collaboration - Ellie Harrison

Exhibition

MONEY M€AL

Harrison collaborated with artist Emily Furneaux to facilitate this discussion event about our relationships with money, as part of Glasgow Open House Art Festival in 2015.
Internet / Broadcasts

Ellie & Oliver’s Long Distance Relationship

For Glasgow Open House Arts Festival 2014, Harrison & her former flatmate Oliver Braid reunited to present two special editions of their popular radio show, as part of three interlinked projects taking place over two weekends, across both their new residences in the west and east of the city.
Performance / Events

The Other Forecast

Recorded LIVE in front of a green screen, Harrison’s The Other Forecast offers her summary of the absurd consequences of capitalism, as a warning about the future we are heading towards if the system continues unchecked. Broadcast on the Big Screen at MediaCityUK in November 2013 as part of The Other Forecast project – a collaboration between Harrison & John O’Shea.
Project website
Internet / Broadcasts

Friendship Festival

For Glasgay! 2012, Harrison & her flatmate Oliver Braid presented Friendship Festival. Building on the success of their popular radio show, they invited six other friendly duos with intimate and provocative thoughts to share with the world, into their home for a series of weekend radio show ‘takeovers’.
Internet / Broadcasts

Ellie & Oliver Show

For a whole year, artists, friends and flatmates Ellie Harrison & Oliver Braid worked together to broadcast a weekly radio show LIVE from their flat in Glasgow (and from a variety of special locations across the UK and Ireland including Edinburgh Art Festival and Glasgow International).
Project website
Performance / Events

Desk Chair Disco

Ellie Harrison & Adele Prince (Sports Day) staged the first ever Desk Chair Disco in Newcastle upon Tyne on Friday 4 November 2011. City dwellers were offered the opportunity to redress their work-life balance by reclaiming their ordinary office furniture and taking it out on the town. As part of Wunderbar festival, Sports Day were invited to take over an empty office unit in the Pandon Building and put on this ‘roller disco with a difference’. The evening featured disco lights, DJ sets, live music and daring Desk Chair Derby displays courtesy of the Newcastle Roller Girls.
Media

Ellie Harrison & Oliver Braid

2 Nov 2011
Wunderbar Radio
Media

Ellie Harrison & Josie Long

1 Nov 2011
Wunderbar Radio
Social / Networks

Artists Anonymous

Artists Anonymous was a support group for Glasgow-based artists co-founded, coordinated and attended by Harrison over the course of two years. It took place every three weeks at the CCA in Glasgow and aimed to provide a ‘safe space for its members to speak candidly, honestly and confidentially to others about the anxieties and stresses of their professional lives’.
Lectures

In conversation with Sally O’Reilly

9 Oct 2009
Space, London
Performance / Events

Desk Chair Parade

On Sunday 2 August 2009, Ellie Harrison & Adele Prince (Sports Day) staged the inaugural Desk Chair Parade took place in Manchester as part of We are the Champions – Castlefield Gallery’s 25th Anniversary. A group of willing volunteers – office workers, shoppers and gallery goers alike – embarked on a magnificent adventure, freewheeling through the streets on ordinary office chairs.
Performance / Events

Olympic Ring Doughnut Eating Contest

Harrison collaborated with Adele Prince as Sports Day on the Olympic Ring Doughnut Eating Contest on Saturday 15 September 2007 at Burgess Park in south London as part the second Artists’ Sports Day organised by Grunts for the Arts. The Artists’ Sports Days are organised as a protest against the recent siphoning off of 35% or the Arts Council Grants for the Arts funds in order to pay for the 2012 Olympics.
Social / Networks

Union of Undercover Artists

The Union of Undercover Artists was formed in summer 2006 by Harrison, Elizabeth Kearney and Joanna Spitzner in response to the project Part-time, which they had each been commissioned to take part in. For Part-time the three artists were required to spend four weeks working undercover in low-wage jobs and to make work in response to their experiences. As well as drawing attention to the lack of support or representation for individuals working in the visual arts sector, the Union of Undercover Artists formed one of the artists’ major responses to the Part-time project.
Project website
Performance / Events

Bouncy Boxing Championships

Ellie Harrison & Adele Prince collaborated as Sports Day on several performance / events with a sporting theme from 2006 – 2009. They made their first public outing hosting Bouncy Boxing Championships the NAN-NANA – New Adventures in Networking event held in Nottingham on 28 – 30 April 2006. 16 lucky competitors were chosen from amongst the 60 attending delegates to take part in the contest. Four nail-biting, knock-out rounds later and a champion emerged – Paul Luckraft of The Royal Standard, Liverpool was awarded much sought after ‘silver glove’ trophy.

Project website
Social / Networks

The Quotidian Factor

The first collaborative project between Adele Prince and Ellie Harrison was this artists’ workshop based on the popular UK TV series The Krypton Factor. The day-long workshop took place at Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth as part of the ARC programme, which accompanied the Day-to-Day Data exhibition in the gallery. The Quotidian Factor featured a series of four rounds in which participants competed in challenges designed to get them inspired by the little things in life.
Project website
Performance / Events

GHAOS ZX

From 2003-2005, Harrison was a member of Nottingham-based art collective Reactor. She designed and performed as ‘QuickShot Pro’ – the giant joystick in GHAOS ZX and helped devise and participate in several other GHAOS performances over the course of two years.

Project website

Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.