DOMINO brought together artists, arts professionals, and a diverse public audience for a four week arts programme based at a former shoe factory in Norwich in Spring 2017 with the aim of strengthening, promoting and cultivating the local arts scene, while expanding links with other UK cities outside of London.

View the Domino publication PDF

Click here to read Jonathan P. Watt’s Introduction text

SAVORR presents DOMINO: Brian J Morrison & Emily Warner from SAVORR on Vimeo.

Through a sequence of programmes of this nature SAVORR’s intention is to launch a self-supporting network with other regional art scenes. The idea being that the programme is a catalyst to bring these networks together, visiting artists and commissioned artworks invite response from local artists and audiences, and that all these ideas filter down into new dialogues, collaborations, and propositions for collective change – a domino effect encouraging artistic exchange between cities.

Birmingham based artists Brian J Morrison and Emily Warner, were invited to take over the vast upstairs floor of the space. Working in dialogue with contemporary art critic Jonathan P. Watts, the progression of ideas for the exhibition, which was titled ‘Resist, Resist, Release’, have been documented and made visible as part of the exhibition making process.

Working with students at Norwich University of the Arts a changing project space downstairs extended, questioned, and played with elements from the visiting artists’ exhibition. An active voice and engagement from the local community was important in transferring ideas between artists and the city. A series of events including a music night, a film screening, creative workshops, and a talk with guests from the Birmingham art scene illuminated possibilities for future collaborations and routes to act on shared concerns between art scenes in the East and West.

February 24th. Birmingham Artist and Curators Talk

Brian J Morrison
Brian J Morrison’s work is informed by the physicality of the body in relation to the production and consumption of art, and considers how art objects might be capable of offering alternative relationships to the gendered body. Born in Belfast, he now lives and works in Birmingham. Solo exhibitions include Tension at The Birley, Preston in 2015, No Pain No Gain!!! at Supercollider, Blackpool in 2014, and Ripped Chiseled Rock Hard, as part of The Belfast Photography Festival in 2013. He is the MA Photography Course Leader at the University of Central Lancashire.

Emily Warner
Emily Warner is an artist and researcher working
in a multi-disciplinary way to explore art as an on- going process, something that temporarily exists as a live experience, an action-based encounter or a conversational situation. Activating relationships with people and place, she is interested in the construction of relationships in both physical and digital contexts. Her work manifests as manipulated media footage and residual fragments from live performance. She is one half of artist-duo Hickey+Warner who commission public art-making via Make/Shift/Space – a roving artist structure. She is currently developing new work for FIERCE FWD; development programme associated with FIERCE– international cross art form performance festival.

Jonathan P. Watts
Jonathan P. Watts is an art critic and editor based in London. Jonathan is a regular contributor to frieze magazine, and writes for Artforum and Art Monthly. With seven friends he is contributor-editor of a magazine of new art writing called A-or-ist.

Exhibition Text
Resist, Resist, Release.
Resist, resist release is an exhibition of new works by Brian J Morrison and Emily Warner. The two artists worked collaboratively to produced a series of objects which inhabit the first floor of the old shoe factory, St Mary’s Works. Brian and Emily share a mutual interest in the role of the body as a site for artistic production and whilst their methods of disseminating these ideas are vastly different, there are some inherent crossovers. It is at these crossover points where the work for Resist, resist, release come into being; taught latex, manipulated clay and spray paint are conflated to create a series of works with the aim to mimic the actions required to produce them.
Interested in the point at which preparation or rehearsal, becomes “complete” the artists consider much of the work produced to be in-flux, some awaiting activation and others seemingly in a state of recovery. This theme continues with a durational audio piece playing in the stairwell, an 8-hour recording of their working processes in the first floor space.