To & Fro
Sonya Dyer, The Betsey Drake Equation (2022)
To and Fro is a pilot project that brings together Primary’s Public and Artist Development Programmes. The project pairs four Primary residents / members with four non-resident artists who connect with our Public Programme. Following a call for expressions of interest from Primary residents and members pairs were suggested by our programme team based on a shared area of research or mutual approach and the potential for an exciting collaborative exchange!
This pilot project has come about through ongoing conversations around ways we can connect different strands of work at Primary and better support the artists we work with. The core of the programme is some paid time for each pair of artists to share their practice and develop new ideas together, with the potential for ongoing collaboration and exchange beyond To & Fro.
Pairs also receive a production fee to develop a public outcome of their choosing. Activity might exist at Primary, offsite or online, and could take the form of e.g., a discussion, screening, exhibition, performance, communal lunch, or workshop.
Participating artist pairs are: Beth Kettel (Primary) & Sonya Dyer; Jim Brouwer (Primary) & Sahjan Kooner; Khaya Job (Primary) & Wingshan Smith; and Will Harvey (Primary) & Jana Dardouk.
Beth Kettel works with text, costume, sound, video and performance. Currently Writer-In-Residence at Nottingham Contemporary 2022-23 and UK Associate on PoF at Delfina Foundation 2022. Recent commissions include: Baseline Drift, a performance part of Art Night, London; A Mutual Influence, Green Man Festival, Wales; Art & Screen Network, ICA, London. Selected solo exhibitions & events include: Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Sweden; The Lowry, Manchester; Phoenix, Leicester; THE END, TACO, London; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; MANTEL, Copperfield Gallery, London; Two Queens, Leicester; Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham; Full English, Curated by Dateagle, London; Cob Gallery, London; Caustic Coastal, Manchester; Jerwood Space, London. Kettel was recently nominated for Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize and has had work featured in print & online publications such as Contemporary Art Society – Artist To Watch; This Is Tomorrow; Mousse Magazine; Dazed Digital.
Dr Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London, and is a Somerset House Studios Resident. She was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021, and is an alum of the Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program.
Dyer’s practice explores where the centre is located in fictional narratives of the future. Recent exhibitions include The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, Whitstable Biennial, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival (all 2022), Directions: Forward, Karst Gallery (2021), Thirteen Ways of Seeing, Herbert Museum and Art Galleries (2021), Art Night London (2021), Rewriting The Future, Site Gallery (2019), Or, Dark Fecundity, The Centre for Afrofuturist Studies, USA (2018), Another World is Possible, CAMP, Copenhagen (2018) and The Claudia Jones Space Station (BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, 2017).
Hailing Frequencies Open (HFO), her current body of work, combines social justice with speculation, fantasy with the political.
Dyer is also a writer and commentator on art and culture.
Jim Brouwer is an audio-visual producer and technician working with artists, dancers, curators, musicians and art galleries. He is senior AV technician at Nottingham Contemporary. Jim is also an artist and AV consultant with a workshop at Primary, Nottingham. He works in digital, live, sound and interactive art, specialising in video, audio, live streaming, events, programming, interactive art and creative technology. In 2022 Jim was awarded an a-n Time-Space Money Bursary to support him professional practice.
Jim is a versatile artist technician who has developed projects in collaboration with other artists, musicians, producers and learning teams. He invites collaborators to share ideas of what they want to get out of a project and then using his technical skillset brings these visions to life in the form of events, installations, performances, and exhibitions.
He has worked closely with artists including Turner Prize Winner Mark Leckey, Turner Prize-nominated Artist Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Jane and Louise Wilson and Mika Rottenberg to develop multi-media elements to their work.
As a freelance technical producer and consultant, Jim has worked with artists and organisations including Liverpool Biennial, New Contemporaries, Dance4, Red Earth, The National Trust, Yelena Popova, Rebecca Lee, William Hunt, Candice Jacobs, Talbot Rice Gallery and the Baltic.
