THE GOSPEL OF THE SWAMP THINGS

Our contribution to the online Abridged project: THE GOSPEL OF THE SWAMP THINGS included building a hybrid boat -Sheebang, producing video and animation, drawings and music - exploring thematics of the swamp, landscape, tradition and mythology.

Dan Shipsides and Neal Beggs have worked together since 2004 under the name Shipsides and Beggs Projects. Initially their collaboration drew from and developed their passion for climbing and mountaineering as a way of exploring intertwined nodes of art and life and the breakdowns of both. This has led to practice-based research across many topics and ways of working across music, painting, drawing, performance, video, installation and sculpture. Reflecting the organic creep of ecology and culture, hybridity and the lack of observance of boundaries, form a key driver to this creativity.

Whilst no longer especially drawing from climbing, their co-research continues to exploit the dynamic emerging between two people climbing together, where being joined through necessity by a rope, becomes a co-creative model for developing art, sharing life and engaging in the wider world. This dynamic enables an organic pattern where (mis)adventures form the backbone of their creative process which becomes a pot into which all ingedients can be thrown. Their practice as research does not aim towards a unified voice but instead, an oscillating set of ideas and outcomes, at times shared and at times disparate, and often beyond the control of either. Through this the work embraces wide sets of curiosities and activities, from mountains and music to madness and magic, taking their practice far beyond a tale of two climbers who became artists.

The term of Swamp Things strikes a chord with their work, where all kinds of unregulated and organic process are at play. Recent works e.g. Where the Lines End and Another Fine Mess, explore fluid water-techo-bodies of borderlands and a terrestial borderland mapping of the stars, both concerning liminal spaces and entities which reflect potential access to an otherworld. Here the idea of boats became a central theme alighed with potential interdimensional travel. This led to making a boat, “Sheebang” which is a hybrid, self-designed vessel, part traditional (with curragh materials and techniques), part modern (Shipsides’ father was a noted boat-builder of racing dinghies) and a conceptual painting (oil on canvas stretched over a frame) and is very much a pata-perceptual product of where wilful imagination, myth and personal experience meets reality; as they say “it’s the whole Sheebang”.