Sonia Boyce at Spike Island

The pencil marks that echo and trace around the text, 'Is this love that I’m feeling?’ are visual sound lines, repercussions spreading over the surface. They are also literal reminders of the fine line taken to avoid sentimentality in this new show at Spike Island by Sonia Boyce. ‘Like Love’ is a moving and tender exhibition- there is something appreciatively different about an artwork that takes you by surprise with its accumulative emotional, and carefully crafted formal concerns. The show is the product of collaboration with Boyce and students at The Meriton School for Young Parents in Bristol that gently and carefully weaves a path between giving a voice to this group whilst ensuring and respecting their confidentiality.

Recently, at a comics conference, the well- known Belgium graphic novelist and artist Dominique Goblet explained how her fictional work was often more autobiographic that her official autobiography. This is a well-trodden contradictory path in art and writing, and exposes the tactic of revealing ‘real life’ within the charade and premise of fictionality. Similarly in ‘Like Love’ Boyce and the students watched the film ‘Coach Carter’ as a means to elicit the powerful and touchingly painful quotes that surround the room, including: ‘He would have found it hard’, and ‘Someone is going to get emotional,’ ‘You’ve changed so much’. These works exist in a no-man’s land that the artist describes as ‘somewhere between fact and fiction’, visualised in the cloud-like printed glass in the show, that is almost, but not quite, a mirror. It is caught in the silvery mist of the wallpaper, with its printed image of all the students at the school with their children, which is both clear and crisp, yet also winks in the light of the gallery and becomes impenetrable. Boyce in her interview with Spike Island Curator Marie-Anne McQuay described how the scale of the wall paper ‘diffused intimacy’; simultaneously we are invited in to view the collaborators, whose photo is printed on the paper, and yet we are kept at a distance. This wallpaper is both resonating with domestic interiors but is of an outside space and a public space, an ‘official school photograph’. The visitor to the show has no way to identify which of the quotes belong to whom and in a work about a vulnerable group this distance is necessary, for there is spectre of manipulation that might arise in an artwork, that needs to be prevented to firmly ensure this a collaboration, not an exploitation.

And to Boyce’s credit the show reveals how hard she worked for the former, symbolised in the beautiful, poetic and touching film by sisters and singer/ songwriters Naiidine and Nikita Watts, whom Boyce not only arranged to go into a professional recording studio and record their very poignant song, but also described as the ‘central piece of the show’. For this is a show that gives those students a voice as much as it is a forum for Boyce’s talents.

Spike Island often works with the community on projects that have resulted in a veritable library of beautifully produced and printed artists books. Recently Kayle Brandon’s self-initiated residency ‘Dad’s Cabs’, culminated in her publication of images and texts that describe the protagonist Lion’s transformation, journey and integration from ‘The Jungle’ to becoming a Bristol-based cab driver. What starts as a fantasy soon becomes anchored in the local landscape, and this is theme of ‘Spike in The City’, a series of artist projects that enmesh Spike Island and Bristol. Other examples include ‘Room 13’, an independent artists' studio based at Hareclive Primary School, run by the children that use it.

Spike Island also invests in the wider artistic community. Other projects that are flourishing include an artists collaborations,‘Intercity Main Line’, by Rhys Coren, which is made up of artists living and working in Bristol and looks to collaborate with other artists groups in the UK. Sovay Berriman recently ran a Zine Fair, which brought together local artists books and zines, and was developed alongside a series of events on Art Writing. Berriman explained: ‘The fair at Spike Island is essentially about exchange and dialogue, but with a generous edge. We aim to create a space for critical enquiry with a different focus each year, for instance this year the Art + Writing programme at Spike was a reference.’

Megan Wakefield who is studying for an AHRC-funded collaborative doctorate with Spike Island and UWE, on ‘Peer Learning in Contemporary Art Networks’ described how her research is so apt and beneficial: ‘Spike Island is an interesting place to study peer learning between artists, as it's 'Associates' programme is mix of self-organised and loosely facilitated activity. An analysis of how artists use this programme (amongst many other clusters) should feed back into the scheme.’ The Associates programme is coordinated by Lucy Drane and is a network of artists, curators and writers, which launched in March 2007 and now has over 80 members. Lucy explained: ‘The Associates programme has rapidly grown to become an integral part of Spike Island's make-up, providing a platform for practitioners - from recent graduates to established professionals - to propose projects, visit significant exhibitions and International Biennials and utilise a unique network of creative individuals within the city.’ Spike Island as a space and a support network for artists is proving itself to be a dynamic and impressive, but perhaps, as Boyce’s exhibition has shown, it may be most memorable for its ‘generous edge’.

www.spike-island.org.uk

www.intercitymainline.co.uk