Blog: Jocelyn McGregor

In my artistic practice, I’m on the hunt for the point of transition between internal and external, organic and synthetic, and real and imagined worlds. Using my own body as a conduit, I combine beauty products, industrial, domestic, organic and synthetic materials and forms to create supernatural hybrid monsters and their imagined habitats. So, as part of my New Contemporaries year-long studio bursary with One Thoresby Street, I came with the intention of developing a new body of work that could imitate more than just the aesthetics and form of a body or organic material: exploring touch, movement, sound and performance as a means of adding uncanny ‘life’ to my sculptures and installations.




^{Installation images from solo exhibition, 'Mantle', at Castlefield Gallery (2022) (photos by Jules Lister)}
It’s worth saying at this point that it’s been an eventful year here in Nottingham. During my bursary I experienced the closure of my host organisation, One Thoresby Street, an artist-led studio complex that had been running for 13 years. I then moved to Backlit Studios for the remainder of the bursary and I’m set to open my end-of-residency exhibition at Forth this December, an artist-led project space in the old caretakers house at Primary Studios. Basically, I’ve had a whistle stop tour of the creative communities in my host city and a not-so-subtle reminder of the increasing precarity felt by artists when so many external forces are itching to get their hands on your foundations.

Nevertheless, it’s been a more than productive year for me. I have learnt some rudimentary green-screen and video editing skills; joined Nottingham’s ever-useful Hackspace that has everything from woodworking tools to laser-cutters; and got myself on a programme with STEAMhouse over in Birmingham (a short train ride from Nottingham) to create more complex models for my stop-motion animations. So far, I’ve animated a set of goldfish, made from old curtains, swimming around the then soon-to-be vacated One Thoresby Street Project Space. The fish were inspired by rumoured sightings of goldfish swimming in Cathedral Cave in the Lake District (where I was living before Nottingham) combined with the legend of the ‘immortal fish of Bowscale’ who were believed to be able to speak. Something about them gliding soundlessly around a space hollowed out of it’s creative residents had something of a ‘Fall of the House of Usher’ vibe (a short story by Edgar Allan Poe), especially when shown on the peeling walls of One Thoresby Street for their closing group show, ‘Not Happy’.


^{'Portrait of a Trough Goldfish', stop-motion animation made in One Thoresby Street}

I also adapted my first fictional diary entry for performance, presenting it as part of ‘Nocturnal Creatures’ for Sculpture in the City and the Whitechapel Gallery. I worked with actor, Elizabeth Connick, to realise a work tilled ‘The Picnic’ as an unnerving account of a hiking trip in a mysterious landscape gone very wrong. The gravitas and added threat brought to the text by Elizabeth was incredible, and I’m now currently exploring foley sound to turn this particular performance into a podcast inspired by horror radio plays.


^{Performance of 'The Picnic' (featuring actor, Elizabeth Connick) for 'Nocturnal Creatures', Whitechapel Gallery and Sculpture in the City, 2022 (photo by Nick Turpin)}

For the final couple of months in Nottingham, I will be consolidating all of these experiments, new skills and learning into a site-specific multi-media installation entitled ‘Vale’ at Forth Project Space with an accompanying performance event. This will open in December 2022.