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THIS SITE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, DONT LOOK AT IT (LOL)Extra Bones is a collective producing experimental art projects rooted in a free-thinking and wide-eyed approach. Extra Bones was established in a busy project space on Deptford High Street and the way we work now is greatly inspired by the interactions we had with the public in that space. In general, our projects are highly responsive to the environment we are placed in, and the people we have met and expect to meet. In terms of "the public" we try to blur the lines between "us" and "them", through improvising with participants, creating projects we are excited about doing ourselves, and keeping planned outcomes very simple or open.
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Gallery Closed Studio Open was an intensive two week programme of creative, collaborative events staged by Extra Bones in collaboration with Utrophia. Extra Bones HQ sat within the Utrophia Project Space on Deptford High Street and the result of being asked to host various static art shows for the 2012 Deptford X art festival was to pull out all the stops for an explosive, hyperactive, interactive and evolving mini festival of our own.
The individual projects largely focused on experimenting, working together, and learning new things, while trying to simultaneously de-mystify Art and empower everyone as an artist.
Example projects include the open invitation “Making Stuff You Normally Don’t Have The Space To Make” (see the 3rd and 4th photo); “Animation Station”, a slowly gathering animation drawn by anyone who visited the space; “Pencil Games 2012″, a day of tongue in cheek competitive arts, and much more from life drawing classes to the costume design/ wrestling workshop/ performance staged by punk band Yucky Slime (see the 6th photo).
Gallery Closed Studio Open tumblr blog which remains incomplete due to lost passwords!
Making Things You Normally Wouldn’t Make’s own blogspot
Made For Extra Bones is the name under which short runs of publications have been produced by Extra Bones.
Curating the physical object may be the project itself, as with the Finkin’ ‘Bout series, or Four Maps, where artists were specifically chosen to respond to a brief set by Extra Bones (the former); or an exhibition hosted by Utrophia (the latter).
In other cases, the publication is a documentation of a project. For example the Lunch Music events have been documented with the Music Of Lunch Music cds, and Draw and Be Drawn was documented after a series of sessions.
The third type of publication is when the making and the finished thing are interlinked. For example, Fun Day was the direct result of the Zine Making Fun Day project, the production was happening from the start of the Extra Bones project. Paper Jam and Trome were also projects about making d.i.y. publications, or more accurately, the very act of re-producing images at the photocopier. This process was the starting point and inspiration for the project, as well as the method of production.
Extra Bones blog posts about Four Maps
Extra Bones blog posts about Draw And Be Drawn
Extra Bones blog posts about Trome
Extra Bones blog posts about Finkin’ ‘Bout
Extra Bones blog posts about Fun Day
Extra Bones blog posts about Music Of Lunch Music
Extra Bones blog posts about Music Of Lunch Music 2
Stuff School came into existence when Extra Bones was offered use of a small, roofless building in the playground of an ex-school, to create a drop-in workshop as part of Deptford X festival, 2013.
It’s a platform, and loose set of instructions designed for short or long sessions for any age or ability. It has also been hosted by Hackney Wicked Festival, and won runner up in The People’s Art Prize 2015.
Stuff School is all about the investigation of stuffs; be it strings, old vegetables, mud, paper or ash, as if we have never seen them before. Investigations are loosely directed by four departments;
Limbs - physical experiments, Ears - audible, Eyes - visual, and Snout - vocal or olfactory.
Stuff School aims to;
a) Create a situation that encourages and celebrates “play”; a childlike exploration of a material, without any expectations.
b) Embrace simple actions; we had an idea of an “anti-workshop”, we didn’t want to necessarily teach any craft, or established process, the idea of material-dictated actions was more interesting to us.
c) Encourage a loose but exhaustive reconsideration of materials, looking past what might be initially considered waste, unwanted, or mundane.
The ultimate goal for Stuff School is that participants can look at everything around them with a sense of wonder and possibility, through this valuing themselves as a creative investigator, communicating more with their surroundings and themselves.
