Current Events

Over coming months there will be a number of events in London, Birmingham, Bristol and Cambridge as the Collective continues to grow and attracts wider interest

• Friday 16th October 2009: National Collective Exhibition. We are planning the first national Collective exhibition in Bristol, at the Tobacco Factory, where George Ferguson has kindly offered his wonderful loft space. Some information about this has already been sent and further details will follow from Louise Copping
  
  
• Friday 18th December 2009: Rollo Gallery - Collective viewing for 'The Body in Women's Art Now: Embodied: Part 1'

The Collective in the News

• January 2010: The Financial Times visited the November exchange meeting of one of the London groups, and wrote the experience up as part of an article on buying art to share. The article made up the front page of the 'House & Home' supplement in the Weekend FT.
  
  
• August 2009:  The Telegraph: Francesca Gavin references The Collective in an article on collecting contemporary art

• June 2009: Financial Times: Following an interview with Paul Tanner from the  Founding Group, the Financial Times reported on the Collective as part of a feature on collectors.

• March 2009: The Birmingham Collective are referenced on the Arts Council website

• May 2008: Own Art - an interview with Rob Lee of the Collective on the Arts Council England website - as part of the ACE Own Art programme

• May 2008: Time Out- a review of Home Suite in Time Out

• April 2008: Art Best Seller #4 - an interview with Rob Lee of the Collective in the Russian Art Journal 'Art Best Seller'

Previous Events

• Friday 2nd October 2009: Multiple Store Collective Evening - Nick Sharp has invited all Collective members to an evening at the Westbrook Gallery on Friday 2 October. It will be a great opportunity to see a wide range of works by excellent artists.

"We are very pleased to invite members of the Collective groups to an evening Drinks Reception at Westbrook Gallery, 8 Windmill Street (just off Charlotte Street) London W1T 2JE on Friday 2nd October, 6-8.30pm.

At our first show as part of our new 6-month's residency at the Gallery, we will be showing the new prints by Fiona Banner, Dan Hays and Simon Periton that we launched in April, as well as a selection of our earlier commissions by Cornelia Parker, David Batchelor, Alison Wilding, Langlands & Bell, Keith Coventry, Anya Gallaccio and others"

• Saturday 25th July 2009: "Sharing and Collecting Contemporary Art" The first meeting of the newly formed "Wyseing Collective" at the highly regarded Wyseing Arts Centre in the beautiful countryside outside Cambridge
  
  
• Tuesday 21st July 2009: The Collective Birmingham will explore the professional life of three local artists/groups with growing national and international reputations in the art world: Simon & Tom Bloors who recently had its first large scale solo exhibition 'As Long as it Lasts' at Eastside Projects, Juneau Projects and Elizabeth Rowe
  
  Existing members of the group have decided that to show their commitment to supporting local galleries and artists, it will mark its formation through sponsorship of Eastside Projects 'Legacy Project for Eastside'. A Silver Birch tree from Simon & Tom Bloors recent show, will be planted in the forthcoming City Park. The group will also acquire a limited edition print to begin its collection.

• July 4th 2009: National Business Meeting at Camden Arts Centre, Arkwright Road, Camden. We are planning a business meeting to discuss the expansion of the Collective and how to manage the growth. Anyone is welcome to attend this meeting to contribute ideas and help firm up actions.

• July 4th 2009: A wonderful curated show has been installed at the home of Mark Blackburn from the AWOL group in London to which all the Collective groups are exclusively invited. More details to follow about this experiment in curating and collecting. This is a possible model that groups may wish to follow in future

• July 2009: Birmingham Collective group aims to become fully fledged through the collective purchase of a new work in July as part of The Art of Collecting, a series of events supported by Arts Council England and Arts & Business to nurture collecting and market development in the West Midlands. Members from London have been supporting Sarah Allen in establishing the group.

• On June 12th 2009, at 7pm: Rokeby Gallery in London are inviting all members of Collective groups to a special event to meet the artists behind the intriguing agency known as WITH. The Crawford Group in particular is interested in commissioning WITH to produce a new work. With recent events at ICA, Hayward Gallery and Tate, WITH 'performs' as a 'self-help company' providing a range of 'Life Enhancement Products' and is positioned somewhere between conceptual art and corporate satire. Its 'products' seek to dissect our obsessions, principles and economic ideals.
   
  The artists behind WITH, Alasdair Hopwood and Sean Parfitt, will chat about ideas for a new commission with any of the Collective groups who may be interested and provide a glimpse of the history, motivations and ambitions of WITH.
  
  This will also be a good opportunity for us to get together again, socialise and informally discuss the Collective's future plans. For those interested, the event will be followed by a visit to the SHUNT LOUNGE, the rather weird and seductive experimental theatre/live art venue in the catacombs beneath London Bridge. www.shunt.co.uk
  

• June 2009: Another group is being set up linked to the highly regarded Wysing Arts centre near Cambridge. Always worth a visit.  www.wysingartscentre.org

 

May - June 2008

Home Suite is a new site-specific promenade performance by the artist Kathryn Fry that uses domestic habit and routine to explore ideas of freedom and control.  

Commissioned by the Collective, a group of people who buy art jointly to display in their own homes, the work examines how we perceive time and ultimately how we might control it. 

In the performances, we watch as a chorus of seven identical females navigate spaces of domesticity on seven days, weaving a narrative arc that describes the evolution of a marriage, its bearing on romance and the effect of both on domestic routine and the role of a housewife.  

During the daily absence of the husband, the bloom of romance begins to fade as novelty is confronted by reality and adventure tends to the tedious. Whether to recapture or to forget that which is felt to be slipping away, Home Suite’s characters turn to a new relationship. The home becomes their primary focus, offering its own form of romance, its comforts and rewards. It calls for a full investment, both physical and emotional.But ultimately it betrays. The habits and rituals, chores and routines, the day planned, the details and obsessions, are not life, they are irrelevant to life and distract from living. Conversely, perhaps perversely, they offer a distraction from the fear of discovering there is no longer anything else. 

Home Suite is played out in the homes of the Collective. These vary from house to apartment to barge but the story unfolds across the same zones in each, providing a spatial link from site to site. Taking site-specificity to its purest form, nothing can be invented, nothing can be put there that has not been previously chosen and placed by the owners.  

Unseen, we follow Home Suite’s characters as their days unravel. At times we are free to roam, whether as part of a group or alone; at others we are held in each room - even seemingly under the characters’ control.

Home Suite and The Collective is supported by the Arts Council England.

the artist 

Whether taking the form of performance, film or installation, Katharine Fry’s work always returns to ideas of freedom and control within time. Beginning with investigations into basic movement, removing both beginning and end, she retains only the middle. This middle is questioned in conjunction with repetition as movement takes the form of detailed rituals and domestic routines. Everyday actions are forced or stretched until people become like objects themselves. It is here that Katharine Fry seeks freedom; fascinated by ideas of time, how we perceive time and ultimately how we might control it. She suggests repetition as the physical manifestation of a thwarted attempt to do so, and raises a mirror to the systems in which we place ourselves. Katharine Fry was born in Belgium in 1981 but is of British origin. An artist working predominantly in live art and performance, she studied MA Scenography at Central St. Martins. Previous work includes Matin Après-Midi at Camden People’s Theatre, Picnic in Mile End Artspark and Quilters Quadrille for Rules & Regs at a space, Southampton. Katharine Fry lives and works in London.