Jim Loftus

Practice Outline

I am an artist, curator, educator, researcher and workshop facilitator working from the Bridewell Studios in Liverpool.

I make sculptural cameras and use a combination of historical and contemporary technologies to explore and map the urban environment. I am particularly interested in how optical instruments affect the way we perceive and design our cities.

I have enjoyed fifteen successful and fulfilling years providing creative, educational and therapeutic activities in the NHS, schools, galleries and museums. 

I am a qualified teacher of Art and Design and during 10 rewarding years in comprehensive secondary schools I became Head of Year and Head of Department. Working across sculpture, filmmaking and installation, I particularly endeavoured to facilitate students' access to contemporary visual culture as a means of combining conceptual understanding with manual skill.

My educational and community work is part of a dialogue in which the ideas and observations from my practice and research are challenged and refined.

 

 

Manchester Art Gallery, Art Treasures

Churnet Street Sheltered Accommodation

June 2007

 

In collaboration with Manchester City Galleries I delivered two separate community workshop projects as part of the Art Treasures exhibition. Working with residents from sheltered housing accommodation we designed and printed a batch of historical experience maps that illustrated and detailed some of the hopes and reminiscences that emerged from our discussions and activities. The maps were also intended to function as an introduction to the area for new residents arriving with the regeneration of Collyhurst.

 

Manchester Art Gallery, Art Treasures

National Childrens Homes Foundations

July 2007

   At NCH Foundations in Collyhurst I facilitated a project in which residents mapped and documented waste ground in the area then designed and modelled structures and landscaping to address this problem. The resulting models and maps were then publicly displayed in an exhibition in Manchester's North City Library and Manchester Art Gallery. We designed and used primitive surveying instruments to record and map dormant public spaces surrounding the accommodation. Using large scale maps from the library archive we scaled up vacant plots and built models of the structures we would like to see built. Interestingly, no one proposed any luxury apartments.

 

 

An Tobar Art Centre

Isle of Mull

Pinhole Camera Workshop

October 2007

 

 

I facilitated a weekend of pinhole camera workshops in collaboration with Glasgow University and Dark Skies Scotland at the An Tobar Art Centre on the Isle of Mull. Following an information and discussion session, participants constructed their own functioning pinhole cameras which were then exposed on a network of sites to map Tobermory. In keeping with the astronomical remit of the weekend long night exposures of the town's lights were taken, revealing its sodium constellation. The subsequent images were developed in an improvised darkroom for exhibition at the centre and inclusion in its archive.

 

 

Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester High School for Boys

Grafft, Graffiti Art Project

January-March 2008

 

 

 

Working with Manchester Art Gallery and Connexions I facilitated a motivational creative project with students in danger of exclusion in North Manchester High School For Boys. One particularly developed aspect of their sense of identity and visual vocabulary was urban calligraphy or graffiti art. Accordingly a series of activities and gallery visits included filmmaking, stencilling, photography and concluded in a large-scale graffiti piece on a school wall designed and executed by the participants.

There was a very positive response towards involving photography to document the school and local environment. They were particularly inventive in adopting new approaches such as using maps and aerial photos to generate letterforms.

 

 

National Trust; Speke Hall, Access to Heritage Forum

Bellowphones

April 2008

 

  

 

A collaboration with two other artists at Speke Hall, a large Tudor/Victorian house in Liverpool working with learning disabled, visually impaired groups and the National Trust on an Access to Heritage project. Through a three-month series of workshops we developed multisensory machines resembling archaic technologies to compliment interpretation of the site and its artefacts. The sounds and smells emitted by the Bellowphone machines were derived from the aspects of the house and collections which the participants found most stimulating. Depressing the Bellows would simultaneously push a waft of air up the trumpet releasing smells from a specially designed capsule and trigger sounds relating to the room and its artefacts.

Plaza Cinema Crosby, Holy family High School

 Intergenerational Film Project

February 2009

 

In the Plaza Cinema Liverpool I collaborated with author and film maker Ray Physick in a film making project bringing together students from Holy Family High School and elderly residents from Nazareth House care home.

The project was sponsored by Mersey Travel as a means of addressing the conflict between old and young on the city's public transport. Students recorded monologues and filmed interviews with the older people. They constructed a narrative from these fragments using iMovie software. The film was shown in a full size cinema screening to which all the participants and their families were invited.

Many of the students were experiencing difficulties at school, for me the most striking aspect of the project was the students' awed attentiveness when the elders spoke at length of a busy river, wartime and horse drawn vehicles. There was a palpable sense among the students that they were being spoken to from beyond their own epoch.

 

Merseyside Maritime Museum, Access to Heritage Forum

Ambient Sound Harvest

March 2009

 

The Access to Heritage Forum members were being consulted as part of the curation process of the new Museum of Liverpool being built at the Pier Head. I was commissioned to work with the group to survey the surrounding area identifying its characteristic sounds. The forum members used hand-held digital recorders to harvest local sounds and record their reactions to them. These recordings formed the basis of the ambient sounds that will be played in the new museum to accompany the views out of its giant opposing windows over the Mersey and the city.

Manchester Art Galllery, North Manchester High School for Boys

Supervision

March-June 2009

 

 

 

In collaboration with Manchester Art Gallery and North Manchester High School for Boys I worked with a group of students who were experiencing problems in the educational mainstream. In order to negotiate a planned outcome I presented the students with a range of optical and photographic techniques, expecting them to choose one scenario to pursue. Within minutes they had exceeded days of planning and dissected each proposal to re-assemble a complex hybridisation of ideas. With first hand experience of surveillance they designed vision-dissembling headsets. Angular mirrored interiors enabled the wearer to not only see in front and behind simultaneously but also all around their own head. Showing an instinctive understanding of the issues, these devices were called 'Paranoid Panoramas'.

To return the gaze of authority they made pinhole CCTV cameras and exposed images in school, the gallery and public spaces. Partly in mockery, partly in reclamation these cameras were encrusted with the urban calligraphy that defines the student's territory. The images and devices were exhibited on the top floor of North Manchester Library and some of the exposures were taken from the observatory hill in Heaton Park. Significantly both sites offer a panoramic vantage from which Manchester's lethally contested internal boundaries are invisible.

The project was designed to simultaneously evidence GCSE assessment criteria. All the students exceeded their predictions by at least two grades and for many it was the only GCSE they attained.

 

Holy Family High School

Shelter Building, Natural Material Sculpture.

June 2010

 

 

A group of Year 9 students spent three days in Cheshire woodland as a reward trip for good attendance and progress. Undeterred by near constant rain, they enthusiastically partook in a series of workshops and activities including raft building and fire lighting. I facilitated sessions in sculpting solely with natural materials and building improvised shelters in which they spent a night.

 

 

Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester

The Land Between Us

September 2010

 

As part of the Land Between Us Exhibition, I led a day of 3 concurrent workshops with families and children. Digital photographic surveys of the gallery and its grounds were conjoined into film. Younger children responded to the woodland immediately outside the gallery by capturing what they saw with coloured pens on specially prepared cellophane coverings on the window. Older children made collaborative large scale shadow drawings of their own nightmarish forest by projecting light through sculptural structures they had made using bamboo and wood collected from the gallery's grounds.