The exhibition consisted of a performance in two parts, the first, designed for a crowd on the opening night of the exhibition, and the second as a series of one to one conversations with audience members during the course of the exhibition. Both versions of the performance were accompanied by live projected drawing, and the revealing and moving of a series of video projections on lightweight, ‘lichen’ screens. Over the week-long run of the exhibition, through repeated conversations, re-drawing, and re-tellings, the story of the stick crystallised, written through re-performing in dialogue with others. Alongside this, the projections of videos, and live drawings in the room, that were placed and removed between guests, settled into position, finding form and placement through experimentation and interaction.

You can read AJ Dahoney’s text about the work for ArtLyst here.

A particular lichen covered stick has been in my car since 2011, after casting a significant shadow across the dashboard during a road trip performance work with the artist Dan Coopey. In Lichen Hunting on the West Coast, this incident is reproduced as drawings, anecdotes, re-enactments and narratives that are performed in dialogue with the audience, creating a new body of work by following trace-lines of the stick.

You can listen to a conversation about the project between me and Fatos Üstek here.

With thanks to Frances Dunlop, Iain Mackie, and all I talked with in Greenock, Banff and Inuvik, as well as Candida Gertler, and all at Outset, and Dan Coopey, for giving me the stick.