What is your tutor up to? Caroline Wright

Caroline Wright, OCA tutor and Programme Leader for Fine Art, has her work featured on ITV during the week commencing 29 April 2019.

ITV Creates features one artist per week during 2019, each commissioned to create an ident which will be screened before programmes commence on the main ITV channel. Caroline’s practice combines visual and performance art that is often site responsive and these approaches combine in her ident, which reflects her interest in the behaviour of materials, and the alchemical processes that can happen when making work. ITV Creates artists were asked to respond to their memories and experiences of ITV and idents to date have included materials such as ancient saris (Sutapa Biswas), flecks of paint (Mark TItchner), backlit filmic sequences (Ravi Deepres) and a walk-in wooden structure (CJ Mahony).
Taking work into a television studio challenges its boundaries – lighting, filmic sequencing and the editing process, to name but a few, can re-frame an idea, extending its potential or changing its focus. Rather like taking a child to school on their first day, knowing all the joys and concerns that might befall them, so is taking a piece of visual and performance work to camera a nerve wracking but equally fascinating experience. Establishing a shared vision and common language with the director, cameraman, editor, producer and other team members at the outset is paramount; the television studio process advances inexorably towards those legendary words “that’s a wrap”.

The Breath Control Project

The Coronet Theatre in Notting Hill, London is located in a building steeped in history built in 1898 by leading architect W. G. R. Sprague. In 1923 it was converted to a cinema and passed through several owners including Gaumont and The Rank Organisation, with a brief spell when part of the building was used as a Pentecostal Church. Famous for featuring in the Richard Curtis film Notting Hill, The Coronet Theatre is now restored for use and run by The Print Room  
For four nights (29 May to 1 June) Caroline will be showing work from her project Breath Control at The Coronet. Breath Control is about the inhalations and exhalations that form the melody, rhythm and punctuation of our everyday existence and addresses air quality and our personal relationship to breathing. In the studio theatre Caroline will be staging Breath Control: Osmosis, performed with her daughter mezzo soprano Laura Wright and for this iteration of the project, guest performer and OCA Programme Leader for Music, Carla Rees.
OCA music and Fine Art students will be aware of the recent call out to work together on a collaborative project, an initiative that was in part promoted by Carla and Caroline working together. Members of the public have been invited to perform in the Breath Control: Osmosis and their knowledge and experiences will inform the script. An interactive installation entitled Breath Control: Notes in the auditorium of The Coronet Theatre accompanies the performance.
2019 is the year of the Biennale Arte in Venice, curated by Ralph Rugoff and entitled May You Live In Interesting Times. Alongside curated shows and international pavilions in the Arsenale and the Giardini there are a wealth of fringe events across Venice. Past examples include One Million Years (Reading), a work featuring a pair of performers counting from one million years in the past to one million years in the future as a meditation on time by the Japanese artist On Kawara, presented by Ikon Gallery Birmingham and the Future Generation Art Prize in 2017. One of the 2019 fringe events will be Alive in the Universe, taking place in the elegant and historic Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, which is situated just off Venice’s Grand Canal. In addition to artists showing one minute films that represent their response to the project title, a number of selected artists will each exhibit in the extraordinary Palazzo for one day each, showing work that addresses different aspects of what it is to be alive today. Caroline will be showing a new video work that takes the edges of breath and its fragile balance to exploring vocal and bodily limitations. challenging the reciprocal pressures and imperfect borders of breathing. Entitled At the Point of Perforation, the work is part of her ongoing project Breath Control.

Notes

Tickets for Breath Control at The Coronet Theatre go on sale from 3 May 2019, and will be available here https://www.the-print-room.org/
Breath Control is supported by Cambridge Junction and subsidised through public funding through an Arts Council England National Lottery grant with additional in-kind support from Life of Breath, Bristol. Breath Control: Notes was originally commissioned by Space to Breathe and was shown at Somerset House as part of UTOPIA 2016. Breath Control: Hyperventilation was originally commissioned by, and premiered at Cambridge Junction as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. The first iteration of Breath Control was commissioned by Le Collectif Blast, Angers France. Breath Control: Osmosis was shown at Latitude Festival 2017 supported by the Wellcome Trust. Breath Control is produced by Artsadmin 
ITV Creates is curated by Charlie Levine
For more information about the Venice Biennale, read OCA tutor Bryan Eccleshall’s blog posts here

Links

carolinewright.com
https://www.the-print-room.org/
http://www.aliveintheuniverse.com/headlining-artists
http://www.artnet.com/artists/lynette-yiadom-boakye/
https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/caroline-wright
https://www.itv.com/itvcreates
Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice