elizabeth newman & nicki wynnychuk
room for plan b

room for plan B is the first artistic collaboration between Elizabeth Newman and Nicki Wynnychuk. Taking their inspirations from similar historical cues and phenomena and a complementary sensibility towards materiality, the act of exchange and interaction has become the stimulus and challenge for this project. By working together the artists have also opened a new opportunity to work on a large scale, and create an 'experience' within the gallery: part discrete modernist object, part post-object interaction and installation.

DdC: what compelled you to begin to make collaborative work?

LN: I think we began to collaborate, not so much out of a compulsion, but more out of a curiosity to see what would happen. I guess collaboration requires a certain amount of trust and respect – you don’t collaborate with just anyone! I think it’s about an artistic friendship, which means a friendship based on a sort of unspoken agreement and understanding about the values and priorities in one’s work. I think we knew we could trust each other’s artistry enough to feel confident that we could come up with work that would be satisfactory to both of us, and at the same time be a bit of a surprise: you don’t know what you’ll come up with when you collaborate.

NW: It’s critical to find the right person or people. The social aspect is always a bonus but essentially, I look for opportunities to open and extend my practice by working with people you can really learn from.

DdC: how are you approaching your current project at the aeaf?

LN: The way we approached the project was rather open-ended. In the beginning we knew we would come up with something representative of our combined practices, but we didn’t have any plans. In fact we first of all thought we would be making work for a very small space, and only later discovered that the space would be huge! Responding to this particular space of the aeaf became primary and central at that point: we felt that we had to deal with the size, with the interior of the space, and with the sort of encounter our artwork might make for a viewer. I’m always interested (perhaps it’s a sort of feminine thing) in ‘decorating’ a space – in making it somewhere encompassing and intriguing to be in, in making it comfortable but not soporific.

NW: Context is half the work, so regarding the space was always a critical aspect. We just started talking, it was quite open. Some things landed others did not. We kept pushing and over a period of time the project evolved. I really feel that working over a substantial period and not being rushed was a critical factor for us.

DdC: how do you negotiate the terrain/boundaries of your individual practices in the context of your collaborations?

LN: The actual process of the collaboration has been very seamless and easy: I think we both feel that we get to represent our own ‘ways and means’, but at the same time we’re open enough to want to see something new, something a bit foreign to one’s own practice. We would suggest ideas, discuss them, try things out. Nicki is very big on models, whereas I would never make a model – so it’s interesting for me to meet someone else’s practice and learn from them. We worked from drawings, changed them, and so on.

NW: To collaborate well I don’t think you can have boundaries or an individual’s ego, the trick is to remain open, this is never easy (for me anyway) but incredibly valuable. I always try to remind myself that listening has the same usefulness as thinking or speaking.

DdC: is your work together open-ended in terms of time or is this a temporary construct, an approach you’re simply taking on for a certain number of projects?

LN: This is a one-off project for us. Of course there may be things we do together in the future, but I think that essentially we see ourselves as individual practitioners… and that this is a bit of an extension of that, an experiment.

NW: There are so many factors that have to come together for it to work or be ongoing. These variables make for a serious commitment. This show was always a one-off project primarily to see what might happen.

DdC: can you define the idea of the ‘experiment’ in your collaborations?

LN: I suppose it’s a ‘trying out’ of something, a ‘waiting to see…’. There is a large amount of freedom gained from collaborating with someone despite the restriction of working with another, having to put your impulses and hazy ideas into words, having to check it out with the other person and so on… despite those parameters, the experience is a liberating one, I think. One is liberated from oneself for a moment! Having said that, I think all art is an experiment.

NW: I think the collaborative process can remind you that all art is an experiment and that control is not always a positive thing.