Work
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Hen Weekend
In 2007 Harrison devised and founded Hen Weekend – ‘the seminar by the sea for female artists, writers and curators. The project aims to facilitate discussion and encourage collaboration between its participants, and to begin to create a unique support network for talented female practitioners working within the contemporary art sector. Hen Weekend events take place in collaboration with seaside art centres around the UK. The pilot event took place at De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill on Sea from 30 March – 1 April 2007.
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The Live Lecture
23 Feb 2007
Broadway, Nottingham -
Artist’s Training Programme™
A spoof website promoting a revolutionary new self-help training regime for artists. The Artist’s Training Programme™ has been researched and developed by Ellie Harrison BA PGDip, alongside two of the world’s foremost self-improvement gurus – Paul McKenna PhD and Dr Ryuta Kawashima. Follow for four week programme today and transform your practice forever!
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Part-time
Harrison’s exposé of the door-to-door sales racket masterminded by the Cobra Group. Written in 2006 for her blog whist participating in the Part-time project commissioned by Prime, for which she was required to spend four weeks working ‘undercover’ in a low-wage job. (Word count: 3,774)
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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.
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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).
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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.
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Daily Data Display Room
For the duration of the Day-to-Day Data exhibition at Danielle Arnaud contemporary art in London, Ellie collected information about 10 elements of her everyday routine. Each morning the results from the previous day were emailed to the gallery and used to reconfigure and adjust the 10 different objects comprising the installation. Over the course of the exhibition, the display aimed to test and visualise an experiment as to whether there was a correlation between different elements of this information.
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Tea Blog
For three years from 1 January 2006 – 31 December 2008, Harrison recorded what she was thinking about every time she had a cup of tea (or a different type of hot drink). During this period, whilst archiving a total of 1,650 thoughts in the Tea Blog, Harrison began to learn the perils of instantaneous ego-broadcasting and so made the decision to ‘quit’ data collecting.
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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.
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Day-to-Day Data
Day-to-Day Data – ‘an exhibition of artists who collect, list, database and absurdly analyse the data of everyday life’, was Harrison’s first major curatorial project. It developed as a way of further exploring the ideas at the core of her practice, and as a way of bringing together a group of artists who shared similar interests. The project featured newly commissioned works by twenty artists and comprised a gallery-based exhibition touring to three UK venues, a publication and a website.
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Daily Data Display Wall
For the duration of the Day-to-Day Data exhibition in Nottingham and Portsmouth, Harrison collected data about 20 different elements of her daily life onto Daily Data Log sheets. Each morning the Log Sheet results were emailed to the gallery and used to reconfigure the 20 different items in the installation, so that it took on a slightly different appearance each day of the exhibition.
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Day-to-Day Data
Harrison edited the publication for her 2005 curatorial project Day-to-Day Data. Featuring the work of twenty artists who ‘collect, list, database and absurdly analyse the data of everyday life’, the publication offers an introduction to the project’s key themes and an overview of each artist’s work. Harrison wrote the Curator’s Introduction as well as an Introduction to her new work for the show, the Daily Data Display Wall. (Word count: 736)
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Gold Card Adventures
For her solo exhibition at Piccadilly Circus Underground Station in 2005, Harrison created a series of 20 large format posters to visualise the data collected during her Gold Card Adventures project, for which she recorded the total distance of every journey she made on London Transport in a year (9,236 kilometres). These posters were used to mark the stages of this cumulative journey by featuring a series of imitation postcards from different global destinations at progressive further distances away from London.
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Swear Box 2005
Throughout 2005, Harrison recorded every sentence that she uttered which contained a swear word. These sentences were uploaded to the online Swear Box at regular intervals over the course of the year, alongside a summary of the reason for the outburst. The work involved in updating the online Swear Box had a similar effect to the more traditional version of the box, in that Harrison only swore on 142 occasions the entire year which was considerably less than the 2,427 she did during her Daily Quantification Records project in 2003.
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Sneezes 2003
Throughout 2003, Harrison recorded the exact date and time of her every sneeze. For this solo exhibition at the Wallner Gallery in Nottingham, she transformed the gallery walls into a giant two-way timeline. Mini colour-coded prints representing each of the 318 sneezes were positioned around the walls to indicate the exact date and time at which they occurred.
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Bath Time
An interactive web-based artwork commissioned by the Transition art programme at Victoria Baths in Manchester.
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Trans-Atlantic Challenge
This web-based programme monitors Harrison’s progress as she strives towards achieving three momentous challenges over the course of her lifetime. For the first of these, the Trans-Atlantic Challenge, Harrison records and adds together all the lengths she swims weekly at her local pool in the hope of one day having swum the 5,400 kilometre distance from the UK to America.
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The Monthly Sculptures Determined by the Daily Quantification Records
Throughout 2003, Harrison also collected data about 14 different elements of her everyday life onto Daily Quantification Records. Each month this data was converted into a set of averages, which was then applied to a set of scales and systems to output the specifications for a monthly sculpture. The first six months’ worth of sculptures was installed at the 2003 Goldsmiths Postgraduate Degree Show.
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My Head’s Swimming
This random thought generator was Harrison’s first experiment in the collection of ‘subjective data’. For three months during the second term of her Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art course at Goldsmiths College she recorded all the thoughts she had whilst swimming lengths at her local pool. She found that swimming provided an excellent opportunity to reflect on all the things happening in her life at what was, during the build up to the US and UK attack on Iraq, a tense time to be in London.
Project website -
Statistics Are Hot Air
This colour-coded vinyl bar chart visualises the exact quantity of gaseous emissions Harrison produced daily throughout 2003. Originally created in 2003 as a studio based wall chart exploring the notion of ‘artistic output’, for which Harrison added one bar to the chart each day. In 2007 the completed chart was installed as semi-permanent installation on glass at Birmingham Moor Street Station as part the New Art Birmingham exhibition Ariston. There is also an online version of the chart.
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Mass = Energy = Time
This kinetic installation uses two found weight mechanism clocks. The lead weights which are normally used to power the clocks have been removed and replaced by foods (bread and bananas) of the same mass. The clocks continue to work as normal – powered by the gravitational potential energy inherent in the foods. Originally installed at Goldsmiths College in 2002 and then at the Colony in Birmingham in 2004.
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TicTac Typing & Peanut Typing
This installation features two Mac computer programmes made during the LabCulture digital arts residency in 2002. The programmes mimic the common typing test, but rather than telling you your speed or accuracy, they inform you of the equivalent number of TicTacs or peanuts you are burning off whilst typing. Bowls of TicTacs and peanuts are installed alongside the two Macs for hungry participants.