Past project’s that Jim has worked on in varying capacities include: Creative technologist / co-artist providing data sonification (using Max/MSP Programming) for Hot Spells, an audio installation in Our Sliver City, Nottingham Contemporary (2021); creative technologist for 3 Screen 6 speaker AV Sync install for artist Rebecca Lennon’s LIQUID i at Primary, Nottingham (2021); AV consultant and technical consultant with the National Trust for Jarvis Cocker’s Art Walk, Peak District, Derbyshire (2019); and technician with Nottingham Contemporary for Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s _C_A_N_O_P_Y_ (2019), a modified ceiling and LED lighting system allowing light into the otherwise dark space imitating the gaps between trees where sunlight penetrates the forest canopy.
Sahjan has recently been exploring their ancestral village in North India and its future(s) using a lens of science fiction and fantasy, they develop transporting works conceived by an enquiry that blends personal experience with technology and ecology. They work with a collaborative and contaminated approach to infect and alter the histories and future speculations off the site. They conjure a visitation of the village which delves into the lineage of the lives, mutations, migrations, technologies, sociologies off the inhabitants of the village.
Sahjan Kooner is an amalgamation of inherited worlds and speculative futures, they work in a freelance capacity to support their practice and owe a great deal to their family, they are a student of the dream state. Using video and installation, they create expansive worlds that explore the traces of love, hope and imagination that make our lives possible, along with examining a debris of questions around the technological, social and racialised structures that augment life.
Khaya Job is an artist based in Nottingham using mediums such as writing, singing and magazine making to start conversations and explore themes on life, trauma, love and everything in between.
Wingshan Smith is an artist/curator/witch based in Nottingham, UK. Her embodied practice explores the cathartics of rituals as sites for healing in community settings. She is interested in tracing forgotten histories and lost identities to invent new ways of understanding one another and our shared futures.
She currently works as Artist Development Curator at Freelands Foundation, supporting emerging artists and regional arts ecosystems across the UK. Wingshan is also Lead Curator at the artist-led project space, Chaos Magic and is the creator of Tender Coven - an online community providing witch boxes, full moon circles, and other public events.
She has previously held roles at Nottingham Contemporary and Delphian Gallery. In 2017, Wingshan graduated from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London with an MA in Art History specialising in photography, film and video in global contemporary art.
Emanating from the common ground of art and architecture William Harvey's work explores post-industrial landscapes / climate change heritage; urban mining & circular economies; and resilient community building. Some questions which drive this thinking are: How can an arts practice influence the realms of architecture and vice versa to help us navigate the social, economic and environmental issues of our time? How will we reimagine, reuse and recycle the materials, places and spaces in careful and regenerative ways that are mutually supportive locally and globally?
Using interdisciplinary thinking and processes, Will explores how the practices of art & architecture meet the questions and themes above to both envision and manifest a more hopeful and ecological future. Essential to his practice is collaboration with others, who share a commitment to evolve our spatial and material cultures to elevate our relationship with human and non-human ecologies.
Will's completed projects / publications include: Power With the People, Touchstone, Welsh Architecture Journal (2022); Privacy Tectonics (design, making & install), with collaborator Ryan Boultbee, curator Candice Jacobs & Broadway Gallery's Near Now, Nottingham (2022); Framework-for-Practice, with collaborator Ryan Boultbee & Broadway Gallery's Near Now, Nottingham (2022); A Remembered Belonging, Group show with Chaos Magic, The Curious Tower, Nottingham (2022); The Underneath, Youth Landscapers Collective, National Forest + Timber Festival, Leicestershire (2022); Nourishment Programme (Graphic Tapestry), Commission by Primary (2021 -2022); Mr Arkwright (design, material & install), for artist Jo Fairfax at Cromford Mills and Derby Museum of Making, Derbyshire (2018-2019). Will has a BA Hons in Architecture & Planning (RIBA Part I) from the University of the West of England, Bristol (2010 -2014) and a Masters in Architecture (RIBA Part II equivalent) from the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machylleth (2019-2022). Will is currently working on a variety of projects at varying scales in Nottingham, the East Midlands and the UK.
Jana Dardouk is a Lebanese-British creative exploring alternative spatial practices centred around community. Whilst collaborating with RESOLVE Collective, her practice includes writing inspired by lived experience to tackle social issues and experimenting with a variety of media from film photography to graphic design and building with waste.