Gareth Jones and I began a dialogue in 2017 through our related walking practices. Our collaboration was conducted remotely since Gareth, initially based in Osaka, Japan, relocated to Sichuan, China. This exchange became more formalised through the Arts Territory Exchange programme.
The Arts Territory Exchange (aTE) comprises of a global network of artists and art practices which respond to the geography of their territory of production. Beginning with a simple correspondence programme in which artists are paired up to exchange works and ideas, aTE exists to both germinate otherwise impossible dialogue between remote and disconnected practices and to bring to an audience a global artwork in the form of an accumulating library of artefacts and debate.
https://www.artsterritoryexchange.com/about
Gareth and I developed a process or collaborative practice that is not about completion or artefact necessarily, more about routes, flows and becomings. Our output is, therefore, a dynamic assemblage of potentials, fragments, traces and residues, which might be interpreted as a loose set of maps towards possible futures, exploring the notion of “space and nausea”. That sense of nausea on encountering capitalist production.
We maintain a dialogue by email, post and occasional skype, and have built up various texts. Initially we did walks in our respective territories, which the other repeated via Google Street View. From this, I gathered an array of photographs, images, video/sound recordings, and some of these still images are incorporated into a series of 28 A4 collages, which started as a set of fragments that Gareth sent to me.
A selection of our work was included along with 13 other Arts Territory Exchange artists in the Fourth Today’s Documents ‘A STITCH IN TIME’ exhibition at the Today Art Museum, Beijing
Gareth Morris Jones is a British artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer, Fine Art, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. His practice-based research is an enquiry into place and subjectivity. Aimed at promoting personal, cultural and environmental wellbeing, this interdisciplinary practice entangles creative walking, drawing and theoretical analysis. Gareth presents his research in a number of international contexts and is a member of the steering committee for the International Visual Methods Conference. He is currently a PhD candidate with the School of Humanities, University of Dundee, Scotland.