Who are you?

Hello, my name is Andrew Brooks. I am an artist, musician, composer and I work in architectural education.

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What is your artistic practice?

My artistic practice is interested in stories, either as a collective or direct motif, or as a thought process about how to find stories about the world and retell those stories. That could be finding very specific stories that people are telling or finding specific information or observations about the world and representing them. I tend to represent it disassembled in some way to give more space for the viewer or person experiencing the work to bring their own context to avoid something declarative, to have something more implied, give them a little more space. The ways I work are quite broad. I use video and sound. I also work through music and performance; I’m a saxophonist. I also work with paper and ink and mixed media, sometimes paint, similar to the piece that’s behind me in this, and installation of these elements and experiences are very important to the work, probably something from my architectural background, creating spaces that you inhabit and different spaces thinking about how you are going to inhabit them and what’s happening around you and curating that experience is key to parts of my work.

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How has your artistic practice been impacted by lockdown restrictions and the pandemic?

Well at the start of the pandemic, I had a couple of projects that I was going to work on, both of them were to do with the motif of storytelling and involved going into people’s homes and meeting them where they were comfortable in their space and talking to them, hearing stories, telling stories to them and recording their reactions or them telling the stories as well, and making work which related to that. As the end of March rolled on, and we all went into full lockdown, that was a complete impossibility. So one of those projects which was working with people with a functional neurological disorder, FND, that has sort of remained on hold. The other one of those turned into one titled, “Isolation Stories” and that was where I would read somebody a story over video call and obviously the context of the call, Skype and Zoom, has become a major way for us all to interact and relate to each other so the work is a recording of them listening to a book of their choice, whether that is Stephen King, Brett Easton Ellis, Hermann Hesse or Dr Seuss, Rhold Dahl or Phillip Pullman, I’ve read all sorts of different books to people. All those recordings last from five minutes to pretty much an hour, an hours’ long reading. 

Now obviously that is pretty much the same as the work except I have done it in person previously, but the pandemic context really changed what the work was about, what it is actually talking about. The other two projects which came directly out of lockdown, as a masters students finishing off a fine art masters at the University of West England in Bristol, and I had access to their central loans equipment store and I was able to borrow a bunch of audio equipment, including six shotgun mics, a lot of frames and cables and stuff to record with, so what I did was, I’m very interested in sound and the way that sound is used as one of the things that I work with and I built a frame which was the six shotgun mics mounted on a pole so it could be walked around with and carried on a frame and so that would be able to record a true surround sound experience of what was going on. I had a mobile phone on a gimbal recording where I was walking and I did walks around the city of Bristol. One of those walks was 9am on the first Monday of lockdown so we are talking true apocalyptic scenes, sort of ‘28 Days Later’, completely empty, and that was a two hour walk around the city, through the very busiest parts, the business district, past the train station where everyone would be walking usually and it was obviously completely silent. The other recording project which I embarked on was a dawn chorus recording, recording the dawn and the sunrise, but obviously because there’s so much less traffic and planes overhead as well, again you got a unique recording of birdsong coming up and also capturing the sky without any vapour trails. That one has actually turned into a piece called “There are only two planes over Victoria Park” because there were two planes in three hours that went over the top of the recording. The video recording was of the sky’s colour changing, not so much the sunrise but just looking at the sky.

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What are you currently working on?

What I’m working on right now is I have been trying to present those in such a way so what I said at the start was trying to disassemble my practice, disassemble the story that I’m trying to tell, the information, find specific information, I think it’s been a way of trying to present those so that they aren’t a declarative literal representation, it gives space for a little bit more interpretation rather than a direct document of it, so that’s one of the things I have been working on. “There are only two planes over Victoria Park”, is projected from above. There is a wash over the participant with speakers surrounding the projection onto the floor. Putting the projection of a film, the visual, in a place repositioning it so it’s not a primary element of the experience.

What’s next? How, if at all, has this pandemic inspired further progress?

So what’s probably been really interesting, or one of the best things that has come out of lockdown is that I’ve moved from Bristol up to just outside Edinburgh, 30 miles east of Edinburgh on the coast in East Lothian. I think what’s been really nice is the connections that we’ve been able to maintain, I was part of various artist groups with people who I did my masters with, we’ve started an artist collective called Flooring Collective and I’m also a member of another Bristol based collective The Artist Project Space, TAPS. What’s been really surprising is that through lockdown, although I’ve moved 350 miles away, my connection with them is just as strong as if I was still in Bristol and our cohesion as groups is probably stronger because we’re able to and it’s so usual to meet online, and that’s been a really good thing to come out of it. I think my pieces now, I’m starting to work less directly with the pandemic but more working with it’s context, so trying to find new opportunities and new ways to present work, new ways to exhibit work, but also going to some of the older projects, so like the FND, functional neurological disorder sufferers, working with them and actually using what I’ve learnt through the Isolation Story project to engage and push that project forward in the new context.

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Where can we find you?

You can find me at my website ajb-art.com , on Instagram or Twitter @bajbart.

I also recommend taking a look at the collectives that I’m a part of, Flooring Collective on Instagram is just being launched and The Artist Project Space or TAPS which is Bristol based. I am always open to collaboration and chatting to people whether through the Isolation Stories, I’d still be happy to read people stories over video, or just to connect, chat, discuss ideas or projects, feel free to drop me a line.

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Thank you very much and thank you very much to Dispensary Gallery.