FTHo

Join us at Flat Time House on the weekend of 2–3 October for the launch of our newly developed studios and research space, a new garden research project, and a special one off opportunity to view our archives and collections.

We are excited to announce the opening of new studios and a research space at Flat Time House with a weekend of events including a presentation of research into the FTHo garden by artists William Evans and Julia Crabtree with writer Alice Hattrick, and a presentation of research into FTHo's collection of John Latham artworks by Sean Ketteringham. There will also be an opportunity to view items from the newly catalogued John Latham collection of artworks, and newly rehoused photographs from the John Latham Archive. More information and timings to follow.

William Evans and Julia Crabtree in collaboration with Alice Hattrick are developing a major new project for Flat Time House’s garden. Over the next 6 months the group will ‘excavate’ the John Latham archive, as well as the garden itself, to consider the conceptual and material aspects of the site. In his younger days Latham was a market gardener and his lifelong passion for gardening is demonstrated at Flat Time House by the integration of a conservatory for planting into the studio he built for himself in 1985. Alongside research into Latham and the site, their research will consider permaculture, care, community, collective action, deep time, and issues of classification. They will use Latham's thinking on making and living, and his inquiry into time and ecology, to investigate the relationship of the garden and botany to authority and power. A public event in October 2021 will share their research.

In addition to the John Latham archive, Flat Time House is home to a collection of John Latham artwork which until now has never been the subject of sustained investigation. A new research space for these items is currently being developed by AHRC funded researcher Sean Ketteringham to allow greater access to the materials by both education groups and artists. The cataloguing of the collection will build upon the experimental structure of the John Latham Archive. The creative archival methodologies we employ explore how cataloguing and storage processes relate to Latham’s ideas of knowledge and confusion, destruction, authority, community, and landscape.

/origin\forward/slash\ is the infrathin banner under which, behind which and through which a band of artists and philosophers are exploring their mutual fascinations and antagonisms with Martin Heidegger’s essay The Origin of the Work of Art (1950).

Currently on a remote placement due to Covid 19, the group have extended John Latham’s body-based floor plan of Flat Time House with an additional virtual room, ‘the other hand.’ Here they co-habit from time to time, using the web interface as a way of experimenting with formats for visual and verbal thinking together and adding victuals to their archive cabinet. 

The /origin\forward/slash\ group are Steven Claydon (Independent), Marie Hay (De Montfort University), Sacha Golob (Kings College, London), Jo Malt  (Kings College, London), Hester Reeve (Sheffield Hallam University), Mark Titmarsh  (University of Technology, Sydney), Georgios Tsagdis  (Leiden University | Erasmus University Rotterdam). This project is lead by Hester Reeve (Reader in Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University) in association with The Centre for Philosophy and Visual Arts (Kings College London).

The /origin\forward/slash\ group will host a live online event in June 2021 and launch an exhibition at Flat Time House in 2022.