Tracy & Hobbs

As a part of Floating Cinema residency at St Katherine Docks Tracy & Hobbs will be creating a project inspired by Mud larking during The Thames Festival September 2014.

Emily Tracy and Lizzy Hobbs will transform the interior of the Floating Cinema to create an old fashioned bureau for lost and found articles from the Thames shoreline.

The Thames is full of property that needs to be recorded so that it might be claimed. The bureau hosts will welcome you on board the Floating Cinema and invite you to share your mudlarking finds with them. The hosts will help you with the official paperwork, making a drawn record ofyour findings, and imagining the story that may have brought the item to the shores of the Thames, looking at who may have owned it, how far it has travelled and how it ended up in the river. The process will be an amusing journey through bureaucracy, forms, rubber stamps and carbon paper, alongside accurate observation and drawing. As a part of the process they will contribute to a collaborative animated film, which will form a record of the precious or humdrum objects from the Thames shoreline.

Anna Ruth curator of Akkigalleria, in Jyväskylä, invited us to create an exhibition in a disused shop during  Live Herring ’14 Festival.

We collaborated  with Jussi Paivinen, a research scientist, environmental conservationist and butterfly enthusiast who works at  Metsähallitus, to run a workshop at The Waldorf Steiner school and we installed a mixture of our films in the gallery. During the opening we invited visitors to make drawings with light using LEDs and bike lights using long exposures. We really enjoyed ourselves in minus 20 degrees.

We are experimenting with painting with light, we are working towards animating the movement of butterflies and moths, but here are a couple of still images from our trials, with thanks to our guinea pigs!

From 21st-24th January, Emily and I are off to Jyväskylä in Finland to show insect related work with Äkkigalleria.  It’s really nice to have the chance to return to the city where I did a printmaking residency in 1996.  We have been working with some lovely films of Malcolm’s showing moths jumping into flight, which we are rotoscoping at the moment.We’ll keep the blog updated,  with many pictures of the work we create and fingers crossed, Emily and I with some karjalanpiirakka and pulla too.  mmm!

Emily and I are getting ready to make bug thaumatropes today for our day in The Floating Cinema at The Camden New Wave festival.  We’re cutting out loads of circles from paper kindly donated by fine printers The Baddeley Brothers, who are local to us.  The weather forecast isn’t very promising. I wonder if we should get Tracy & Hobbs cagoules? We already have matching wellington boots.

The Floating Cinema will have one last outing next weekend at Granary Square near King’s Cross, for the Camden New Wave Festival and we’re pleased to say that it’s got a Water Folk theme.  So if you feel like doing a little dipping, or drawing, or if you’d like to see the Floating Cinema before it’s tucked away for the winter, come and see us on Saturday between 1 and 6pm.  

photo by Hydar Dewachi

We are really pleased to announce that Water Folk is going to show before a Project Wild Thing today at The Hackney Picturehouse.  There will be a full house.  Project Wild Thing looks really brilliant, a funny yet serious documentary, all about kids, and their relationship to nature.  The posters show a little girl licking a frog.  What would that taste like I wonder?

After the film, there is a panel discussion with Councillor Jonathan McShane, Claudia Draper (Playing Out lead in Hackney), Helen Griffiths (Chief Executive, Fields in Trust) and Cath Prisk (Director, Play England).

We ran Water Folk drawing and dipping workshops for The Big Draw last weekend.

The reed beds in The Queen Elizabeth Park in the park are teeming with life and during the course of the day particpants recorded this footage with our little microscope. We found Daphnia, Cyclops, snails, Damsel fly larvae and Water Boatmen. Watch out for the shrimp!

Do come and join us for a day of messing about with a pencil at the newly opened Queen Elizabeth Park, Stratford. We will be fishing around with our nets to see what we can find in the river Lea and then making a collaborative animation of all the tiny wrigglers.