Fair Isle is a group project designed to provide an environment in which artists experiment with exhibition practice as well as to exhibit the particular enquiries with which they are involved in their own art practices. 

As a group project, it enables artists and visitors alike to watch as, over 5 weeks, groups of 6 artists progressively alter the exhibition space for the next group by installing new work. It starts with the first group who install and construct artwork in the empty project space, altering it for each other and for the next group who instal their work in the same but now modified architectural space.  For the third week, the first six will remove their work so that a new group of six artists install their work in the space that is modified by the second group, and so on. The modification usually occurs not from literal movement of walls etc, but simply from the alteration of space that occurs when artworks are installed.

Fair Isle is thus not so much an accumulation of actions, as a slow progressive movement  of entanglements and disentangments that might create patterns in the minds of viewers that are a little like those produced by fair isle knitting, and that in the end will disappear into memory when the last group leaves.

This Fair Isle experiment will stop after 5 weeks, but it is a project that, if it become a more standard form of exhibition practice, would mean artists made decisions in response to the surprising things that other artists do as much as to developments in their own individual projects. It is a form of collaboration between artists that has a hint of the temporal rhythm of dance and music. It is also one that maintains the priority most artists give to their individual projects as well as valuing the role those projects play as inspiration and challenge to others. It thus aims to strengthen both individuality and communality in artpractice.

Artists were invited to participate in Fair Isle because they work with installation or with an interest in space in some other form, and, initially at least, because they had done projects at Articulate before. Within that, group composition is fairly random—artists who responded to invitations selected which group they wanted to join usually without knowing who the other artists were. They do have the opportunity however to meet beforehand to jointly determine how they want to interact with each other and the project space.

*image (left)
Bettina Bruder
work in Redfern Biennale 2014
courtesy of the artist and Redfern Biennale