Fun A Day Dundee, 2013

Last year Morgan Cahn brought Fun A Day to Dundee inviting individuals to pick a project to do each day of the month of January, and then submit their work for a celebratory group exhibition. 2013 saw it return with 38 people taking part, myself included: I decided to use the project to kick-start re-learning French.

'Un peu quelque chose francais, chaque jour'

I studied French at high school, though I never got to the stage where I was confident in being able to hold a conversation in the language. Aware that my skills would only continue to diminish, Fun A Day seemed like the perfect opportunity to return to my learning before forgetting everything entirely. 

Easing my way back into the language, I spent January watching French tv, reading Le Monde, remembering grammar rules, emailing a friend in French and booking/planning a trip to Paris in February! I created a zine to document some of the things I'd been up to and wrote everything in French, including my to-do list for my trip to Paris.

Image courtesy of Scotsman-In-Hawaii 

There was a vast variety of work for Fun A Day, which is part of what makes it such a brilliant project to take part in - almost nothing would seem out-of-place so you can really take your own idea and run with it. 

The Celebratory Exhibition was held at Roseangle Cafe Arts, Feb 8th from 6-9pm. There was such a great atmosphere made by people bustling around talking about the works, (trying to see as many as possible over the evening) all interspersed by the sounds of the flute whenever Matt-R was summoned by ringing a bell and later in the evening there was a performance by Playground Tactics. Then we joined up with folk from the DCA's Jutta Koether Seasons and Sacraments exhibition preview for a lot of dancing at an After-Party at Redd. Fun A Day, 2013 certainly got the year off to a great beginning... ensuite j'irai a Paris!

Zoo As A Gallery, Camperdown Conversations

In January, 2013 Beth Savage and I met to discuss the concept of the zoo as a gallery - what could this mean? What would we consider? What would we challenge? 

Before holding our conversations, we decided upon six topics to act as focal points for our discussions - value, aesthetics, roles and symbols, site/situation/proximity, the gaze and ethics - and each put forward a text relating to our thinking about individual topics. The conversations weren't confined to the topics and texts we presented but were often guided by them, so that the six conversations have overlaps but are distinct in their content.

We made notes on screen prints Beth has worked on as part of her Residency at Camperdown Wildlife Centre. Toy animals explored the words as we explored our thoughts on the ethical considerations of animals in art, life, zoos etc. This project will continue to evolve. As yet it has no determined end-point, or aim, but I expect that once we listen back to the conversations we will have more of a sense of what route it could take.

Our day of conversation was recorded and can be heard by following this link from Beth's blog, there are also details of the texts/articles we read.