Ham and Enos
Ham and Enos were established in 2002 by Mandy McIntosh as a way to consolidate and house multi-disciplinary practice. Ham and Enos provide an atelier style workspace and context for film, animation, socially engaged public art and design.
| Mandy McIntosh is creative director of Ham and Enos. A visual artist based in Glasgow, but currently located at their studio in the Embroidery Mill of a reclaimed textile factory in Paisley. 'Previously, we focused specifically on combinations of digital and manually rendered craft. Tangential areas of research included aesthetic possibilities in the representation of non fiction and the significance of fashion illustration as a form within the context of fine art.' |
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It’s crucial to us that we are continuously forming new relationships and contexts to work in. Not that context has to be innovative, but that within the practice, elements recoil and react against each other, so the internal frame of reference is quite narcissistic, like a grand fashion house.
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It's enticing to be able to create self determined situations of collaboration with other art groups, music labels, coders, schools, television production companies and so on. I came originally from a garment background, designing in Paris then returning to Glasgow School of Art to do a Masters... |
...I was fortunate enough to be taught by Julian Gibb on the last intake of an incredibly maverick and edgy course which doesn’t exist anymore. It provided me with a framework for thinking about art and design which is boundless… it allows Ham and Enos to inhabit quite odd positions and be internally severe.'
Most recently Mandy McIntosh worked in a school in Girvan with 14 pupils. On day two she decided to cultivate more power from what they chose to wear to school by combining it with stuff made out of plastic bottles. Before that she was in Bannockburn making non nationalistic patterns from the blood of William Wallace.
| 'There has been a significant amount of work in schools this year and it’s been mutually very nourishing, the intricacy of the give and take procedures to actually make art with kids. For the Wallace project, the brutality of the drawings completely determined what happened in the work. I loved that the primary six class of Bannockburn could articulate cruelty so uniquely, it was enthralling. We have the opportunity to work with Zeena Parkins again... |
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... I just picked up some of the music she has made for Oompie ka Doompie. Its remarkable music… very very Zeena, but Zeena wrapped around Afrikaans and Glasgow and Rod Stewart and locusts, all these elements in the story of Oompie. Its so exciting.'
Recent collaborators and organisations Ham and Enos have worked with include The Changing Room, FACT in Liverpool, Axis Arts, Kaffe Matthews, Zeena Parkins and Simon Yuill. Elite models, Knit-Knit and Digital Dumbo… all in New York, Channel Four and currently True Television. In 2004, Ham and Enos were awarded a BAFTA for Weightless Animals, an interactive work made from space archives and research at the NASA space centre in Houston.
Oompie ka Doompie is an animation work which is made from examining the three years a Scottish family spent in Johannesburg in the 1970s. Directed by Mandy McIntosh, in collaboration with one other animator and music by Zeena Parkins, the moving image work will be determined by new procedures in drawing which were developed by the lead artist whilst living in New York for six months in 2004. The work is also informed by a research trip to Johannesburg in 2003, when McIntosh revisited where she used to live as a child.
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Ham and Enos will mount an exhibition of the drawings which amalgamate through Oompie ka Doompie. This will provide the opportunity to examine the drawings as artefacts in their own right and discuss the nature of the still as an artistic unit within animation. |
The exhibition will be in the Paisley Museum and Art Gallery. It will be contextualised by a series of workshops, an examination of contemporary animation work in South Africa and a programme of artists talks and open studio events.
'It was initially through the examination of a specific South African artist, William Kentridge, that I seriously began to consider the force of the still in animation. Seeing his drawings in situ and being offered the opportunity to grasp what disappears through his annihilation of the still.... his processes of erasing the previous frame once it has been photographed. Conceptually, Kentridge rejects the amalgamation of the static to make animation. In late September 2004 I travelled to Paris, to view the large sound-art show at the Pompidou. The show looked specifically at the marriage of sound and image in art and film.
| 'There were stills from "Fantasia" by Disney... |
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...and one of the first animations by Oskar Fischinger. For Fantasia, a series of pencil sketches show the huge technical virtuosity and skill in the drawing of an army of lithe brooms carrying water for the sorcerer's apprentice. Oskar Fischinger's pristine hand painted graphic circles reveal the mammoth investment of labour in each frame. The idea that each second, at least twelve of these images might be photographed is astounding. The processes I am using in Oompie are pretty traditional, mangled up with digital 3D stuff and elegiac, very committed drawings of Glasgow and Johannesburg circa 1970.'
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Oompie ka Doompie, the animation, is scheduled to reach completion in summer 2006. The workshops and talks will be ongoing until the exhibition in 2007. | |