Maggie Tran

Scarecrow

2011-11-03T13:31:00.001-07:00

The Bearded Lady of Mystery was ritualistically put up on Plot 103

When we paraded her on the street to the allotment, children screamed and wanted to hi-five her hand. People in cars slowed down to absorb what they were seeing

2011-08-24T06:22:00.000-07:00

My Videos

2011-07-16T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Marriage of Vinh Trung and Kieu Ngan an epic wedding

Task of the Year Performance on camera

Opera piece Documentation of a performance, installation and sound piece. Best to be experienced live

Plot 103

2011-06-11T01:59:00.000-07:00

Plot 103 is an allotment project, hidden in a valley like a secret Eden in Hollingdean, Brighton. It is a 45m long & 8m wide piece of land. It is an experimental growing space for artworks, learning and food production. It is a study of nature, horticulture, rituals and social spaces as well a space for contemplation, meanderings and play. It is nicknamed Cockaigne - the medieval land of plenty, well depicted by Peter Bruegel the Elder - where the pigs run around with forks in them ready to be eaten and the sky rains with cheese.

From lo-fi publishing to allotments
It is not a surprise that I have gone from encouraging people to make their own 16mm films, facilitating people to publish their own work - from books to performances www.bookville.co.uk, to being interested in growing things and nurturing a creative space in this form. DIY to self-sufficiency seems like a natural progression to make, and both about taking control for oneself and being self-empowered. I am studying Horticulture at the moment, which will provide me with more knowledge to create my folklore garden.

Here are some of the things growing that is or has been growing in the land of cockaigne -

A South American plant called achocha

This is when it has exploded

Tubular petaled Cosmos Bipinnate

Amys' Place

2011-06-11T00:36:00.000-07:00

This was not a direct swap, but my friend Amy kindly let me use her spare room several times, whilst she worked at home. She even made me lunch and provided me with companionship during my breaks. She is on an interesting adventure at the moment, which you can read about at - http://amysheartpath.blogspot.com

Sex, Survival and Servitude

2011-04-05T01:28:00.000-07:00

Sex, Survival and Servitude is a performance lecture/ crash course on How to Survive, How to be Sexy, How to Serve, and to emphasise the point I cook breakfast for everybody and get them well prepared in life's essentials before dining.

Demonstrating the power and allure of the cock strut

Showing that as well keeping your lips sexy plump and moist, the chapstick is the ultimate survival fire kindling

First performed at Coachwerks Scratch Night

Performazine

2011-04-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

Cover image - sign language for the work performance

Performazine is an infrequent publication that comes out periodically when I have collected enough interesting material and have time to be able to put it together. It is a zine that celebrates and documents performance/ live art, and contains observations, inspirations and musings. This issue includes human relationships for advanced technology and the framing of things, a highlight on the best market salesmen around, Brooklyn artist Jay Van Buren and his love of painting furries, the start of the Performance I Didn't See series, hand drawn performance related ads and delving into the arena of bad performances. £2.50 + 50p postage, for a copy contact maggiesgrowontrees(at)gmail.com.

Epiphanies and Idiosyncrasies

2011-02-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

I had an epiphany recently. It's not new to me that I have an awful track record of losing my artwork + documentation etc - when I had just graduated from my fine art degree my house got broken into and as well as my tools for making work - photo camera and laptop, they took my DV video camera along with with most of all the work that I had ever done. Then there was twice the incident of the hard drive dying disasters, and I had struggled to back up most of my work from them. In fact I took on a whole new zen attitude to it and saw it as my body from time to time liked to do 'shedding' and just to let go of things. Reluctant at first to see it as starting afresh and that maybe it was an opportunity to use another medium like drawing, instead of video (no camera) and performance (the perfect ephemeral form that possibly might never have happened once documentation was lost), I did manage to just give into it.

But somehow it did not fully dawned on me that that has always happened until recently, and then to my re-realisation that even when I made my first artwork back in high school I had been losing my work. The time when I had applied for a bursary to go to Italy and the interviewer had to come looking for me in the midst of a lost and forgotten artwork junkyard at the back of the class, desparately trying to re-find some item that I half remembered existed. It has been happening all along. There has been no lesson learnt and moved on from, it is a history that keeps repeating itself and involves a half conscious awareness of losing the work and a half arse attempt to retrieve the work.

I have finally come to the conclusion that it might be because I am not meant to make art and be an artist or this is part of my artwork. Which leads me to the two sketchbooks that I lost and miraculously found their way back to me, and has become the beginning of an interventional piece...

People, projects and spaces

2011-01-30T10:52:00.000-08:00

Skjul Fyra Sex

I am in Göteborg, Sweden with my partner Graeme Walker who is an idea developer, playwright, improviser, designer and creative person who I often collaborate with. We are visiting our friend Tobias Müller who we met at Coachwerks - a social art space in Brighton that I was helping to run for a year a few months ago and which Graeme is still running - www.coachwerks.org.uk. Tobias was very inspired by the type of space and project that Coachwerks was and felt that something like this was hugely lacking in Göteborg. Graeme advised that if he was interested in starting one, the harbour area was probably a good place to look for spaces, as Göteborg is a very industrial working port and there was a possibility there could be empty warehouses...

