & Tim Maslen
Mirrored and Native, installation

Laurel Kurtz and Steven Beatty
Juicy, installation

Sari Lievonen
Fleece, installation

Kaspar Wimberley
Line Of Sight, event

There will also be opening events on the opening of 4 March 2008, participants to be confirmed.

Further details below. The International Gallery, 4-21 March 2008

Chong Boon Pok: Nice To Meet You- A shadow tracing event

Nice to Meet You will be the outcome of audiences tracing each other's shadows on the walls of a gallery room. The piece explores paradise story by seeing through the interrelationship between human, revealing paradise may be found in a harmony web of interconnection that makes up from peaceful individuals.

About the Artist
Pok sees his work as the result of his interest on matters of the everyday and Zen. Over the years, he has produced a body of cross-disciplinary work consisting of sculpture, installation, time based, and interactive performance that made from an engagement with everyday life. They explore the as-it-is-ness of things, and interconnectedness between objects and people. Born in Malaysia, living and working in the UK, he is currently undertaking a fine art practice based MPhil/PhD research in London Metropolitan University.

Chris Eckersley The Note C

The Note C consists of eight 'sound stores' arranged in a grid to create a contemplative space for viewers to pass through. Each sound store (white cube) is pre-recorded with the musical note 'C' played on a different instrument, which is activated by people moving through the space. Someone once told Eckersley that the universe vibrates or resonates to the frequency of the note 'C'. For him, he never knew if this is true, but it always seems plausible. He has long been a fan of 'minimalist' music, so when it came to making this piece, he chose the note 'C' as a sort of homage to Terry Riley's 'In C'. However 'The Note C' is not a piece of music; it's an interactive sculpture which explores spatial relationships by using the added dimension of sound.
About the Artist
Born in Birmingham in 1952 Eckersley studied sculpture at Cheltenham College of Art, and design at Central Saint Martin's College, London. He works both as an artist and designer and was visiting tutor at Central Saint Martin's from 1996-2003. He has been awarded the following; The Prince's Medal at the 2002 V&A Design Awards; Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. Eckersley's exhibitions include 'Betrayed by the Senses', South Bank, London, and 'Designers block', Milan.

Didi Dunphy : Inside Skateboard

Dunphy is interested in the intersection of art, performance and design - fabricating objects that facilitate an interactive cooperative play. Her work explores the nature of recess while challenging the tradition of arts institution by encouraging viewers to "play" with minimalist inspired sculpture. The "Inside Skateboard" sculpture is designed for play, for interaction with the hopes that through this Recess or play activity, cooperation, collaboration and good ideas are born between people. As, in Dunphy's pieces, by inviting a physical interaction, play time, she transforms viewers in to "performers". These works and performances do relate to a discourse of public sculpture in that unlike Nauman's self-reflective concept, the participation with the public operated democratically. Each performer/viewer has equal say in the process of fun and the outcome of the play.

About the Artist
Didi Dunphy received an MFA from SFAI in performance art. Selected exhibits and installations include, Playscape, Atlanta Contemporary, Let's Fall in Love, Go Fish Gallery, NY, Push Play, Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, A/D 2004, The Lab, San Francisco, AIM, Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, Georgia Triennial, Telfair Museum, GA. Ms. Dunphy also exhibits design objects at the ICFF, NY and CaBoom West Coast Indy Design Show, Santa Monica. A number of features have been written about Ms. Dunphy including CMYK, Southern Living, as well as reviews in the LA Times, SF Chronicle and Atlanta Journal Constitution.


Faye Peacock; This is For You

This is For You is a series of books with each book made from visitor's writings about certain subjects in a quiet and calm environment. When a visitor offers a piece of writing they receive a book from the previous day in return. A new book is produced each day and displayed for visitors to read.

The books are produced as result of contemplation from the writing process.
The space is a rest bite a sanctuary… it gives time for people to look at themselves and their lives and their surroundings. Being given time in this way is liberating, as is the feeling of being given authorship of someone else's artwork.

About the Artist

Faye Peacock has exhibited at Camberwell Arts Festival, 'I am Your Worst Nightmare', at Arnolfini, Bristol. MAP festival, Carlisle and Sensitive Skin, Nottingham. Faye has worked closely with the curatorial group 'GRAFT' who are based in Nottingham. She worked with GRAFT in curating the annual performance art festival: EXPO. And also on the collaborative project 'Arteries' which was presented in the Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.


Kaspar Wimberley; Line Of Sight

At a given time a line of sight is quietly drawn through the city. Strangers are connected together for a brief moment of silent solidarity, a message that is intimately being passed from eye to eye, drawn from corner to corner, bouncing and rebounding through the city.

Members of the public willing to take part in our project align their watches and, at an agreed point in time, stand at a predetermined fixed location in the city, where they focus their gaze on another participant who can be seen in the distance. This focus is held for approximately 5 minutes. Participants photograph their distant partners. The gallery space used for Paradise Stories is included within this circular line of sight.

Wimberley's questions if paradise is possible without generating a feeling of togetherness and/or belonging, paradise and sanctuary more as a state of mind and being than a physical environment? Paradise as a community. Paradise as connecting with others as much as looking inwards at oneself. Line of Sight whispers this need for a feeling of community, within a highly mobile, fast moving and often competitive urban lifestyle.

About the Artist
Wimberley works as a Scenographer, Performance Artist and Artistic Director of Treacle Theatre Company (specialising in site-specific performance), formed in 2003 as a collaboration of German and British artists, who would like to explore experimental structures for performance, engage in new forms of artistic collaboration and develop new strategies for audience interaction.

