Henry Coleman . Matt Franks . Simon Faithful . Karl Lydon . Goshka Macuga . Sadie Murdoch . Tucker Nichols . Mark Pearson . Richard Priestley . Deborah Rigby . Dallas Seitz . DJ Simpson . Francis Upritchard . Gavin Wade . Simon Wood

Action on Friday September 19th 2003 6.30-9.30pm
20th - 28th September 2003

To launch a new season at Cell, the gallery will set out to defy the romantic myth of the autonomous artistic object and will invite all takers to step up onto the potters wheel to throw a pot. The viewer will become an active and physical participant within the performance and the overall installation. The project touches on ideas about 'actionism', although eschews heavy pathos by introducing play and irony. The curatorial point to the action and subsequent show is to open a dialogue around the artistic value imbued within the outcome by the skill of the maker, if the exhibition's existence is reliant upon the audience's interaction on the opening night. The title 'Easy Rider' evokes a notion of the rejection of social structure and confinement through its association with the '60's biker-culture film of the same name. For the period of each audience participant's time behind the wheel, they are empowered to adopt this rejection of the mainstream and, as in the 1960's, embrace the alternative by visiting the creativity of the craftsperson, unbound by mass production, and free to ride where their creativity takes them.

Central to the exhibition will be the potters wheel installed on a stage or platform, where individual members of the audience will throw pots. The gallery walls will house shelving / display units where the thrown pots are to be placed and exhibited as they are made. Gradually the audience will develop the installation.

Additionally selected artists will produce an A2 drawn interpretation of how a pot might be thrown if the 'thrower' were being guided by their hand, resulting in a set of craft-based instructions informed by their own practice. The diagrams will illustrate an artist's intent, rather than become an individualised artwork. This set of drawn instructions will be displayed around the gallery, and will serve as artistic empowerment for the members of the audience who are to participate. It is expected that many of the diagrams will be impractical and misleading in terms of what is possible, in part due to the lack of pot throwing skills of the artists themselves, and in part due to the artists diagrams proving impossible to recreate in clay by the inexperienced thrower. Ego is thwarted by incompetence, and the underpinning struggle to create is underlined.