Hello
Welcome to the Test Bed Blog. Test Bed is a new art project, set up by Friction Arts in Birmingham UK. My name is Lee Griffiths, I'm an artist, director of Friction and artistic director of Test Bed. I'll be using this blog to document the trials and tribulations of putting together a large art project, involving over 20 artists, plus production crew over three months.

Background
I first had the idea for Test Bed around eighteen months ago. I'd noticed a large amount of training and support for new or emerging artists, in fact we at Friction have been involved in some of the best of the crop ( in our humble opinion - see www.creativealliance.org.uk), but what about the rest of us?  There didn't seem to be any support for 'submerging' artists, those of us who have been around for a while and maybe don't get the support or recognition we perhaps deserve.  I'm also very concerned with the role of art in society.  Friction Arts make what we call 'art where you live', that is artworks and projects that live outside the 'normal' places where we expect to encounter art, and that involves people as participants as well as audience. I put these two ideas together, and so Test Bed was born.

I spent a lot of the next six months or so cajoling, pleading and brow-beating various people until I had enough finance to make the project happen.  (In Friction we talk about finance, rather than funding, we're just trying to be good capitalists and keep our options open...) So thanks to ACE West Midlands, Business Link and Creative Alliance for helping me to make my idea a reality.

I knew what I wanted, i.e., a project raising the profile of 'submerging artists' that also served to do the same for participatory art, but now I needed to work out who.  I looked for artists who had been active in the region, but who maybe didn't have the profile as practitioners they deserved.  I was also looking for artists who would make a quality artwork and who had the confidence and experience to involve people in the production or performance of that artwork.
I didn't have to look far.  I've worked as a practisingg artist in the West Midlands for fifteen years and so have a fairly good overview on who is out there, making the kind of work that I'm interested in.  Some of it, literally on my doorstep.  So, eschewing all normal concerns regarding equal opportunities, I made my selection.

The Artists
These are the artists I decided to invite on the project, the descriptions of them and their work are my own, I'm sure they would come up with much better statements of their practise than I ever could.  I suppose I'm trying to explain my reasoning for selecting them for the project.  Gratifyingly, nobody I invited onto the project refused the opportunity.  Why would they;-) 

Harry Palmer - defying all attempts at categorisation, Harry is an artist, publisher, radio journalist, video experi-mentalist and avid collector of eccentrics (check out www.eccentriccity.co.uk for the world's first eccentric newspaper and www.knex3.org for some of his eccentric radio.
George Saxon - recently relocated back in West Brom, we first met George at Harry's mill in Hull back, very much, in the day and have never quite managed to work with him since.  George's video works have been shown across the planet, including his paper house in Japan.  He's also produced work like 'Housewatch', working with other artists to transform a row of houses into a video installation - groundbreakingly projection-tastic work. 
Darryl Georgiou - although well established outside the region, Darryl remains largely ignored in Birmingham. Their loss, he's fab.  His dad used to run a chip shop near the site of the project, so his inclusion in the project was inevitable. 
Pauline Bailey - Pauline has been working around the fringes of the city's arts happenings for ages, producing installations and participatory projects including working on the 'Intervention' project.  Pauline's son, Adika, is an unofficial and unwitting mentor for the artists on the project.
Julie O'Neill - Julie makes installations which often have a performance element, which description does her no justice at all.  Though she might not be quite the veteran the other artists are,  there's not many people making more interesting work around.
Sandra Hall - Sandra is co-director of Friction. all nepotism aside, her ability to engage with people is second to none.  Test Bed will give her the time and space to flex her artistic muscles, initially developed by working with the likes of Augusto Boal, Guillermo Gomez Pena, Philippe Gaulier and some British people as well.
Nelson Douglas - Photographer and lecturer at Kingston University (not the one in Jamaica - the commute's too long), Nelson makes photography-based participatory projects.  He seems particularly keen on letting the community get their hands on his medium formats...
Mark Storor - another artist involved in the reverse exodus back to the centre of the world - Brumtastic.  Mark has worked on some amazing participatory projects including literally giving people angel's wings, an ice cream van swapping songs for ices and an archaelogical excavation of his Granny's tea table.  Mark is a proper artist.