The structure we put in place was devised to open possibilities up, with just enough rules to initiate ideas and approaches. The structure involved the four departments, which focused approach; only using one stuff at a time, which ensured a thorough investigation; and textbooks we made, which were full of very basic and quite abstract starting points, for example “always in transit”, “you don’t need to tell anyone what you’re doing”, “zoom in”, “What are the animals thinking?”.
Some examples of actions that came about include; whittling tightly wound rolls of differently coloured paper, using clay as a print making medium, making harmonies with balloons, mud memory story telling, amplifying freshly squeeze oranges, creating an immersive night sky sculpture with black paper and a pin, finding single letters of type in piles of white ash.
Progress In Work is a series of events designed to a) exhibit the making, rather than any finished work as the “art”, and b) put artists in a new setting, in terms of location, time-frame, collaborators and approach.
Each of the first three events took place at the Utrophia Project Space, over a long weekend, with three carefully chosen exhibitors each time. There was also a responsive development to the series itself, with emphases specific to each event.
Progress In Work #1, featuring Neb Poulton, Jono Allen and Surya Buck was very much a show of three fairly focused lines of experimentation, each with their own idiosyncratic methods trying to co-exist in a fairly small section of the project space.
Progress In Work #2, featuring Jack Brown, Hugh Barrell and Bernie Kerr, had a more focused approach, with each artist using only construction, screen printing, and sound respectively, but all working on the idea of creating a den together. There was also a much greater emphasis on working with visitors to the show.
Progress In Work III, featuring Reena Makwana, Tim Spooner and Stephen Fowler, continued the idea of the public contributing, especially on the opening night, and focused in a wider way on the location of Deptford High Street as a source of inspiration. The artists also focused on the common thread of “stories and environments collected, explored, narrated”. In addition to the work itself, the artists produced a daily photocopied abstract documentation of their progress.
More about this project and links to the artists
Extra Bones blog posts about Progress In Work #1
The Spinny Whoa-a-trope (as in Zoetrope but more “whooaaa!”) Is a rotating drawing board. Along with specific exercises, it was devised to open up possibilities for team work and a less restrained approach to drawing as well as building unpredictability and excitement into the act of putting pen to paper.
The six or so activities usually begin with a version of the classic “exquisite corpse” game, and conclude with an instinctive chasing of the line drawn by the previous drawer, with your own line, while the Whoa-a-trope spins. After this, participants step back and view the end result through cardboard tubes as it moves before them. This has in the past been accompanied by a semi improvised song!
The project has worked to great effect with various age groups at Twinkle Park Festival (see the first three pictures), DIY Cultures at Rich Mix, and at The Saatchi Gallery with year 9 school groups (see bottom three pictures).
Lunch Music is Extra Bones’ platform for presenting free music at lunch time. The acts chosen are only united by the fact that they are not like the other acts, and that probably you can eat your lunch while listening to them!
Styles have included free-form electronics, experimental acapella, lo-fi punk, solo harp, Appalachian mountain music… pictured here are Seek Drummer (behind the title), Foxout!, Malphino, The Bow Creek Ramblers, Goodbye Leopold, Rozi Plain, Halo Halo, Gasp! Cracking Eggs, Anguish Sandwich and Love Distance.
So far Lunch Music has run as 3 series of consecutive Saturday shows, one act per week, and also staged various multi-act line-ups, including a Utrophia Collective special broadcast live on Resonance FM.
The first two series were celebrated with releases of “Music of Lunch Music” cdrs produced by Made For Extra Bones.
Some more past guests- Anacreon, Jules and Gav, Sam Lee, Trace Fluids, Yearning Kru, Jonny Farr, Charcoal Owls, On The Roof, I Had A Dream, NOW, Dog Legs, Dm Clark, Female Band, Paco Jr, Spinmaster Plantpot, Peter Rockmount, Frozy, Charles Hayward, Corpse Lights, Hugh Smith, Vision Fortune, Trace Fluids, Colin Min Sai, Jazzman John Clarke, DJ Tendraw, Phil Minton’s Feral Choir, Black Spot, Sicamore, Lies Init, Jackdaw Sandwitch, Peanuts, Mouth 4 Rusty, Rosie Okae, Wynford, The Muddy Lane String Band, Adam Bohman, Hudshrimp Shrimpson, Machine Woman, Lady Neptune, Christopher John Weaver, Lucy Farrell, RABBIT, Instant Market Music, Yucky Slime, Naseby Fox, Crushed Beaks,
Extra Bones blog posts about Lunch Music including some videos
Listen to Music Of Lunch Music releases and the Live On Resonance special
Paper Jamming as a project came just after naming Paper Jam.
