Open Frequency
Open Frequency is a curated on-line programme presenting new developments in contemporary art. Selected artists are nominated by key curators, writers and artists from across the UK. Recently profiled Scotland-based artists include Katy Dove, Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan, Camilla Low, Toby Paterson and Hayley Tompkins.
Open Frequency is a programme area of Axis, the arts council funded leading online resource for the contemporary art community.
Andrea Roe's work examines the nature of human and animal biology, behaviour, communication and interaction within specific ecological contexts. Several residencies have introduced her to different types of institutions, ranging from the Wellcome Trust to the Crichton Psychiatric Hospital, Dumfries, where she learned about and responded to research projects and collections.
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Through photography, film and installation, Roe translates scientific research on the psychology of animal behaviour into artworks that are experienced physically as unfamiliar, visceral sensory encounters.
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| Roe is now approaching the end of a 12-month Leverhulme Trust residency at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh. Here, while working among scientists she has become interested in capturing the critical moments of the process of taxidermy, a practice often thought of as macabre or gruesome. Roe, however, believes there is something poetic, if not beautiful about transforming dead animals into specimens that appear to be alive. |
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Her particular interest lies in the sensory experience of taxidermy which she argues is a mixture of scientific process and artform.
She wants to bring this to a wider audience via film, still photography and interactive displays through the use of animatronics. |
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'Each specimen represents a combination of the taxidermist's knowledge and aesthetic judgement. I want to reveal the hidden skill and process of taxidermy and to show some of the research behind the temporary exhibitions at NMS.'
Andrea's work will attempt to entice the viewer and to share her understanding of the animal's life. This is in contrast to the usual display of animals, which focuses on the finished specimen.
| '... in preparing a bird skin, the surprise of opening up a belly and finding its prey inside or seeds giving some clue to its flight path is a detail rarely related to the viewer. It seems that the exciting, investigative work in the research laboratory is not on offer to the general public except perhaps in a diluted form. Hopefully the work I'm doing will provide an alternative viewpoint.' |
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 | (Explorer Magazine, National Museums of Scotland, Spring 2005).
Caduceus: Big Dream, 2005/06
Caduceus: Big Dream - the minidreamworlds project - is about the creation of miniature worlds, inspired by ideas of memory, time and place re-represented through digital media: photographed, filmed, edited and manipulated.
Andrea Roe and Richard Brown have worked with a community group at Causeway, helping them develop their own minidreamworlds.
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Developed from their own perspectives and interests as artists - taxidermy, the museum diorama, wunderkammer, kinetics, nature and artifice, robotics, alchemy and electricity - they aim to produce a digital film based on ideas of scale, place, memory, consciousness and time.
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Small-scale models of real and fantasy places will be filmed using specialist camera techniques. These films will be then recombined with footage of existing scenarios, places, people and animals to produce a surreal contrast of nature and artifice. Altering perspective and scale, merging the real and the imaginary, the films will reference animal symbolism, magic, sexuality, fairy tales, life, fertility, death, decay and animation.
Caduceus: Big Dream is a film commission made in collaboration with Richard Brown and Art in Partnership Edinburgh, funded by Barrhead Housing Association. Go to the Barrhead arts website for more information.
Caracal Transmission, 2004
The Mobile Art Lab research project, a collaboration with Richard Brown, examined the feasibility of using a mobile vehicle as a basis for producing experimental art as a reaction to place and location, memory, history, observation, and discovery.
The project explored the gathering and transmission of art, research and process through a variety of media including live webcam, internet, email, publications; site-specific events, video projections, installations and performances.
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Their intent was to evoke wonder through revealing the hidden, uncovering lost skills and re-presenting locally found knowledge. |
'By going out on the road in a hired motor home in Dumfries and Galloway, we tested our ideas out for real, we found out what worked and what did not and experienced the actuality of travelling, working and creating art as a partnership in a mobile vehicle. As a result many of our initial ideas have changed and new and unforeseen experiences have shaped out future plans and proposals for the project.'
Roe studied MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design (1999-2000). Recent solo exhibitions include New Arrivals, SAC Aberdeen, 2002, Incidental Relationships, Ateliers Hoherweg, Dusseldorf, 2001, Rabbit Run, Wellcome Trust, London, 2001, and Close Shave, Mafuji Gallery, London, 2000. She is based in Edinburgh where she is a part-time lecturer on the MFA course in Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. |