Treacle have specialised in creating work for unconventional spaces. Reinventing disused spaces, exposing forgotten places and interrupting public spaces.

Over the past four years their exploration into site-specific performance has led to creation of work for a variety of locations, including The Williamson Tunnels and the Sefton Park Palmhouse in Liverpool, a Martello tower in Jersey, a deserted holiday resort in Bulgaria, a fishing port in Wales and a derelict glasshouse, ancient forest and wartime bakery in Germany.

Jennifer Mehra & Tim Maslen

In the Mirrored and Native series by Maslen & Mehra the imagery suggests a paradise where we strive to co-exist with the flora and fauna of the planet and a place where we can live in our urban realities but somehow still remain connected to nature. The large-scale light-boxes are re-cycled advertising displays from the London Underground.

The Mirrored series sees people from an urban context placed in a more natural environment. As city dwellers go through their day to day lives it is easy for one to forget about the experiences of wide open spaces, clean air, the smells of plants, the sounds of birds etc.. The Mirrored series relocates these people in mid stride, mid conversation to an altogether incongruous context.

In the Native series, 'nature' is reintroduced into an urban environment.
The imagery from both these series suggests a place where we can have our cake and eat it too. A paradise where we strive to co-exist with the flora and fauna of the planet and a place where we can live in our urban realities but somehow still remain connected to nature.

The resulting medium format transparencies are drum-scanned to the maximum size files in order to create high quality prints on aluminium, transparencies for light-boxes and in some cases billboards. The large-scale light-boxes are re-cycled and refurbished advertising displays from the London Underground. We have chosen to re-use existing boxes, shifting the context and meaning of a familiar urban object.


About the Artists
Maslen & Mehra are a London based collaborative duo. Their practice explores ideas that revolve around the meeting point and overlapping of nature and culture. Works take the form of installation, sculpture, collage, drawing and photography. Maslen & Mehra have exhibited widely internationally including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, South Korea, South Africa, Russia, UK, and the USA. Recent projects include solo exhibitions in Rome and Istanbul. A substantial book regarding their practice will be realised in 2008 with support from the Arts Council Of England.


Laurel Kurtz and Steven Beatty: Juicy

Juicy is made from thousands of plastic bottle caps and lids. They are sewn together with plastic zip-ties. The piece is free form hyper process sculptural installation that is alive with color, and spans the surface of the walls; it is an abstract organic form reflective of natural occurrences- both on the earth's surface and celestially.

In the United States, plastic caps and lids are not recyclable. Soda bottles are made of Polyethylene Terephalate, and therefore recyclable. However, the cap-holding rings and the base of the vessel are made of a different type of plastic, Polypropylene, and must be removed for processing. Polypropylene is not processed in the United States and is sent abroad or ends up in landfills. People cannot include Polypropylene in curbside recycling or take them to recycling centers. It will never biodegrade, and can potentially last hundreds of years.

Experts from advertising firms select the colors of the plastic caps. They spend countless research hours to painstakingly select the perfect color to represent health, happiness, freshness, purity, and strength. These colors of vitality, although discarded, still hold the same messages and carry through into the piece.

Steven Beatty
The materials that Beatty uses are directly related to my commitment to environmental issues and modern culture. Beatty wants people to look at the world they live in, see the beauty that goes unnoticed, and reconsider objects of everyday life. His work is currently constructed of found and discarded materials. He saves 'these objects from their fate in the landfills, and raise them to higher status by making them into art.'

Laurel Kurtz
Kurtz is interested in Social Practices as a conceptually based art practices, challenging herself and others' socially constructed limitations and notions of acceptability. It is not dependent on, nor must it include: object making, traditional viewing venues—such as the gallery, a studio in which to create work, nor is it dependent on the permission of a third party to facilitate any events leading to its creation or visibility. It is experiential in nature.

The artists have widely exhibited in spaces including Outsider Artist Project, Seattle, to Overlapping Lines, Korea.

Sari Lievonen: Fleece
Lievonen extends 2-4 fleeces to their extremes to create a space where the viewer can go into and also walk underneath the object.
For her a modern day paradise would be a place or a space or barely a moment in which it is possible to stop and linger with the moment, connect with oneself and the environment and to be able to use any or many of your senses to experience the duality of the human condition: the relation of the mind and the body. That is so because the contemporary urban life tends to be hectic and fractional. It is filled with sounds and noises, visual excitement and need to move on all the time. It demands for interaction of various kinds and it asks one constantly to make decisions. "We have learned to navigate in a jungle of information and to meander on the hard and stony pavements of our everyday environments filled with all kind of activities and temptations."

About the Artist
Lievonen is a full-time as dancer, choreographer and teacher 1988-2001. Director and principal teacher in Saridance Dance School (Oulu) 1987-95 she was Founder of The Oulu Dance Theatre, acting as Artistic Director between 1992-1995. Her collaborative works in visual art, theatre and dance since 1988 include several productions and performances in theatres, art galleries and museums as well as in outdoor places. Many of the projects include working with diverse communities. She has also worked as a producer for many independent productions and has pursued her career in the following countries: Australia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain, Norway, South-Korea, Soviet Union, Sweden, Russia.Her exchibtions range from the Borey Art Gallery, St Petersburg/Russia to Light of Academy, Beijing.



WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Jason Wilhelm (INT_routine)
Vincent Erhart (Kryptide)