Art, like real estate, is often concerned with location. The provenance of an ancient vase, the nationality of an artist and the site of an exhibition all have a bearing on a given work - or at least our perception of it. But some art takes location itself as a subject, and questions the nature of here, there and the strange territories in between. For the exhibition Locale: British Artists in Residence, opening this Saturday at 1a Space in Cattle Depot Artist Village, six visiting artists aim to explore these themes in new ways.
Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman, a couple from Manchester known for their collaborative partnership, have often worked with space and place, and helped to orchestrate this special programme.
Last spring, they were 1a Space's first resident artists when they created Turf: Garden in To Kwa Wan, a site-specific project for which they invited locals from the neighbourhood around Cattle Depot to contribute plants to a collaborative sculpture.
After some positive responses, 1a Space wanted Rushton and Tyman to return, but they wanted to bring along another four artists from their extended network in Britain.
Rushton says the turf project was about 'addressing the local community', whereas Locale deals with the idea of the local in a different way. 'The artists draw on their own environment, and the way they understand the local, which is today very global,' she says.
This local/global overlap appears explicitly in much of the work, such as Melanie Jackson's Root Entry. Jackson, whose multi-channel video Made in China screened at Videotage in 2005, took an image of a woman planting a seed from the UN website, and wanted to see how it would 'grow' if she invited others to animate her drawings for a commission of GBP200 (HK$3,200).