Nor stamp hard on the ground neither

Commissioned by Pavilion, Leeds responding to Whitley Beaumont – a landscape that has been attributed to the landscape architect Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. Exhibited at The Calder, The Hepworth Wakefield as part of 'The Follies of Youth' exhibition. Nor stamp hard on the ground neither is a moving image artwork by Amelia Crouch that depicts a series of actions, performed in the landscape and based on instructions from an 18th Century etiquette book about how a gentleman ought to walk. It combines two things that appear natural (Brown’s landscapes and a particular manner of walking) but that are actually cultural affectations from a particular period in history

The scientific method

How do we make sense of today's information overload, from post-truth politics to mind-boggling quantum physics and neuroscience? The Scientific Method showed how artists have revealed the structures and systems of knowledge that we consume daily, subverting the accepted and confounding the expected. This exhibition brought together recent moving image works by artists such as Amelia Crouch, Patricia Esquivias, Sîan Robinson Davies, Liz Magic Laser, Kate Liston and Yuri Pattison, alongside drawings by KP Brehmer and works by John Latham, Semiconductor and John Smith presented in association with LUX. Some artworks appropriated a faux-scientific rhetoric, others highlighted the potentially unanswerable questions of contemporary science, or employed humour and irreverence to puncture conventional wisdom. Departing from the objective knowledge sought by the classical scientific method, these artists often foreground the bodily, the personal or anecdotal

Spectral evidence

Spectral Evidence is a moving image work about colour perception and colour language. Combining research into the evolution of the eye, the physics of light, linguistics and semiotics, the work takes colour as a case study to investigate the cultural and biological limitations on our encounter with the world. Displayed across two screens, the first is arranged sequentially based on the order of the colour spectrum as identified by Isaac Newton in 1665. The second follows the sequence of acquisition of colour terminology suggested by Berlin and Kay in their publication 'Basic Colour Terms' from 1969. Produced with support from Arts Council England

The follies of youth

The Follies of Youth was an exhibition of historical research and contemporary art commissioning by visual arts organisation Pavilion hosted by The Hepworth Wakefield. Three artists – Giles Bailey (based in London), Amelia Crouch (Bradford), Ruth Lyons (Cork) –produced work in response to three landscapes in West Yorkshire – Stapleton, Whitley Beaumont and Byram – listed in the account book of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783). Supported by a collective of producers, nicknamed ‘the follies’, the artists undertook field trips to the ruinous and industrial landscapes. In an attempt to recover Brown’s lost designs, the artists engaged the follies in rehearsing certain eighteenth century practices: of Arcadian poetic fantasy, walking etiquette and lime kilning

Launchpad

The output is an exhibition that playfully explore the semiotics of language through film, screen prints and text art. The works were selected by Adam Smythe, Curator at The Bluecoat (Liverpool), and Castlefield Gallery’s Programme Manager, Matthew Pendergast. Research process: Starting points for Crouch’s playful works include word games, homonyms, anagrams, children’s songs and quasi-scientific experiments. Though accepting the unruly nature of words her works are haunted by a dream of systematic order. They emphasise repetitive learning, experiment and methodological actions, which ultimately appear absurd as the works loop or conclude with no defined resolution. Research insights: Experience tells us that language is indeterminate, uncertain and relational. Words often evoke something other or more than they are intended to, as they attempt to communicate the physical and visual world beyond written language. Dissemination: The output was disseminated as Launchpad at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 29 July – 7 August 2016

Tomorrow belongs to nobody

The output, Tomorrow belongs to nobody, is an artefact that explores our relationship with Coventry’s post-World War II architecture. It was commissioned by Coventry Artspace. Research process: Crouch’s research is primarily carried out through her artistic practice, the creation of exhibitions and site-responsive public artworks. The research explores meaning-making as an embodied and indeterminate process. The work combines research interests in site-specific art, artists moving image and narratives of subjectivity. Producing this work involves reading spanning art, cultural studies, cognitive linguistics and sociology. The research explores subjectivity, as an historical construct and a lived, phenomenological experience, and the relationship between visual and verbal modes of representation. Research insights: Referencing City Architect Donald Gibson’s aspiration to cultivate “a healthy body, a cultured mind and a radiant soul” (1943) Tomorrow belongs to nobody queries this idea of rational agency and considers the increasing individualisation of society over the years since the inception of modernist Coventry. Whilst we may now question modernist ideals of rationality and progress ought we still value the utopian social ideals embedded in Coventry’s buildings? Dissemination: The output was screened at the following: January 2019 Screening: Interruptions, Holden Gallery, Manchester. Programmed by Chris Paul Daniels. November 2016 Screening, Turning Point West Midlands re-launch event, Eaton House. Programmed by Ryan Hughes. 22 June–7 July 2016 Exhibition, ‘City Arcadia Festival,’ Arcadia Gallery, Coventry. June 2016 Launch screening, The Albany, Coventry with Coventry Artspace

Practising Place – Vocal landscapes: bodies, language and place

Practising Place is a programme of public conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different venue in the North of England and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with people from different backgrounds, who share a common area of interest. Vocal Landscapes examined the role of language within experiences of place. Referencing locations such as the Lake District and the West Yorkshire estate of Whitley Beaumont, Amelia Crouch, in conversation with David Cooper, discussed how forms of language are used to govern, frame and re-inscribe particular places. Drawing on their individual research, the speakers also considered how place writing and visual art can expose the inherent tensions and hidden voices of landscapes, by attending to the intertextuality of place

Latent voices: how public art of the past can speak in the present

The article reflects upon two recent exhibitions of past public art ¬- City Sculpture Projects 1972 at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2017) and Out There: Our Post War Public Art (2016) at Bessie Surtee’s House, Newcastle (Historic England, 2016). Wondering why these venues or organisations wanted to re-visit these projects in the present-moment, the article speculates upon changing notions of the public and upon the increasingly individualised nature of contemporary neoliberal society. It posits that part of art’s role in the present moment is to resist the narcissism that consumer capitalism encourages and to invite us to re-envision or see the world form other points of view

Our Plan is to Announce

The output is a text-based artwork by Amelia Crouch presented in the form of a website. It remixes content from UK government coronavirus briefings, which were broadcast daily between 23 March and 23 June 2020. Research process: Ministers’ speeches from each day were appropriated and subjected to a reorganisation procedure, with the speech ‘remixes’ being based variously on particular grammatical word, sentence or speech attribute. Research insights: The procedures explore what happens when informational content of the briefings is rigorously and systematically turned into nonsense. At times the outcome remixes foreground government priorities or rhetoric, highlighting dominant words or phrases. In other the materiality of language is prioritised. Here a loss of clear meaning hints towards a sense of despondency and lack of control that came along with the pandemic. Linguistic communication is shown to function as more than just information dissemination. At the same time, the artwork questions the ability of language to adequately and fully represent our experience of the world. Dissemination: The artwork is presented in the form of a website, available online

In uncertain words

How can a multimodal art practice provide both a plea for precision and a plea for worth of uncertainty in a political climate that wants for both? Using a series of her moving image and text-based artworks as examples Crouch discusses the mutable and context-dependent nature of linguistic meaning. Words neither represent reality nor vocalise thought in any simple, transparent way. Yet still they provide an insight into human cognition, sitting suggestively at the intersection of an individual speaker’s cognitive endowment and a socially agreed system of rules. Crouch’s artworks use wordplay and interaction of text and image to highlight fundamental categories –space, time and causality – that apparently structure human cognition whilst evidencing that our language use does not map onto these entirely. By foregrounding the multimodal and contingent nature of meaning the artworks posit a complex and embodied view of knowledge that values language but does not prioritise the verbal above all else