Here are some pictures of the team helping us, special thanks go to

Tiffany with City AV Oxford – great job!

City AV Oxford for going way beyond the call of duty on Friday before the bank holiday weekend, – you saved the day! –

and to Cath and Matthew from the curatorial team for bringing out the beautiful Manet sketches to hang next to the video portrait.

The lovely Manet sketches waiting to be hung

Delicate calibration of the moving umbrella

Mr Payne at the Ashmolean

Thanks so much also to Tim Payne our long-time collaborator and engineer extraordinary for the design and production of the umbrella sculpture mechanics –

and to brilliant Matt who stepped in to complete the install when Tim was laid up.

Andrew and the video portrait

Tiffany and Matt with the umbrella sculpture

Andrew Brown and Harry Phythian-Adams managed the installation despite having a delivery of extraordinarily large and precious display cases, for the same floor on the same day – no easy task!

Ashomolean director Xa Sturgis and Tiffany Black discuss the installation. Thanks to Graeme Campbell, Design for lovely panels he created

Sarah and Tiffany

Sarah Mossop and Helen Ward, who have nurtured and encouraged the project from the start were invaluable this week, oiling the wheels and giving feedback and support.

Last September the gallery looked like this –

our proposal was to transform it to this:

To find out what it actually looks like now – come and visit!

sketching with ballustrades and mirrors

One thread of early research lead us to thinking about the strange perspectives in Manet’s work e.g. Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, http://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/index-of-works/notice.html?no_cache=1&nnumid=000904&cHash=0ac4f8868a

and the debate about Manet’s the Bar the Folies-Bergère

http://courtauld.ac.uk/gallery/collection/impressionism-post-impressionism/edouard-manet-a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere

– is the view possible or not? – having always understood that the perspective was thought to be impossible and part of the mystery, meaning and of the importance of the painting we were interested to come across this link http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/manet_bar/looking_glass.html which demonstrates an angle of view that might make the picture possible…

In any event, the final impression of the compositions in some of Manet’s work, including the Portrait of Mlle Claus, is widely recognised as uneasy, almost a collection of collaged perspectives, which presents a new ‘Modern’ sensiblity, detached and isolating… it seemed important to root our work in the contemporary as much as the past

Ideas about lighting, viewer and composition continued to develop as we read Foucault’s “Manet and the Object of Painting” ………. his idea that the bright flatness of the front-on lighting on Manet’s models implicates the viewer – who was previously concealed in the darkness of the theatrical lighting of chiaroscuro – in a direct and confrontational line of view, that in part explains the outraged public response to works such as Olympia, and Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe….. this prompted a line of thought in our research that might have continued into the territory of exploring ‘the Gaze’ – on the balcony, who/what are we looking at, at what and how is Fanny looking, how is the painter looking at her?….and then the research took another turn.

Photograph of Sophie Prins Gapinski http://iswinoujscie.pl/artykuly/15082/ http://www.cultureinside.com/348/section.aspx/ViewProfile/5976

On a web search we discovered that Fanny Claus played in the first ever all-woman string quartet, which had great success and in a website, http://www.sophie-drinker-institut.de/cms/ an independent research institute specializing in musicological women’s studies we found that she had great great grand-daughter still alive, a painter, who had recently had an exhibition in France in a gallery in Cordes sur Ciel, in the Tarn district, close to brook & black’s studio, in the same gallery where Tiffany had organised a show of her mother, Jacqueline Black’s paintings a few years ago.

This descendant of Fanny Claus, Sophie Prins Gapinski, was the same age as us, and was living in Paris. We left messages through emails on several websites that may have been able to contact her, and then struck success through telephoning the mayor of Cordes and asking if Sophie’s email could be sent to us from the gallery records. We were in contact.

The violent events in Paris in November, asserted a darker backdrop to the project and brought the focus back to the present context and tension in so many of our cities’ streets…..and when we eventually organised to visit Sophie in January, on the drive to Paris we passed the gathering mass of people at Calais, police, wire, fences …when we arrived at Sophie and her husband Tadeusz’s flat in Boulogne Billiancourt, for the first part of our visit the conversation circled around the current anxieties and tensions, the movements of people and the Syrian war.

Sophie and Tadeusz Gapinski

On arriving at Sophie’s home ­we were surprised by another ‘coincidence’. We had decided by this point to ask Sophie to continue a line of work that brook & black had used in previous installations:

painting on the picture glass – early sketch

the motif of the woman who paints onto the glass of a window or screen, and then having painted herself out of the picture, cleans the surface to re-emerge from the painted surface.

We had planned to ask Sophie if we could video her squeezing paint from the tube out onto the window/picture glass in front of her and then start to paint. It was a jolt of surprise to walk into her flat – before we had even talked about the work – to see this image in her living room.

Beyond this visual surprise we could never have predicted or hoped that Sophie and Tadeusz would be as welcoming, enthusiastic and helpful as they were, and that Sophie would have played her part so imaginatively and sensitively, creating, undirected, moments in the video that are really poetic and surprising, and for finding and reading the text that forms part of the soundwork for the installation in Gallery 65.  We cannot thank them enough and we are really delighted that they are both coming over to see the work on the week of Live Friday.

Hi, I’m Sarah Mossop and I’d like to introduce myself because I’ll be posting comments about the project from time to time. I’m working with the Ashmolean team as a freelance advisor on the project and have been involved from the start of the second phase with artists brook & black. I’ve worked on a lot of projects with artists in residence, supporting them in making new work alongside leading community workshops, and I’m especially excited to be working with brook & black again (if you haven’t already done so, do take a look at their previous work at: http://www.axisweb.org/p/brookandblack/ ). A project like this is a complicated process with lots of consultation meetings at the start (some of which you can see in brook & black’s photos), where we’re trying to ensure that everyone – the artists, the Ashmolean team including education, community, curatorial, programming and communications staff, and the community groups who are participating in workshops – has an opportunity to contribute to how the project develops.

It’s great to hear that the session with OYAP went so well. We’re hoping some of the young people on the Stepping Up programme will continue to work with us on Beyond the Balcony.

Since joining the project this summer we’ve been dashing around meeting people and finalising our proposal for working with the Ashmolean and the community groups involved.

First project team meeting

Meeting Adam Clayton from MIND

Meeting Mandy Blair from Young Dementia UK

Setting up the new blog with Sarah Casey

Now all is set up and we more or less know who’s who this is our first blog on the second phase: Beyond the Balcony!

It’s been a great introductory few weeks, everyone has been helpful and full of enthusiasm and here are a couple of pictures from our first workshop, that we led last week, with young people from OYAP trust, brainstorming how they would approach a project like this if they were in our shoes!

The group were really engaged and lively and came up with some brilliant ideas, and we look forward to meeting them again hopefully later in the project.

They enjoyed their time too saying the workshop was ..”extremely useful as it mapped the whole process…”,   “Tasks were good to get us thinking about projects and approaches..”  and that it contained..”Useful advice on funding and applications …” and that it was “clarifying and thought provoking..”    Thanks to Kate Thomas for hosting the session beautifully and Helen Le Brocq for taking part and encouraging the team.