Rachel Busby
RETREAT
This is not a holiday
Hardwick Gallery, University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham
Symposium and launch: Saturday 6th October, 12:30 – 5:00pm
Exhibition open: Monday 8th – Friday 26th October, 10am-4pm, Mon-Fri
Participating artists: Flora Wellesley Wesley, Hannah Clark, Indianna Solnick-Farrell, Alice Gale-Feeny, Kevin Hunt, Sam Mercer, Rachel Busby, Eleanor Sikorski, Sooyon Kim, Polly Elizabeth Baker, James Hankey, Rowan Lear, Alex Noble.
SYMPOSIUM Saturday 6th October, 12:30-4pm
This symposium explores workshopping, retreating and self-organisation, and offers an opportunity to take part in a half-day micro-RETREAT. The symposium will involve presentations from Rowan Lear, Hannah Clark and Kevin Hunt, a performance by Alice Gale-Feeny, and a workshop on consensus decision-making, with lecturer and theorist Jean Boyd leading the plenary. There’ll also be freshly baked bread, a RETREAT staple. The symposium will take place at Hardwick Campus, room AP026B (Project-Space).
The symposium will be followed by the exhibition launch from 4 to 5pm.
Polly Elizabeth Baker, paper works. Sam Mercer, video Rachel Busby, paintings
Rachel Busby, paintings
Eleanor Sikorski
Polly Elizabeth Baker, paper works. Sam Mercer, video Rachel Busby, paintings
RETREAT is an annual week-long residential workshop that has taken place in remote areas across Britain. It is not a holiday: it is an opportunity to enjoy communal living and intensely debate artistic practices. Michael Whitby has organised RETREAT since its beginnings in 2008. The act of generosity – of time, energy and ideas – from all involved, and a commitment to the group’s self-organisation, informs the project. As an evolving, experimental space RETREAT functions as a temporary autonomous zone, a model for existing inside a system that allows no outside.
Originally a gathering of students from Wimbledon College of Art, the project has produced a unique and extensive network of friendships and working relationships, and the exhibition at Hardwick Gallery presents the work of 13 participants at the 2018 workshop in Northumbria.
The exhibition will also present a collection of RETREAT posters, alongside an archive of publications and films: a rich resource that are not just a record of activities and discussions that took place, but artworks in themselves.