#stephen sutcliffe

[oculablog]

STEPHEN SUTCLIFFE - Untitled, 2011, Acrylic wall painting, edition 2 of 3, Image courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery

[coldhandswarmh-art]

Stephen Sutcliffe (27/11/19)

We began a little late today... sadly our train services are not currently known for their punctuality... but despite this Stephen Sutcliffe managed to give an info filled lecture!

Sutcliffe did focus less on his work than on the influences behind his work, he had a whole load of folders of influences to share with us and as his work is nearly solely film, he showed us one of his films made for the Free Cinema Movement which was displayed in the same place it was filmed which added a different dimension (kinda meta). He likes working on the title cards of his films, and on creating different kinds of soundscapes, I always find soundscapes can be really revealing or really creepy... if done just right!

Sutcliffe then proceeded to highlight some of the works that had been a great influence over his work; Alphabetical Africa by Walter Ash, the collage maker (an underappreciated art form) named Joe Beinarde who wrote a book called In remember which is an unconvential autobiography (written in the order the author could remember the stories), and Kenneth Halliwell to name just a few of the number he showed us!

I would have liked to have seen more of his work with him their to describe his process as well as hearing about the artists that inspired him. But it was still an enjoyable lecture!

[neo-existential-crisis]

Artist Talk - Stephen Sutcliffe

I woke up late today and so I was worried I was going to miss the start of the lecture but even though I was late Sutcliffe was also. Though he was late because of train delays not lack of sleep.

Through the lecture Sutcliffe spoke a lot about his influences, the authors, actors and film makers he has been inspired by through his life. What really interested me about his work was that it was all film with many works being patched together videos from elsewhere to create a whole new thing that simultaneously connects with what it once was but also has a new message. I think I like this type of work as it feels very accessible to many different sorts of people as many recognise where the video clips came from and also the cut and paste nature of it really connects to me I think because it reminds me of the compilation videos and edits I see on YouTube though those have a different feel it’s still very much a down to earth kind of working. Also what drew me in was that many of his influences came from film, I love film as a concept as it’s so versatile and is an easy medium that can very quickly draw you in.

[fotoflingscotland]

Stephen Sutcliffe: Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs by FotoFling Scotland Via Flickr: Talbot Rice Gallery - Edinburgh Summer 2017

[dailycontents]

Invitation for Lucy Skaer, Stephen Sutcliffe and Mircea Cantor event at The Hepworth, Wakefield.

Commissioned by Pavilion and The Hepworth, Wakefield, 2011 210 × 297 mm

By http://www.qubik.com

[luxmovingimage]

Stephen Sutcliffe

Taped footage, poems and archival material; collage, splicing and cheap effects

On YouTube you can find a clip from a 1970 BBC documentary, The Crimes of Joe Orton, about the arrest of the playwright and his lover Kenneth Halliwell for defacing books borrowed from a London library. They had altered dust-jacket blurbs and pasted photographs onto covers – a monkey’s face on a history of the Tudors, say, or a heavily tattooed man on the front of a John Betjeman biography. These additions – ‘sometimes amusing, sometimes mildly obscene’, as the librarian puts it – landed the pair with a six-month prison sentence in 1962, five years before Halliwell bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer.

Though the clip is not by Stephen Sutcliffe, it has several things in common with the videos that the Glasgow-based Yorkshireman has been making for the past ten years: it is little more than five minutes long, has the straight-laced humour of a somewhat nebulous, pre-MTV period of paternalistic British television programming, and involves a collage technique with a rather laissez-faire attitude to publicly available materials. Disgruntled librarian Jim Connell gives a succinct description of Orton and Halliwell’s methods that tallies with the techniques favoured by Sutcliffe: ‘Most of these blurbs were written […] so that one started reading almost without realizing that this was a thing which had been doctored.’

[luxmovingimage]

LUX / BBC ARTS ARTISTS AND ARCHIVES COMMISSIONS

Wed 24 September 7pm, CCA Glasgow 

Friday 26 September 7pm, Tate Modern (as part of the TV as Material weekend) 

Artists and Archives: Artists’ Moving Image at the BBC is a unique residency programme based at BBC Scotland organised by LUX and BBC Arts, offering six artists unprecedented access to the facilities and archives of the BBC. This programme includes the London premiere of six new moving image works produced as part of the 2014 residency. These events showcase a diverse range of artists’ approaches both to television and the archive, and include the premieres of works by Kate Davis, Kathryn Elkin, Luke Fowler, Torsten Lauschmann, Stephen Sutcliffe and Alia Syed. 

Artists and Archive: Artists' Moving Image at the BBC is supported by BBC Scotland, LUX and Creative Scotland.

The new works will be available to view online on the BBC Arts website from Monday 29 September 2014 and for public screening and exhibition through LUX Distribution.

WORKS

WEIGHT Kate Davis, UK 2014, HD Cam, B&W and Colour, Sound, 11:06 min ‘Taking a 1961 BBC documentary about artist Barbara Hepworth as its starting point, Weight explores how televised depictions of creativity have constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour. Weight re-imagines the value systems...Read more 

[experimenta2013]

Stephen Sutcliffe Transformations (detail) 2005

Art Now Lightbox: Stephen Sutcliffe

Stephen Sutcliffe’s two films take poems as their starting points. Transformations is based on the Thomas Hardy poem of the same title. Hardy draws attention to the cycles of death and rebirth that are ever present in the countryside. He describes a man his grandfather knew and his wife, and a ‘fair girl’, who, in a process of organic renewal, have been transformed into trees and flowers:

…they are not underground But as nerves and veins abound In the growths of upper air…

Come to the Edge uses a recording of the poet Christopher Logue reciting a poem originally written in 1968:

Come to the edge. We might fall. Come to the edge. It’s too high! COME TO THE EDGE! And they came, and we pushed, And they flew.

The poem is combined with video footage shot in a 6th form common room. In the footage a good-humoured scene is suddenly transformed into something altogether more sinister as the group of schoolboys enact a ritual humiliation upon a seemingly older, mustachioed boy. ---from Tate.org.uk