Interview with Alex Wisser, Cementa_13 Director

The Cementa_13 Contemporary Art Festival is happening in one months time, the four day festival starts on February 1, and preparations are now seriously underway to organise and accommodate the as yet unknown number of people who will be descending into the small and at the moment quiet rural town of Kandos. A call out has just gone out on the Cementa_13 website for participants and guests  to register so that a clear idea may emerge of the size of the coming festival. Just before the New Year I interviewed festival director Alex Wisser, and was fascinated to find out more about the background and stories behind the festival.
The full interview was published earlier today in Arts Features International. Here is an excerpt:

Alex Wisser: "One night we sat drinking too much wine, talking about the recently closed cement works on the mountain next to the town and the thought quickly formed that we could stage a contemporary art festival here.  Haha.  Yes, another glass of the shiraz please.  We woke up the next morning and Ann was drawing up artist lists and thinking about public liability insurance.  Georgie and I rubbed our eyes and realized we had signed on.  Artists have these kinds of crazy ideas all the time.  It usually requires someone taking them seriously to cause any real trouble".

The full article and interview is in Arts Features International at artsfeatures.com, at this link.

Copyright ©Ruth Skilbeck,  2013

Interview with Alex Wisser, Cementa_13 Director

The Cementa_13 Contemporary Art Festival is happening in one months time, the four day festival starts on February 1, and preparations are now seriously underway to organise and accommodate the as yet unknown number of people who will be descending into the small and at the moment quiet rural town of Kandos. A call out has just gone out on the Cementa_13 website for participants and guests  to register so that a clear idea may emerge of the size of the coming festival. Just before the New Year I interviewed festival director Alex Wisser, and was fascinated to find out more about the background and stories behind the festival.
The full interview was published earlier today in Arts Features International. Here is an excerpt:

Alex Wisser: "One night we sat drinking too much wine, talking about the recently closed cement works on the mountain next to the town and the thought quickly formed that we could stage a contemporary art festival here.  Haha.  Yes, another glass of the shiraz please.  We woke up the next morning and Ann was drawing up artist lists and thinking about public liability insurance.  Georgie and I rubbed our eyes and realized we had signed on.  Artists have these kinds of crazy ideas all the time.  It usually requires someone taking them seriously to cause any real trouble".

The full article and interview is in Arts Features International at artsfeatures.com, at this link.

Copyright ©Ruth Skilbeck,  2013

Interview: Tracey Emin and Ruth Skilbeck

In interview: Ruth Skilbeck & Tracey Emin at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, 2004  

                                                                                                            
                                     Photograph © Copyright Ruth Skilbeck


Professor Tracey Emin and Ruth Skilbeck pondering the art of travelling light in 2004. 


In the photo I am interviewing Tracey Emin, who at the time was attracting media epithets such as  'bad-girl' of British Art, and 'Britain's biggest art celebrity'.


Tracey came to Sydney in 2004 for the opening of her exhibition, Fear, War and the Scream at Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.


Tracey's stories of her adolescent experiences of rape and racial abuse, transformed into the material  form of her art catapulted her into the upper echelons of the art world when she was picked up out of her struggling artist's life in an East End council flat by Charles Saatchi. Achieving cultural and political prominence in the 80s, Saatchi, is the advertising agency director who advised the Thatcher government, then turned to contemporary art. In the mid-90s Tracey Emin became one of  Saatchi's  curated group of Young British Artists, that also included Damien Hirst and the Chapman Brothers. No longer so 'young', their work continues to be represented by Jay Jopling in London's White Cube gallery.


Sitting in the sun on the terrace of the gallery, we were talking literally and metaphorically about 'the Art of Travelling Light'. A stream of consciousness that began when I asked her about how she flies. We devised a story concept of Tracey Emin's Art of Travelling Light -with tips on how to fly aesthetically with minimal baggage- or in Tracey's case designer luggage. Above the detritus of relationship breakdowns, addictions, life's crises. With friends and other animals (Tracey had a much loved cat); through the transformed subjectivity of art.


An alchemy that seems even more apt now.






© Copyright Ruth Skilbeck 2011




My story 'Tracey Emin Down Under' is published in POL Oxygen-Design, Art, Architecture, Issue 2, 2003.