Conway + Young

IMAGINE SHOPS WITHOUT CARRIER BAGS, STOCK CHECKS, 9-5 OPENING HOURS, TILLS, SECURITY TAGS, GUARDS OR ALARMS

IMAGINE 92 EPHEMERAL AND CHANGING SHOPS WHERE WHAT YOU
LEAVE WITH ISN’T SOME THING PHYSICAL BUT AN IDEA,
A NEW SKILL, OR A DIFFERENT VIEW

Empty shops are the face of the downturn, of depression and a lack of
confidence but they also leave space for everything that does not revolve around money,
for a new focus on need, on education and on encouragement.

Let’s make them: observation shops; talk and discussion shops; swap shops; skill shops; thinking shops; experimenting shops; history shops; sitting shops; meeting shops;
exhibition shops; shops as places for debate and as places for chance encounters
between people from different parts of the City.

Let’s make these spaces about thinking, producing, creating and learning, for those
excluded by the expense of a day in town. Let’s make art spaces; meeting spaces; reading spaces; eating spaces; spaces that contribute to the social life of the City.
Collectively we must find that which does not just rely on money; that which unites us;
local initiatives; education and cultural engagement accessible to everybody.

Let this sign of depression be an opportunity to build a new framework for our City centre, away from the idea that money, private investment and consumerism are the only way to develop an area. Let’s develop the area ourselves on the basis of our interests and needs and allow everybody to benefit from it.

We propose a collective effort to fill these 92 shops and to use them to develop the social space of our City abandoned by profit-makers. Let’s make Leeds a City of diverse attractions, not with only big glossy crowd pullers but with a collective of independent spaces.

Omitting The Word, aims to explore what it means to be a feminist and question the way in which the term is claimed, rejected and perceived.
We are asking for short pieces of writing from men and women who describe themselves
as feminists and those who chose to reject the term.

Omitting the word feminist, please write 250 words on either why you do or
do not consider yourself to be a feminist;
what does the term feminist mean to you? and what does it mean to be one? why do you associate or disassociate with the word? is the term relevant?

We are interested in your personal response.

Your words will be published alongside others.
Your name will appear collectively and your individual contribution will be anonymous.

We flyposted dedications to the places, buildings,bridges,cafes and views that make
Bristol a city that makes us happy.

Located in Kirkgate Market in Leeds, Stall 133-134 was a temporary studio and exhibition space, running from 11th October until 20th December 2008. We worked in the space documenting and responding to the market community. Stall 133-134 was a collaborative project between us, Leeds Met students, guest practitioners and the market community.

Thanks to Chris Clarke, Will Davies, Gareth Jones, James Hankins and John Hammersley

The Unredeemed Pledge

We invite people to stay for one night and two days in the understairs closet of
our house and make work in response to their experience.
This intinerant residency began when we were living in an old shop in Bristol. The name,
'The Unredeemed Pledge', references the first occupants of the shop who ran it as
a Pawnbroker in 1897. The residency will move where we move.

Rules of the Residency
Residencies are for the period of two days and one night.
We will provide you with your meals and bedding.
You can use the house and balcony as you wish but you must sleep in the under stairs closet where you will be accompanied by a radio.
The work you produce whilst completing the residency must be site specific.
Your piece(s) of work can be anything; a song, script, poem, drawing, film, sculpture, performance, painting, photograph, a record of an installation etc.
Because we are renting our accommodation we ask that the work you produce is removable.
You must leave something at the end of your residency as a mark of you having taken part.
Before you leave please place an entry in the guest book, you must include the date of your residency and your contact details.

The results of the current Leeds based residency will be shown at The Art Market. D.T.B

Resident 01:
Jan 19th - 20th 2008. Alice Osborne. Poster.

Resident 02:
Feb 2nd - 3rd 2008. Alex Ostrowski. Installation and song.

Residnet 03:
March 15th - 16th 2008. Gordon Armstrong. Illustration.

Resident 04:
May 10th - 11th 2008. Aaron Sewards. Paintings.

Resident 05:
May 12th - 13th 2008. Ricardo Giacconi. Installation and list.

Resident 06:
May 21st - 22nd 2008. Valeria Amadei. Installation and photography.

Resident 07 & 08:
June 7th - 8th 2008. John Richards and Lewis. Musical instrument.

Resident 09:
June 27th - 28th 2008. Hannah Godfrey. Story and illustration.

Resident 10:
July 5th - 6th 2008. Eva Manning-Davies. Illustraion and text.

Resident 11:
March 8th - 9th 2009. Nick Burrows. More Rugby Songs - Music and illustration.

Show Tell

Show Tell at UWE is now being run by Dylan and Olie, keep an eye out for posters.