Paper Jam is a zine made by Extra Bones founder Andrew Kerr when he had unlimited access to a photocopier for one evening only, with no notice. Because of this freedom as well as constraint, Andrew took a whole load of previously unrelated sketchbook work, a few photos, a chain and a few found images and jammed them all together, using the photocopier as a unifier.
Andrew used a number of techniques to get the most out of the machine and therefore the images he was working with; printing on top of a print; moving the original in various ways as it is scanned; flattening a 3D object; vastly decreasing or increasing an original’s scale. These techniques are what are now taught in Paper Jamming sessions.
Using these techniques celebrate the photocopier as more than just a duplicating device, and celebrate chance as a creative force. It is also rooted in the Extra Bones ideal of pushing the tools and resources you have, seeing what extra value they offer, and being inspired by their inherent properties.
The images here are; Two spreads from Paper Jam; One spread from Trome, created with students at Eltham College; A spread from the Fun Day zine, and an action shot from Zine Making Fun Day; Two spread and a pile of the collected work zine made at Wellcome Collection’s Saturday Studio.
Draw & Be Drawn was originally a drop-in drawing club, running weekly at the Utrophia Project Space. That first series of sessions culminated in an exhibition. Work from a second series was pulled together in a zine, and there have been a few ad hoc sessions at events such as Twinkle Park Festival too.
The concept is as simple as the name, and is open to all, with participants defining how much encouragement, guidance and tutoring is offered.
Alongside the simplicity of the project, and the accessibility that it provides, is the uniting, and rewarding result of being encouraged to look for a decent amount of time at someone else (friend or stranger)’s face!
Participants of all ages came along purposefully or popped in on a whim, with friends or without, having not drawn in 20 years, or being in the midst of art degrees, and made records of each other on bits of white paper.
One of our favourite projects from the Cryptic Quest residency was The Jungle Gateway. Extra Bones worked with the Learning Disabilities Project at Bede House, Rotherhithe to create a three dimensional collage installation.
Half Stories the publication, is the result of project led by Extra Bones for Hato Press. The brief had simply been to devise a drawing workshop for a small group of participants. We chose to focus on an attempt to draw “from the back of the head”, half awake, or automatic drawing. The group went through a series of activities designed to disengage the conscious mind from the drawing process, disrupt preciousness for a drawing, and embrace unpredictable results and work with them.
Bring The Wood To The Trees was a installation/performance/workshop project concerned with the reuse of discarded wood. Specifically with the idea that through considering the material’s properties, we can re-instill the timber with it’s powers, both physical and mythical, and through tuning into, and grasping some creative possibilities, embed our own thoughts into the new object too.
This idea of creating charms, or totems (or just compositions) though embracing chance and reconsidering discarded materials has re-emerged a few times in other Extra Bones projects, most directly during the Cryptic Quest residency’s charm building project, and The Bigheads.
Zine Making Fun Day was an experimental and hyperactive project devised to co-inside with the 2012 South East London Zine Fest. We led various activities designed to explore and push what could be done with art making and reproducing with very little time, but a lot of ambition.
Here’s some more on some of the activities (numbers relating to images). 2; simultaneous team drawing through the window onto acetates - these images became separate layers for screen printing back on top of each other. 3; painting onto paper which was then photocopied onto. 4; a “Paper Jam” session, using the photocopier as an editing tool to overlay and distort images. 5; free drawing to live improvised music - there were two of these sessions, the first was with children from Tidemill Academy, and the drawings from that session were printed with a risograph machine after crops were chosen by the participants (see last image).
We then compiled the zine Fun Day from the results in an edition of 50, each with a unique screen printed double cover and a unique paint and photocopy centre page.
South East London Zines facebook
Peckham Print Studio, who made the screens for us and lent their portable printing table