Hope Land
Michael Mayhew: 4 November - 23 November 2013
A residency and exhibition by Michael Mayhew
4th November – 23rd November 2013
Michael Mayhew states that Hope Land is a real place.
For the duration of this residency@ R-Space daily life becomes art,
Making tea is comparable to painting a canvas,
Cracking eggs becomes a dance Eating food becomes performance
Striking matches becomes a durational act.
Hope Land transforms a gallery into an installation of life & living.
A social immediate and crucial space for out lives and times.
Michael Mayhew is a performance artist whose work is highly-regarded both nationally and internationally, and has been incorporated into the British Council Performance in Profile. He is cited as ‘one of the most original and searching artists currently working in the UK’ (John E McGrath – Artistic Director, National Theatre of Wales). He is regularly invited into higher education institutions delivering seminars, lectures and educational projects (includes Liverpool Hope, University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, Plymouth University, and University of Greenwich). Michael has been regularly project-funded by Arts Council England as well as being a client of ACE. His process and practice is cited as ‘important, significant, and influential’ (Lois Keidan, Live Art Development Agency).
Lisburn 2013 Hope-land examines hope as a source for social change, and searches for hope in the lives, homes and streets of Lisburn and districts to generate a performative installation that informs, affects, and promotes hope. For a 14-day period the artist will undergo an immersive process that will engage and participate with the living systems of the lives and people in and around Lisburn. He will search for hope. He will ask what hope means. He will enquire into people’s hopes. This will partly be achieved by arriving and engaging with people in social environments. It will also be achieved by establishing the ‘Archive of Hope’, a forum for debate and receptacle of considered responses to the research and information Mayhew engages with. Mayhew will establish a series of public forums and social gatherings at R-Space that will debate hope as a personal reflection and social implication.
Mayhew will work for one week travelling on foot through the geographical terrain of Lisburn. This first week will focus on gathering raw material and data for the following week which will involve working with the found in a process of wrapping, burning and painting, and a series of performative rituals that will see the compositional structuring of Hope-land as an installation.