Open to all disciplines, Show Tell is an open invitation for people to bring
something/anything that they find interesting to tell the group about.
A chance to see and hear things that you otherwise may not.

Shown and Told
A stylophone.
A plastic duck.
Eroca Nicols Made to Order DVD of performances 1-3 2008.
Butcher Something Embed a radiant head CD.
Subbuteo Westham away team.
Match Day: Football programmes by FUEL.
Sounds of Bristol 7 inch record, recorded 1967.
A ‘Take It Easy’ birthday card by Big Up Design featuring Will Smith.
Information about Listening Post exhibition at Science Museum.
Graphic 10: Taking a Line For a Walk - Diaries, notebooks and sketchbooks.
John Wood and Paul Harrison From One Thing To Another exhibition catalogue.
A printing error.
No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.
Aids to Tray and Trolly Setting, published 1960.
Tokyo – illustrations by Stefan Marx.
Mushrooms and Toadstools in Colour, published 1971.
A collection of 190 postcards of Switzerland, presented in an album.
7 inch recording of garden bird songs, recorded 1976.
The Tart newspaper issue five.
Ladybird book of Danger Men, published 1970.
2 envelops filled with found things.
See How it Works flicker book.
An old biscuit tin.
12 inch recording of Dutch organ music.
One deer antler.
Matt Sewell, Swan Vista exhibition information.
One self-published poetry book from 1980’s by the Bristol Hut Writers.
Collection of Medical Illustrations Volume 1 Nervous System by Frank H. Netter, M.D.
Example of ‘Suited for Subversion Suit’ for protests by Ralph Borland.
Workbooks in Primary English number 5 by O. B Gregory.
A super 8 film of Miami and Florida with music from Jean Michel Jarre.
1950s music sheets: Annie Get Your Gun, My Fair Lady, The Echo of Serenade.
Two candles: Bust of Lenin and Stalin.
4 x postcards from the Statue Park, Budapest.
The New Architecture of Europe, Pelican book.
Scotch 3M tape box.
12 inch recording of XTC Go 2.
Plug socket book by Mark Pawson.
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski.
3x photos of Juliana Capes Pavement constellation from the Shifting Ground exhibition

“We moved to Leeds from Bristol 60 days ago.
No one knows us here and we don’t know anybody.”

Held at the Art Market in Leeds, Elections was an exhibition and exchange of 20 artists work. Our submission to Eclections was a response to leaving somewhere and something we knew well to move somewhere we didn’t know, to do something new.
Questions are important to our work and more so since moving to Leeds, this piece of work was a series of questions for visitors to the show, the other exhibitors, the city and ourselves.
It was exhibited with a pen for people to obliterate our questions with their answers.
The other 19 exhibitors were invited to dinner to ask questions of us.
We are happy to be here .

Level 11 of the Multistory Carpark
Bench for One
Geraniums in Celebrations of Jean

Working with the Arnolfini Access and Education department and a group of work experience students aged between fifteen and sixteen, we were asked to develop a guide to design within the Arnolfini building and Bristol. We collected information through a combination of group discussions, activities and walks around the city. The end result is less a guide, more an interactive discussion about what design is.
The guide is available from the Arnolfini as part of the On Purpose: Design Concepts show.

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Open

For nine months during 2007 and 2008 we lived and worked in a disused shop in Bristol situated along a busy commuter route. Everyday, lorries, buses cars bikes and pedestrians passed by our window. When we had this space we invited artists and practitioners to exhibit work in the shop front window from Sunday to Sunday. As opposed to a traditional gallery space, these windows offered an open context for work to be displayed in.

Above image: Pawn Shop by Steve Monger

We spent a morning with the writing group of Art + Power, based at the
Spike Island studios in Bristol. We based the creative writing workshop around the Vauxhall Bridge, which is next to the studios. We spent the morning on the bridge discussing how it is used, its history, and speculated about what laid beneath the water.
As a result of these discussions a series of short stories where written, these stories where tied to the bridge for the people who use it to read.

Through Creative Partnerships, we ran a series of workshops with the newspaper club at Warren Primary School in Nottingham. The project was based around the theme of technology. Using a variety of tasks we encouraged the students to challenge and question their relationship with technology. The end result was distributed as a supplement of the school newspaper.

A poster produced to be distributed during a talk we gave at the
Watershed Media Centre in Bristol.

As part of the Southville Arts Trail we are opening the doors to our home and inviting a range of local and national practitioners to take part in the event.
We, Conway + Young will be exploring and presenting ideas about our residential setting.

Richard Sanderson will be drawing the Tannery with whoever wants to join him from 11.00am

Live performance piece by Peter Barrett from 11.00 am

Noise band Shapes and OK Pilot will being playing a set in the window from 6.00 pm

Social Historian Ben Waddington will be leading a walk around the local area.
Walks will be leaving from outside 254 Coronation Rd at 12.00, 2.00 and 4.00 pm.
You don’t need to book or get a ticket, just turn up.

Throughout the weekend there will be the opportunity to watch films by Bristol based
practitioners Narin Wilks, Carol Stevens and Moira Gavin, Amin Musa,
Miles Carter, and Nagea Rose, view recent projects from Colum Leith,
John Hammersley and Chris Clarke, be part of Tom Common’s continuous commentary,
take part in Alice Osborne’s extension of The Dinner Project and other
spontaneous participatory events.

Produced in collaboration with post industrial city lovers Go, based in Sheffield,
we designed flyers and posters to advertise the opening of a temporary shop;
Cooling Towers Collectibles Co.
After Go won a Channel 4 competition to turn the towers in to an art gallery, Eon who own the towers have announced that they are going to demolish them. To mark the end of a four-year campaign to save the towers, the memorabilia shop was set up to celebrate the cooling towers as Sheffield’s civic icon.

Go also commissioned us to create a piece of cooling towers memorabilia for the shop.
We designed and screen-printed a limited edition picture postcard book, Without You on the Horizon, inspired by the likely demolition of the towers.

Wall of Statements is part of a work exchange initiated by the Enschede Academy of Visual Arts and Design, Netherlands. Members of eight universities are invited to produce a poster, in an edition of eight, that make a statement. Posters will be distributed to participating universities and pasted on a designated wall.
In response to this project we have printed the first of a forthcoming series of posters marking the 80 year anniversary of women's right to vote. Inspired by this anniversary, the series will address and challenge gender inequalities that still exist and document our relationship to the world as women, feminists and female designers.
Dedicated to Millicent Fawcett, founder of the national union of women's suffrage, the first of the series addresses the gender pay gap.

A to B

For four days in October, as part of the Typevents Moving Type Conference in Birmingham, we ran the A to B workshop; a collaborative project about moving found type from one place to another. We were based in a cold warehouse in Digbeth, the oldest part of Birmingham. From our corner of the warehouse, we invited participants to explore the city of Birmingham; scouring for type on their way to work or on their way home, on the journey to and from the conference; in lunch breaks and on walks in the area directly around the warehouse.
We then asked participants to bring what they found back to the warehouse,
from where it was re-distributed.

Click on photo for video.

A Walk From A to B to A to B

Birmingham based historian, Ben Waddington, who was running architectural type tours in Digbeth as part of the Typevents festival, devised a special type tour in response to the title of the workshop we were running, ‘A to B’. On the third day of the event we, along with nine other participants, joined Ben on a walk from A to B to A to B. We walked from A B Row to Stratford House on Stratford Place. Whilst on the walk we photographed pieces of typography where the letters a and b were consecutively in place.
A B stands for the Aston and Birmingham Parish Boundary. A B Row is the street
demarking the boundary.
Carved into the doorframe is the date 1601 and arranged in a triangle are the letters A B R. These letters stand for Ambrose and Bridget Rotton, the farmer and his
wife who once lived there.
Thanks to Ben Waddington for suggesting the walk.
Thanks to Carol Stevens, John Hammersley, Bobby Leach, Ollie Kay, Millie Glynn, Fern Dunn, Liam Randall, Myles Lucas and Chris Wright for walking.

Graduate Development Programme

The Graduate Development Programme is a new education programme at The University of The West of England. The Graduate Development Programme exists to connect and encourage the development of the different parts of student’s education. Our role was to simplify the 50 page course handbook to communicate the purpose of the new module, to both students and staff and create intrigue about the new programme.
We distributed a variety of 18 posters around the university campus’s to deliver short statements and questions addressing the content of the module in a public setting. These where removed after three weeks and replaced with a final poster, which offered an explanation.

Dott 07 Alzheimer 100

In September we spent the day at the studio of London based communication company Think Public, generating ideas for their Alzheimer 100 window display at the Dott 07 festival.

Round About

During the summer of 2007 we moved to Nottingham to work at the eco-friendly screen-printing studio, I Dress Myself. Whilst there we we took part in an interactive exhibition, involving a drawing exchange between 9 Nottingham based artists at
The Nottingham Art Organisation.

An Ode to Modbury Town

This tote bag was produced for I Dress My Self as part of an artists limited edition series.
The bag is an ode to Modbury town for ceasing to use plastic carriers bags in 2006.
Avaliable at www.idressmyself.co.uk

Broadmead to Broadmarsh

Whilst working at the screen-printing studio we printed a publication and poster about coming from Bristol and repositioning ourselves in Nottingham, using both cities major shopping centers as a reference point.

