Over summer 2013, our studio group, Manifold, was invited by craft collective 60|40 to engage in Starting Point. The Starting Point series is Siobhan Davies Studio’s annual artists’ commission, to make new work in response to the Studios – a progressive arts organisation focusing on choreography and dance, in South London.
This was the fifth and final year of the Starting Point series, 60|40 collective made a departure from previous years invites to individual artists, by inviting us as a group, and we decided to take a residency approach to the invitation.
They encouraged us to ask questions of ourselves and our practice, both individually and as a group. We started by staging an exhibition that looked at our own influences, and then to see how the residency unfolded, to end in a second exhibition that showed some of what we had discovered and developed along the way. It was a difficult process in many ways, but one that we all felt was very an important point, perhaps another starting point, in the way we operate as a group.