This is sort of what happened, him and a group of twenty or so people have studios there and help run it. They are property guardians of the building and rent it for very cheap and can use and do whatever in the building for a year or more until definite plans have been made for it. It includes one big event space, recording & rehearsal studios, a sewing machine room and darkroom. As someone who is involved in spaces quite a lot, I always feel that it is important that spaces like this exists, a place where creatives can play freely, a fertile hotbed where self expression, creativity and innovation can happen and be nurtured. Judging by the popularity of it - a lot of people in Göteborg feel the same.

Home workspace

2011-01-19T02:51:00.000-08:00

View from Jo's window

I work part-time for an arts magazine, which considering it is a 'side job' to keep me going financially it takes up a substantial amount of my week and is rather intense. It involves being in front of the computer approx. 8 hours in a day, where my head ends up feeling boxed in and my body protests for the lack of physical use for such long periods. I usually work from home, which adds another layer of potential cabin fever. So I decided to try and make things more interesting, I have had a taste of working in the homes of friends who also work at home and working alongside them.

I decided I wanted to go as far as swapping homes for the day and found my friend Jo Dimbleby willing, I had never even been to her house before. We met halfway between our homes and swapped keys and envelopes with maps. Stepping into an unknown space was thrilling, like when you are privvied to go into someones' bedroom and get excited about seeing what books they read. I would say that someone's home is a more conducive environment for working, you see things in a different way, things that you would usually register as chores and risk being sidetracked by, can seem acceptable if it's someone elses - you like the casualness, even finding it charming.

So I am officially open for home coworking and home workspace swapping, so if anyones' interested let me know! My email is maggiesgrowontrees(at)gmail.com

Letter Writer, Archivist, Librarian

2011-01-04T06:22:00.000-08:00

I offer services as letter writer, archivist and librarian.

Here are some projects I have offered my services to:

Letter writing at the Coachwerks Winter Fair, to help children and adults type out or hand write a bespoke letter to Father Christmas, and to post it off for them too.

Archivist for Bookartbookshop

Librarian for The Brighton Pebble Museum

Librarian for Coachwerks library project

One of the correspondences between me and fellow librarians:

Hello fellow librarians Mark & Graeme,

I just wanted to take the opportunity to tell you that I have finished the categorising and sorting of one shelf (the black one with the beginnings of European history, foreign language books and the old hardbacks with anonymous covers etc).

All the biblical and overly strong christian toned books are stalled on the absolutely hard to reach top shelf including the small beginnings of questionable books on teenage weightloss and racist graffiti, homophobic psychology and religious books preying on the vulnerable. Safely in one place and where we know they are, they are ready for any other use that may be required of them, including emergency insulation and heating.

I have started what Mark coined as the 'Far Out' section and at the moment it is occupied by other religions, spirituality, cosmology, astrology (tarot readings, dream books and horoscopes) which I was thinking can morph into the supernatural, pataphysical, the ig nobel, fantasy and the most effective escapist material. I am happy to discuss further with you the definition of this category.

I have also put the more dull sounding fictitious literature at the top, which may perhaps benefit from further inventive categories (like M. Pembreys' commendable Jezebel section that is healthily increasing or again saved for other uses). There is definitely a visible 'wholesome rom coms' section definitively appearing.

The seemingly biggest genre - thrillers, suspense, murder and generally violent books are all at the bottom of the shelf. Now grouped together this head surface titillating matter look quite good visually with the common font type, visual presentation and aesthetics that they share.

Biographies with their commonly hard cover READ ME size have been placed in the roomy cavities above the anonymous coverless hardbacks. A small 'Probably must read' section of possible classics has been added in the reachable regions of the shelf, and a 'Sort of bearable fiction' also.

This is the rough update thus far. Maybe us fellow librarians can convene again this Saturday morn of the community caff. If the morning proves too distraction full we can continue our gravely important task on a quieter evening also.

Yours respectively and best of wishes,
Maggie Tran (your other fellow librarian)

Brighton Mummers 2010

2010-12-30T05:10:00.000-08:00

Mumming is a british folk play I partake in every year usually just before Christmas, mumming is about essentially being in disguise and a ritual performance. Of many personas it is the one that makes me more English than English, and armed with my wealth of knowledge of British folk culture which is sometimes even alien to the native, it is as if it's a result of a very opposite/ contrasting/ different heritage.

One of my characters is Jack Finney

"My names not Jack Finney,
it's Mr Finney,
a man of growing pains,
do more than I or any man at this game,
why I once cured a dinner lady of a toothache...
I cut off her 'ead and threw it in a ditch."

www.brightonmummers.co.uk

Welcome

2010-10-22T14:13:00.001-07:00

To the website of Maggie Tran