University and College Union

For the Bristol Branch University and College Union we designed and made a banner for their protest marches.

I Won’t Dance Don’t Ask Me

As part of a teaching fellowship we undertook from September 2006 to June 2007, we art directed a group of four third year students to produce a publication for Bristol UWE’s graphic design degree show 2007. We ran workshops which were devised to gather information about how the students surroundings and situation influenced their personal practices. The content of the publication consists of information collated from the results of these creative workshops.

Goldeny Hall Garden Party

We where commissioned to design a cheap and flexible signage system for the stalls at Amnesty Internationals annual garden party at Goldeny Hall in Bristol.

Darfur Memory + Exile

Through Amnesty International we were put in contact with the Sudanese artist Mohanadim Bakhat, whom we mentored for a period of three months to help him put on a solo show of his work at St Mary Redcliffe, in celebration of him being granted asylum status.

Confluence

Confluence was a group exhibition, held at The University of The West of England in April 2007. During our degree we went on exchange to The Willem De Kooning Academy in Rotterdam for four months, this exhibition explored the theme of exchange and was held in conjunction with Erasmus exchange students. Our response was a window installation advising ‘How to Integrate in a Foreign Land.’ In conjunction we produced a publication to catalogue all the participants experiences.

Dependency

Initiated by London collective Make: Dependency was a group exhibtion exploring the theme of dependency. At the time of being given the brief Conway’s Nana had broken her hip and would be living down stairs for the following six weeks. Jen’s Nana is fiercely independent, walks for two hours everyday and busies herself through accommodating her husband. Now housebound for 6 weeks her independence had shifted and she was now reliant on her
husband to care for her.
We sent both grandparents a disposable camera and asked them to document how their daily lives had temporarily altered since the accident. The results of which where exhibited.

Newport Newport

After not being able to afford the university trip to New York we decided instead to go on a trip to Newport by train for £3.95. This publication was made during the day of our trip and is a collection of drawings and found photos which document our encounters
and our response to New Port.

Project 100

Produced in collaboration with David Young.
As a group we decided we needed a means through which to communicate our ideas and thoughts to people outside of our immediate network of friends and acquaintances. 100 was initiated in response to this, it was produced quickly and cheaply. We relied on friends to distribute Project 100 around the cities in which they are living or visiting. The number 100 represents the number of the building in which we produce the publication.
Project 100 was discontinued when we moved out.

Here / There

We were asked to produce the identity for the Bristol school of Art, Media and Design degree show 2006. This included the invitations, a map, and a signage system. The show was held at two sites, this involved making invitations that emphasized that both sites had to be visited in order to view the whole show. In response to this we named the show ‘Here/There’; when you were here, there was there and when you were there, there became here. Using the title ‘Where’, we used coloured tape to direct visitors around the show. To guide people to the other campus we employed walking tour conductors, who wore t-shirts stating ‘There’.

This World / That World

Thinking about art school and the world outside of university, graphic designers and non-graphic designers, we created a publication to accompany our degree show. To form the content of this publication we organised a one-day workshop for the people on our course. We also questioned people outside of our course; friends, family members and strangers. The publication is a culmination of the responses we obtained. It is accompanied by a DVD.

This Space is Your Space

A four-month investigative project exploring how we are restricted and controlled by private land ownership. This investigation consisted of a number of interventions, which are catalogued and represented collectively in the book. Each intervention attempted to challenge and explore the notions of ownership, access to space, the use of public and private space and act as a catalyst to provoke a response from Bristol’s public. A DVD accompanies the book.

Opening

After clearing the rubbish from a disused alleyway in a suburb of Bristol, the edited discarded and found items were then photographed and hung as part of an exhibition held in the cleared alleyway. Local residents were invited to attend and debate the shared ownership of the space.

Let it Grow

This book was produced in response to a weekend spent in three different locations in Holland. It was produced strictly within three days, without the use of a computer,
using only found imagery.

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I Have Something To Say

Produced in collaboration with Alice Osborne.
I Have Something to Say, was a response to the theme ‘Engagement,’ presented to us by De Anshouw (an exhibition space in Rotterdam). Our aim was to inspire engagement through providing a forum. The posters produced for this exhibition advertised the project in advance but were also designed to offer people a space to say something prior to the event.
We fly-posted the adverts around the city; the blank space also gave those who couldn’t visit the exhibition the opportunity to engage.
At the exhibition itself, stickers where given out and attendees and passers by were asked to write a thought, response, comment or statement and add it to the exhibition space.