Current Exhibition
Forthcoming
Past
Proposals
Collaborations
Residencies

Oh we will, we will, will we
Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan
28 January – 6 March 2005

Oh we will, we will, will we, 2005
Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan

A Studio Voltaire commission, courtesy of The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Sutton Lane, London

Studio Voltaire has commissioned Oh we will, we will, will we, a new project by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. There are two parts to this project; a large-scale sculptural installation and a body of associated research activity that will be launched at a public talk event during the show.

For Tatham and O’Sullivan each exhibition is a scenario in which to re-configure the boundaries of their collaborative practice and the parameters of art. Their project HK used the slogan “Heroin Kills” and re-presented it both as six metre high black letters and as an 18 carat gold necklace. The Slapstick Mystics with Sticks has existed as both a play performed occasionally by an amateur dramatic troupe and also as a short novella. Working within conceptual art traditions Tatham and O’Sullivan’s work creates and temporarily inhabits specific narrative or thematic spaces. Through the use and re-use of diverse forms and approaches their works create situations far beyond the sum of their parts; an intangible spectacle where clear meaning is not on offer and the viewer is made to feel complicit.

Oh we will, we will, will we will provide an opportunity for the artists to frame and re-present their characteristic signs and symbols by using and re-combining elements of content from past pieces; re-appropriating their own work, creating some sort of other system for meaning or for thinking about meaning. To supplement this work and taking place sideways of the main exhibition Tatham and O’Sullivan will undertake a process of research activity in collaboration with Fiona Jardine. Although open ended and without a determined outcome the focus will be on expanding the mythic potential of signs that their work has previously explored.

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan are based in Glasgow. Their most recent solo exhibitions and projects are The Slapstick Mystics with Sticks, Frieze Art Fair Commission, London, 2004; Think Thingamajig and Other Things, Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland, 2003 and This has reached the limit conditions of its own rhetoric, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2003. Group exhibitions include Zenomap, Venice Biennale, 2003 and My head is on fire, but my heart is full of love , Charlottenburg Museum, Copenhagen, 2002.

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan are represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow and Sutton Lane, London.

Supported by Arts Council England, London and The Henry Moore Foundation
With kind assistance from Lambeth Arts and Furnival Press