Outsiders (2016)
By
Morgan Tipping
A film still from Outsiders showing a series of illustrated beer mats on a pub table. The on-screen text reads: ‘You too me a lot about your drinking and it was almost the glue between the places and the people in your past’. Photograph credit: Morgan Tipping, 2016
Outsiders is a collaboration between artist Morgan Tipping and survivalist Gerald and explores how housing, belonging and community are multiplicatively connected.
Gerald and I met at Mildmay Park Extra Care Home in September 2015. Mildmay Park was his first home since his stroke 12 months earlier. I had a studio on the second floor and I was introduced to Gerald as the new resident artist. He was introduced to me as a resident who has had an extremely eventful life of (in his words) 'survival'. Meeting Gerald gave the physical studio space I used a context that shaped my understanding of how to respond artistically. In the 8 months Gerald and I have spent talking and collaborating we realised how much our lives had overlapped geographically.
Throughout the 90’s Gerald collected his dole money and counted it out in cans and cigarettes. He’d get his ‘giro’ (benefits) from the Job Centre on Elthorne Road opposite the art school I went to in 2003. Our lives had been separated by time and circumstance but were connected in the present in a way that cast metaphysical significance over the past. He listed all the places he used to stay in and we discovered that we know the same streets, the same pubs and the same parks. I visited them and painted them on beer mats. Over the course of 3 months we recorded one another talking about our experiences of these places.
'Outsiders' (2016) is an concentrated but verbatim account of our mutual storytelling. The paintings are filmed in and around the Limehouse warehouse I rented during the residency at Mildmay Park. The look and feel of the spaces filmed parallelizes the painted and narrated places in the film, but are separated by time and location, making an impression rather than a documentation of a city.
Due to a sudden and unaffordable rent increase in June 2016 I was evicted from the Limehouse warehouse. The eviction also ended my residency at Mildmay Park and demonstrates how housing and community are multiplicatively connected.
To watch Outsiders, click the link below:
