Schemarium

2024
Writings, Exhibition + Online

Exhibition Dates:
Tuesday 4th – 8th June, 2024

Venue:
Stryx Community Art Café, 90 Vyse Street, Jewellery Quarter, B18

Schemarium is a collection of writing about public art and proposals for public art works for the city of Birmingham. The ‘Schemarium’, refers to a hybridisation of two ideas, one ‘scheme’ and the other ‘arium’. Scheme is a sketch or outline, which unifies the parts, in order for a concept to be realized. Arium is derived from Latin and is a suffix denoting an artificial place, location, or receptacle for something. Thus, the Schemarium could be said to be a place for outline plans.

https://schemarium.com

Context

The project, titled Schemarium, was set up with the aim of inviting students and alumni of the MA Fine Art course at Birmingham School of Art, to make a proposal for a temporal or permanent intervention in the city of Birmingham. The proposed art interaction, artwork or art event responds to a public space or spaces within the city centre. For the project, Birmingham School of Art was considered the epicentre of the city and as such provides an initial situation for Schemarium as part of the place of the United Kingdom’s second municipality. These conditions acknowledge the creative prowess, potential and value of the Art School as a component of re-imagining and re-worlding its surrounding locale.

As part of the lead-in process, students were introduced to different public art projects, such as Art Angel, London; The Highline Plinth Project, New York; and Birmingham based projects such as, Ikon Off-site and Fierce Festival. Through a series of talks and workshops, they learned about the different perspectives and responsibilities of public art Commissioner and the Commissioned; for example, Rachel Bradley (2023-24) spoke about what the commissioner is considering when working on live projects, whilst Faisal Hussain (2024), worked with the students through site visits and discussion, to consider what the artist must think of when responding to a brief.

Time also played its part in the evolution of the project, with a consideration of the impacts of the pandemic on the making of art publics. As is well documented, galleries and showing spaces were closed, and outdoor public and online spaces as alternative site had in the former a resurgent focus, and in the latter a burgeoning moment. It was an apt and consequential time, the legacy of which is still being evaluated. The potential for commissioners of art (including socially engaged interactions and art for public space) to take up the mantle to reinstitute a sense of place amongst its communities, is evolving and urgent.

Themes

There are different iterations of the project (including Birmingham City & Ecological City), but the most recent has asked each participant to create a digital, proposal-response to environmental issues in this Holocene (unofficially Anthropocene) epoch and consider this in relation to the urban space. Themes may include climate change, the value of nature, multi-species entanglements, aesthetics of the natural, eco-systems, or any other concept which is relevant to impacts on natural phenomena and our natural world. The proposal may point a finger at some issue, present a solution to a problem, or perhaps memorialise historical or contemporary content. The parameters of the theme are however elastic, in so far as the vision of the artist reflects the current moment, and this is vital to the overall diversity and dynamism of the proposal collection.

For the Ecological City, there were diverse responses which considered the natural or nature as a space for playful interaction. Ryan Asbury’s cyber litter pickers, perform a clean-up of detritus from queer spaces, whilst Fred Hubble, proffers a ringing of the bells to herald and warn of changing phenological events, often overlooked by the public.

The earlier iteration (Birmingham City) sees a series of responses which speak to the nuances, histories, and complexities of this wonderful city. With work from artists such as Yazmin Boyle, who evocatively proposes a compass representing icons of Birmingham’s manufacturing past, modernism, and contemporary cultures, to the selection of The Electric Cinema by Jessica Wall, as a site for portrait drawings of people connected to the UK’s oldest cinema, now sadly closed.

The outcome of this project is an exhibition and discussion held at Stryx Community Art café in the Jewellery Quarter. The exhibition displays a series of plan-type prints, incorporating alumni commissions and former and current student work. The content also includes newly commissioned writing on the status of public art now, with essays by commissioner and art agent Rachel Bradley and Co-programme director at Grand Union, Jo Capper.

This exhibition is also accompanied by a website www.schemarium.com

Mona Casey, Schemarium Coordinator & MA Fine Art Course Director, April, 2024