featured
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Bus Regulation: The Musical (Strathclyde)
The second iteration of Harrison’s Bus Regulation: The Musical – inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’ – re-enacts the history of public transport provision in the Strathclyde region from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!
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Tonnes of carbon produced by the personal transportation of a ‘professional artist’
This graph was first compiled as the central illustration of Harrison’s 2019 book The Glasgow Effect: A Tale of Class, Capitalism & Carbon Footprint to illustrate the artist’s increasing amount of travel in the years running up to her 2016 project and the dramatic impact it had on reducing her carbon footprint for transport. It was updated in 2020 for display at Edinburgh Art Festival.
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Bus Regulation: The Musical (Greater Manchester)
Inspired by the 1980s hit musical ‘Starlight Express’, this performance / event re-enacts the history of public transport provision in Greater Manchester from the post-war period to the present day… on roller skates!
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This Is What Democracy Looks Like!
We live in a liberal democracy, yet how much power do we really have to decide the direction of our country? “This Is What Democracy Looks Like!” gives you the opportunity to meet & greet your newly elected politicians at a roving roundtable discussion upon a bicycle built for seven. Hop on, decide on your direction and then travel together through the Olympic Park whilst discussing the issues that matter to you with the people in power.
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Life Raft
Designed as the final hole of Doug Fishbone’s Leisure Land Golf, Life Raft – a scale map of the UK floating in the adjacent canal – offers a safe haven to immigrant golf balls that can make the treacherous crossing.
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High Street Casualties: Ellie Harrison’s Zombie Walk
A performance / event in collaboration with Ort Gallery staged on Birmingham’s busy shopping streets. Dressed as “zombie employees”, more than 60 participants helped to map the former locations of thirteen of the big retail chains which have disappeared from our high streets since the start of the financial crisis in 2008.
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Dark Days
An ‘experiment in communal living’, this event offered one hundred participants the unique opportunity to stay the night in the great hall of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow as part of a pop-up community.
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The Global Race
The Global Race is an absurd vision of an Olympic games of the future, in which the brilliance of human ‘innovation‘ means we no longer need to break a sweat! At an athletics track in central Berlin, a group of ‘elite athletes’ and members of the public competed in a series of races on Segways.
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The Redistribution of Wealth
Installed in Tate Britain’s Historic Collection Room, this piece retells the history of UK government spending on the arts from the birth of the ‘Council for the Encouragement of Music & the Arts’ in 1940, right up to the present day climate of cutbacks.
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Fair Game
An experiment in ‘value’ devised specifically for the context of the art fair. Fair Game is an endurance performance which sees Harrison gamble her entire artist’s fee for the project with fair goers, by setting-up and running a hoopla stall within the fair grounds.
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Timelines
For almost five years Harrison documented and recorded information about nearly every aspect of her daily routine. These laborious, demanding and introverted data collecting processes grew ever more extreme until she devised the ultimate challenge for Timelines – to attempt to document everything she did, 24 hours a day, for four whole weeks (26 June – 23 July 2006).