The Wick in Layers

RCA IED / Gallery-Residency

3 -13 March 2016

Tutors: Dr. Libby Heaney and Charlotte Jarvis

arebyte presents a project with Masters students from the Information Experience Design and Visual Communication courses at the Royal College of Art. The students have been asked to use the text Autonomous Art in the Neoliberal City by Josephine Berry as a starting point to make research-led works about Hackney Wick. They are using a variety of digital and analogue methods to investigate the systems and networks of arebyte's local area. This research will be presented in situ in the gallery space during the residency, creating a space of fluid meaning and connections that reflect the ever-changing narratives surrounding the area.

Wei Lun Chang’s research catalogues Hackney Wick’s graffiti and uses this as a starting point for typographic play around the bylaws of the Olympic Park.

Annelise Keestra & Franziska Hatton develop an evolving visual conversation looking at the dualism existing between the two areas of Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park. Investigating language of space and place, as well as the sense of place and non-place, their mirrored researches question authenticity and supermodernity, the effervescent and the controlled. By looking at historical resonances and finding connections between the past and the present, they aim to open the discussion on the future of the area.

In The Green Screen of the Olympic Park, Yinan Song makes Google Street View videos of old graffiti and street art of Hackney, using the green screen technique to project them onto the endless, immaculate green fence surrounding the Olympic Park, where only commissioned art works are allowed.

Georgia Ward Dyer is using reclaimed materials from the local area’s industrial and creative industries to build a communal table for the group to work and eat at together during the residency, culminating in a dinner & discussion with invitations to selected individuals who have each played roles in the show’s existence, from Olympic legacy advisers to local artists to landlords. The menu will be themed by the Wick’s industrial past, present, and future, and after the residency ends the furniture built during it will be returned to the streets from whence the materials came, to continue as part of a cycle of resources and re-use.

Jordan Gamble’s piece Foundations looks at the historic foundations of Hackney Wick and how it has changed over time and the symbolism behind the term ‘hackney candle’. It takes the form of a time-based installation using wax, silk, brick and other materials relevant to the Hackney Wick’s history.