Eddy Dreadnought Art

March 2013, and Eddy had some pamphlets on the ‘Furlough’ table, at the ‘Sheffield Zine Fest’, Electric Works. They were a record of a Facebook message that he had posted earlier in the month, which consisted of a tower of 378 short lines of letters from different languages, along with some abstract symbols.

His intention was partly to test the limits of Facebook by posting a very long and abstract message, something like the builders of Babel challenged the invisible forces of their Jehovah. And partly to quietly subvert social networking, by using the site for a solitary, disengaged act, creating along the way a rare bubble of spaciousness rather than dense scrolling prose.

 During February and March 2013, Eddy posts 21 tweets on Twitter (@Eddydreadnought). These were solo improvisations around the themes of early morning lightning, asteroid and meteorite strikes, and other explosive lights. The series was augmented by attaching a paper copy of the earlier tweets to the village hall notice-board in the the highest village in England, Flash.

January 2013, and Eddy rehearses and performs at ‘NewVolutions’, a live art micro-festival in Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. His piece ‘Fortune’ was loosely based on the start of the recession in 2008, and consisted of a ritual to support the financial sector, and to reaffirm faith in ‘trickle-down’ economics. 

Photographs by Julian Hughes

It was derived from a DVD about the UK economy made by Eddy in 2010. After a single college showing it was subsequently lost during a sudden computer freeze. Here are stills from it.

December 2012, and Eddy does a performance in the wonderful old anatomy lecture theatre in Summerhall, Edinburgh. It is part of the ‘Anatomy#3: Pantomime for the End of Time’ night. Subverting the notion of the cheery communal song pointed-out by comic characters just before the finale ‘walk-down’ in a pantomime, Eddy led the singing of a chorus, interspersed with spoken verse, to reference ice and snow as a metaphor for mortality and oblivion. The piece was from a fictitious pantomime version of Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’.

Here is the chorus, set to a ‘nordic Calvinist dirge’:

‘A starving captain goes outside

And he may be some little time

Stumbling through the glaciers

To a crystalline sublime’

In late November 2012 ‘The Red Headed League’ publication is launched by Furlough in BlocSpace, Sheffield. Eddy had been invited to contribute, along with 12 other red haired artists, as a partial re-enactment of the Sherlock Holmes story.

Eddy’s piece has a photograph (above) of a model abalone, followed by an experiment in rococo writing. Here is an excerpt:   

   ”I lower myself through the biggest respiratory pore by a rope harness and hug a crystal chandelier, which whispers ‘essere brillano bianco’ (be white, glisten).

   We are suspended above a vast mother-of-pearl auditorium, six tiers of slow spiral balconies high. Far below, the floor is filled by waving tentacles, applauding an anterior company of ballerinas, on a frilly epipodium. The air is thick with bel canto, and haliotic cries of ‘bravo!’ and ‘posso sentire il mare!’ (I can hear the sea).” 

Copies of the publication are available from www.furlough.org.uk    

November 2012 and Eddy performs at the Brautigan Book Club’s Year End Event, in Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club. He assembles his flatpack sculpture made of lint for 30 minutes, and then reads out Richard Brautigan’s 52 word short story ‘Lint’. Above is the rehearsal version (summer), and the final show (winter) version of the sculpture. The lint was ‘Innotherm’ recycled denim insulation, cut with white cotton lofting. 

Here is an excerpt form Brautigan’s ‘Lint’:

‘I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than in words.’ 

October/November 2012, and Eddy has an installation in the group show ‘Beyond the Material World’ at Bar Lane Studios in York, curated by IAQA.

Called ‘The Museum of Domestic Comets’, it rested on the conceit of a domestic icebox  becoming a museum of comets. The piece played with scale, and how ‘transcendent’ objects might be grasped and made immanent.

The audience was invited to interact with the piece by responding to ice-cubes and frozen paper from a small freezer, by drawing or photographing them, or by writing/drawing their own memories of celestial bodies. Perhaps prompted by Eddy’s large close-up photographs of ice-cubes, with text, on the wall.

An example of the text: ‘In 1908 there was a comet explosion in Siberia, heard 1000 miles away. In Western Europe it was bright enough to read a newspaper at night without a lamp. The headlines were about the comet’.

October 2012, and Eddy does a pecha kucha at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, part of their 7th PK night, with a theme of ‘Drawing Lines’. Eddy billed his as ‘a sort of performance, a sort of semi-fictional CV/misery memoir’.

Above are three of the slides.

The original version had Eddy lecturing to a wooden sculpture of the fountain in his final MA show in Persistence Works, Sheffield (see post for 1st June 2010)

September 2012 and Eddy puts this small image into a BlocSpace fundraiser in Sheffield. It follows on from his DVD ‘Upperthorpe Circles’, shown in June 2012 (see previous post below). Here is part of the DVD text commentary:

’ I dreamed that Sheffield had a Cultural Revolution

A counter clockwise revolution

The middle class were taken to camps on the Ponderosa for re-education

Were forced to walk anti-clockwise around the perimeter of Upperthorpe night and day

Were pelted with chips from its 7 tower blocks 

Were made to drink budget coffee from polystyrene cups

Were denounced by saxophonists on Shipton Street

Were placarded by students in the evangelical factories of Philadelphia’. 

It reflects his growing interest in an imaginary future cultural revolution in Sheffield, extrapolated from those in the 17th century English Civil War, in the former USSR, and China.

September 2012, and after a visit to St Bartholomew’s historic Pathology Museum in London, Eddy is reminded of his previous anatomical studies and artwork, and the embryology of thought. He produces this small sculpture, ‘Larval Thought’ from wax and found objects.

July 2012 and Eddy performs his ‘Spectre of a Mass Cyberattack’ at Access Space in Sheffield. This was part of a series of performances at the closing night of Susanne Palzer’s un-residency there- RAM/RAR/RAA+RAP(s). The brief was to address digital technology without using it in the performance.

 June  2012, and saxophonist James Sweeting played a pop-up music recital on the site of the former Shipton Street Settlement in Upperthorpe, Sheffield, devised and filmed by Eddy. It featured numbers from a 1927 concert played at the Settlement. The DVD was shown at a conference about the late warden, Arnold Freeman, at Freeman College, Sheffield, and was later accepted into the Freeman Archive at Sheffield University.