The Cabot Institute is always interested in exploring new territories, and it was in that spirit the Institute appointed its first Artist in Residence in January 2012.
Artist in Residence, Neville Gabie, flying a kite at Halley Research Station, Antarctica.
Artist in Residence: Neville Gabie Neville is bringing his wealth of experience to the Cabot Institute as the first Artist in Residence. With Leverhulme Trust funding, Neville is spending his year with us working on a project called Common Room, which explores and exemplifies the connections between Cabot Institute researchers. Neville has a background in sculpture and his practice has always been driven by working in response to specific locations or situations caught in a moment of change. Highly urbanised or distantly remote, his work is a response to the vulnerability of a landscape subject to change. Motivated by a personal need to understand his own sense of place, Neville’s interest is in establishing a working relationship within a particular community as a means of considering its physical, cultural or emotional geography.
Neville has worked across the world and has work in the Tate Gallery and Arts Council Collections. His previous projects include: • Artist in Residence for the Olympic Delivery Authority on the Olympic Park in Stratford, from October 2010 - January 2012 • POSTS published by Penguin Books - [photographs from this publication have been exhibited in Japan, Korea, Germany, Portugal, South Africa and the UK] • MOMART Artist in Residence at Tate Liverpool • A four month residency at Halley Research Station, Antarctica with the British Antarctic Survey • Three years as artist in residence on a building site in Bristol - Cabot Circus ‘BS1’
Credit: Neville Gabie
• A five year project he initiated and co-curated with the artist Leo Fitzmaurice in a North Liverpool Tower block ‘up in the air’. The purpose of the Cabot Institute is to create a structure through which researchers from all fields can contribute to inter-disciplinary dialogue and research under a common umbrella; in Neville’s residency this is the ‘Common Room’. After several months of conversations and immersion in the work of the Institute, Common Room is slowly coming into being. Imagine a room, a physical space, which makes aspects of Cabot’s research and common knowledge, and the threads that connect it, visible. It might be made of glass and completely transparent, it could contain drawers, shelves, freezers, a speaker with sound, a continuous film. It might even be self sustaining, providing its own energy. It could be the physical manifestation of the most essential concerns of every individual working collectively as part of the Cabot Institute. The challenge to researchers is laid down simply: identify one singular item, object, animal, mineral or other, a sound, a model, or an equation, that in essence is the gravitational centre of your research.
What would you choose? Images from the Common Room archive.
page 18
Neville has begun collecting Common Room’s artefacts and stories, which will appear on the project’s blog: commonroomproject.blogspot.co.uk