Bren O’Callaghan A Runaway at the Media Circus!

Celebrity Skin

Work is now well underway on my next project in association with Harry Hill and artists Gemma Parker, John Powell-Jones, Simon Misra, Laura Barnard, Charlotte Gould, Hannah Gibson and David Bailey for exhibition at Cornerhouse later this month as part of the group exhibition The People You're Not featuring two further installations. During the late Summer of 2010, Cornerhouse, Manchester hosted Unrealised Potential: a collaborative group exhibition instigated by artist/curator Mike Chavez-Dawson. The show aimed to explore the creative potential of artists’ unrealised projects, blurring the lines between artist, curator, visitor and producer.

Established and emerging artists all submitted ideas for unmade work which were presented as legal documents granting realization rights for a period of two years, after which the rights to any unmade work would revert back to the originator if they remained unproduced. All ideas were priced at £50. My own difficulty with choosing one of half a dozen job titles to describe what it is that I do, dependent upon context and future intention, mirrored the deliberate muddling of role and responsibility in this invitation to pick one of dozens of waiting batons to run with.

I chose to purchase a pitch by artist, TV entertainer and popular satirical comedian Harry Hill, which unlike others that ran to multiple paragraphs of detail and step-by-step instruction, stuck to just one sentence: To recreate George Cruickshank's The Worship of Bacchus using known alcoholics. I had no idea at the time how I was going to interpret this, only that I wanted to respond in some way to Harry's public persona by creating a work that was accessible on multiple levels, and in doing so allow me to engage others as part of my ongoing collaborative methods.

More to come as I share my thoughts on the process behind the idea and images from the construction, illustration and eventual exhibition.

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4