Declan Colquitt Michaela Cullen
The Newbridge Project, Gateshead
 

For a new collaborative work, artists Michaela Cullen and Declan Colquitt explore ideas of recollection and the slippage of time through themes of Irish pilgrimage and Northern dance music. The artists include a naturally occurring process of remembering/disremembering, sound and film, in an attempt to define place and identity, both artists have moved backwards in time, looking into:
 

an anthropological childhood, suspended time, mythology and ancestral relations to recent past. These movements encompass remarks on continuum, displacement and lost futures.
 

A new film work is presented by Michaela Cullen. Described by the artist as “applied nostalgia grieving”, this discriminatory photographic story tries to understand friendship, upbringing and geographical binding. The three entities of the Morrigan, Badb, Macha and Nemain go on a defragmented journey of self-realisation by way of self-excavation. The characters argue and meander in handmade costumes and are disguised by their distorted cartoonish faces. The film is set in Hy-Brasil, a phantom island said to lie in the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.

 

Irish myths described it as cloaked in mist except for one day every seven years, when it became visible but still could not be reached.
 

Below the purpose-built bleacher/bloomers/riser, where Colquitt’s sound work:
…and for a new moment in a sea of spaces I can’t fit in
is installed.
 

Working closely with Cullen, Declan Colquitt’s soundtracks use field recordings of North East England and dance culture. Through the use of early camera phones that were popular at the time, and were also instrumental in the dissemination of the music via infrared and bluetooth technologies, the artist creates a lo-fi digital soundscape with uplink and vocal Cullen’s narrative.
 

These camera phones also remain the predominant visual tool throughout the rest of Colquitt’s work, reused in unconventionally printed photographs, collages and film stills that exploit pixellation of the moving image and consequently new anthropological optics. These works will subordinate culturally nihilism and social atomisation Colquitt sees as inextricably wrapped up in the dance music of the time.
 

As part of the exhibition, the artists have released a two-part publication which will be available in the gallery and writing/bookshop alongside the exhibition. Although created separately, they illustrate more theoretically a story cross between works in the show through research, archiving and documentation.
 

This project was curated by Bloc Projects, Sheffield and Gateshead Council.
This project formed part of The Great Exhibition of the North, 2018.