An open exhibition before Christmas, in which all works were for sale at the fixed price of just £10. Any works unsold before Christmas were reduced to £5 for a January Sale re-opening.
Glitter
December 2008 - January 2009
Ghost Ships
Paintings and Objects by Bryan Hawkins
November 2008
The ships that can be seen from Margate Sands come and go, like ghosts. Their lights flicker at night. The images and emotions they evoke and the stories, understandings, memories and dreams that might be woven around them resonate and sparkle. These ships float in our vision and at a distance from land, home, and from our direct physical experience of their weight bulk, power and history. Always recognised as out of place, as strange and as strangers - as transitory and fleeting - suggesting another time, another state, and another sense of the world. Ghosts (and ghost-ships) operate beyond the known and the ordinary. They are messengers and mediators between worlds and forms of experience. These ghost-ships carry with them their cargo of story, memory and history.
Andy Warhol's TV
October 2008
In 2006 Limbo founder Paul Hazelton found and bought Andy Warhol’s old Philco Predicta television set in a Margate second-hand shop called Style Counsel. A few months later Style Counsel closed, following a burglary.
For this project, LIMBO worked with Kate Jackson of Style Counsel to present Andy Warhol’s TV, a project that looked at Margate’s relationship with culture at a time when it was hoped that cultural improvements – led by the new Turner Contemporary arts centre – would help to reverse economic and social deprivation in the area.
There was no artwork in the show, in which Margate’s Substation Project Space was partially reconstructed as a hybrid of Style Counsel and a museum or gallery. Instead, second-hand objects were on display– some as they would have been in Style Counsel, others as objects might be presented in a museum or gallery. The television, which is no longer working, occuped an area behind this hybrid space, and was temporarily re-animated by a projection of Episode 3 of Andy Warhol’s TV, the artist’s cable television show from the 1980s.
Ship of Fools
July 2008
A multi-discipline art event, which was one of six projects based on one of Foucault's six principles of heterotopia. According to Foucault, heteratopias are 'actual existing utopias'. Whereas utopias are sites with no real space, Heteratopias are counter-sites that exist in real space. This was to be our focus for the year's programme of events.
"In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up..." so ends a summary* of Foucault's lecture of March 1967, in which 'the boat' was imagined as an heterotopia par excellence ... 'a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea'.
(* This text, entitled "Des Espace Autres," and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967)
The 'Ship of Fools' is a popular metaphor often used to describe the human condition. Here, the notion that we are all foolish, self-centred beings bent on achieving our own interests at the cost of others, is one that has been embraced by writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers and composers.
The exhibition included London artists John Stark, Velika Janceva, and Andrew Walter, video artists Jon Fawcett, Nathalie Bikoro and Laura Smith, Andrew Dodds', sound work: "Adrift' (originally commissioned for the public art host-structure: Arcade) a performance by Brighton-based Eva Weaver and an installation by Margate-based Steve McPherson.
Sponsored by Christ Church University College
Dreamcoaster
May - June 2008
Following the recent arson attack on Margate's much-loved Scenic Railway, Limbo Arts has teamed up with the Save Dreamland Campaign to stage a community exhibition celebrating Dreamland's heritage and inviting the public to share their memories of the park.
The public were invited to come along to the Substation to help build the Dream Coaster, a huge wooden model made out of donated scrap timber and based on the layout of the Scenic Railway.
Our Dream Coaster became the focal point of a week-long exhibition when visitors were invited to share their memories, hopes and dreams. We also displayed some very rare posters and memorabilia and showed some old film footage of the park. Supported by The Shell Grotto, Margate, Save Dreamland Campaign, the Whoopee Agency and Stromboli’s Circus, the Greatest Shop on Earth, Soho, London.
Talks given by Nick Evans, author of ‘Dreamland Remembered’ and Iain Aitch, Margate born author and journalist. Family Workshops with artist/teacher Sarah Wicks Make your own train and memory chain.
Performances from the famous Whoopee Agency.
Margate Rocks - Sarah Craske & Stacy Keeler
The Womens' Land Army
May 2008
A period of research activity, working with local archives, people and the local council culminating in a site specific installation at the substation.
Wig Sayell - Photographic artist Wig Sayell uses installation, experimental and early Victorian processes. Her work involves interacting with the landscape, often with pre-determined viewpoints.
Shell Ladies
Ann Carrington
April 2008
Ann Carrington won a competition to create signage for Old Town Margate and to help promote some of the town’s key features and attractions, including the Tudor House and Shell Grotto. She's built thirteen 7 ft shell ladies each named after a famous lady of Margate - from Baroness Orczy, who wrote 'The Scarlet Pimpernel', to Phyllis Broughton, the gaity girl.
The figures form part of a trail around Margate, ending at the famous Shell Grotto.There were also several workshops throughout the three months.