Stephen Hurrel Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom
My practice is based around themes of absence-presence, creation-destruction, and tensions that exist when cultural and natural forces impact on people and place. Through a process of engaged, contextual research, and an intuitive response to that material, I draw out hidden, poetic, and human narratives to create work in video, photography, text, sound, digital-media and installations.
I’m a visual artist and filmmaker living in Whitley Bay, based at Cullercoats Studios. I moved to Whitley Bay from Glasgow with my family in 2018 and since then I’ve been making new work and connections in response to my new environment, building on previous projects and films. Many of these previous projects were focussed on people and place with a particular interest on coastal communities. This interest is inspired by being brought up in a small town on the west coast of Scotland where there was a complex interplay of marine activity that included tourism, leisure activities, ecological research and marine industries featuring oil rigs, cruise ships, sailing boats, fishing boats as well as the familiar site of UK and US submarines and warships. My personal experience of this mixed use marine environment, and the conflicting interests that it displays, informs my way of perceiving landscape as a multi-layered site with a shifting cultural, technological and natural ecology. There is also a playfulness about this kind of environment where different signs, signifiers and languages may become combined or confused, creating new meaning and visual possibilities.
As well as an active studio practice I have worked in many different environments and contexts, in the UK and abroad, mainly through art residencies and specific commissions. I have also collaborated with a marine social ecologist (Dr Ruth Brennan) on several marine-based projects that engage with people and place. In response to the island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides for example we engaged with the local fishing communities and produced a colour publication which was then expanded on to produce 'Sea Stories: Barra - an online cultural map of the sea' as well as my independent film/installation Mapping the Sea: Barra. Both of these works were concerned with the island’s intangible cultural heritage, with specific focus on how stories and knowledge can be contained within coastal locations, rocks, caves, coves, and topographic features. Our collaborative film commission (Clyde Reflections, 33mins) based around the Firth of Clyde in Scotland was screened in the CCA Glasgow and then installed in the Gallery of Modern Art for six weeks.
I've exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale and Colombo Biennale, Sri Lanka and have produced site-specific public works in the UK and abroad, including permanent public artworks in the UK, Ireland and Tasmania, Australia. Artist residencies include Sri Lanka, Mexico, The Azores, coastal communities around Scotland, a one-year Australian Residency and most recently a week-long Winter Residency at Alnmouth Huts/Old School Gallery, 2023. I’ve been Lead Artist on two public projects recently, which involved extensive engagement with the ecology of people and place. As Lead Artist/Curator/Planner for artworks for a new Health Centre I commissioned several artists to produce new site-specific artworks and I created several permanent installations featuring text, photo-based ceramic fragments, medicine bottles retrieved from the seabed and nautical colour-coding. Each of these artworks tapped into the cultural and natural environments of the area and sought to create new relationships and narratives by incorporating local knowledge, objects, materials and stories.
For my film works, I’m interested in fusing a poetic visual language with critical, speculative thinking around our current environmental conditions. I’ve sought to make visible environmental and scientific material that is often inaccessible to a wider public, such as microscopic imagery and underwater video footage, as well as interpreting scientific data and research into visually and aurally engaging material. Many of these projects involve a close engagement with people, both in terms of research and production. My films range from those that are ambient, such as 'Dead Reckoning' with a focus on image and sound, to immersive video installations that incorporate text and voice, such as 'The Sea, The Sails and the White, White Blades' and 'Clyde Reflections' and various short form documentary and experimental films.
