The project is described further on its website:
“A message is whispered from one person to another and changes as it is passed. We whisper a message from art form to art form. A message could become a painting, then music, then poetry, then dance. We whisper each finished work of art to multiple artists so the game branches out exponentially. We ask each artist to find what the works have in common and to create a translation of that into their own art form. So — TELEPHONE begins with one message, passes that message through more than 900 artists from 72 countries and then concludes with a single artwork.”
The Seattle-based curator Nathan Langston wrote of the project’s origins that “[t]he first game of TELEPHONE was published six years ago, and a second game was never planned. But in March 2020, as the global pandemic began to metastasize in the States, the moment seemed ripe to give it another go.”
Ella Carty responded to works by the visual artist Pawel Pacholec based in Gdansk and choreographer Manuel Vignoulle based in New York by making the short film ‘Waiting for the Tide to Turn’ on her camera phone in which Ella turned her lens onto the rocks and tide pools of south Cornwall. Later, when Ella could return to use her Krowji studio once Covid restrictions had been lifted, she made an ink drawing to evoke waves hitting rocks. In turn, Ella’s work, along with Sarah Crofts’ short film, inspired poet Julia Lisella from Massachusetts to write the poem ‘Dioramas’, all part of a generative chain of artistic works that crosses international boundaries, and in doing so uncovers universal themes.
The TELEPHONE project, which one can happily get swept along and lost in, features a complex, wondrous web of interconnecting works with all the artists involved responding to nature in some way, and celebrates human connection, inspiration and creativity despite the unforgiving climate of the pandemic.
You can read Ella’s blog post on taking part in the project here
https://ellacarty.com/2021/04/11/telephone/
And the Telephone website, which is well worth visiting, is here:
