Platform Residency: Glen Stoker & Anna Chrystal Stephens

Anna Chrystal Stephens and Glen Stoker: There Are No Firm Rules

Are there sustainable ways of living and working?
Can we rediscover lost knowledge?

For their summer Platform residency, artists Anna Chrystal Stephens and Glen Stoker will use field research and practical experimentation to explore the fundamentals of life: food, shelter, community and a reconnection with the land. Presenting their collection of DIY manuals, craft and survival books, the gallery will become part library, part out-door training centre and part studio. Offering a range of walks, talks and hands on workshops, alongside making their own prints, photography, sculpture and installation, they will open up new possibilities around how we structure every day life.

At the start of the residency, the artists invite you to a Welcome Found Food Event, to be held at Site Gallery on Saturday, 30 July.

Events and activities to get involved in during the residency:
From Tuesday 9 August: Piece of String – an on-going collaborative cordage making activity in the gallery.
Sunday 14 August, 2 – 5pm: Survey
Thursday 18 August, 6 – 8pm: Walk-and-Talk Reading Group
Friday 26 August, 7pm: Pub Quiz and Platform Closing Event (details TBC!)

Hack Circus have recorded a podcast interview with Glen and Anna, where they discuss the themes of this residency and what they have learned so far. Have a listen here.

The artists are keen to connect with communities in the city with alternative approaches to living. Please contact robyn.haddon@sitegallery-staging.b-s.work for more details.

More information about Glen and Anna’s work is available at their project blog.

About Platform:
Platform is a nationally unique artistic development programme, which gives our galleries over to an artist, or group of artists, to make new work in public. Come explore how ideas are born, nurtured and developed into new work. The gallery is open as usual Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5.30pm.

About the artists:
Anna Chrystal Stephens
Work takes the form of photography, sculpture, installation and participatory happenings. I am interested in living strategies, communities, collectivism and societies’ relationship to the natural environment. I have been investigating basic living processes and survival skills; recently this has consisted of learning to identify and safely consume wild plants, spin yarn and preserve food, followed by exchange and diffusion of these skills though walks, discussions, workshops. read more

Glen Stoker
A visual artist working in various media, but with an emphasis on photography and film, installation and assemblage, performance and text. The site and location specific practice is centred on acts of walk and response, and carried out largely in the public realm. Themes of urban place and space narrow down to a particular focus on urban land use and the post-industrial human living condition, alongside ideas of absence and presence and longing and belonging in the contemporary city. read more

For the Platform exhibition – The Artist Proposes – we filmed interviews with all Platform 2015/16 artists. Here is Glen and Anna’s short film, where they talk about their work their plans as they were at that point: