In Certain Places
One of my meetings was with Elaine Speight, a freelance curator who spends much of her time working for In Certain Places, a programme of temporary public artworks in Preston. In Certain Places works with artists without a brief and over a significant period of time (perhaps a year or two) to develop an idea that relates to/responds to a place and/or its people. So the organisation’s relationship with artists is incremental and always developing.
At my meeting with Elaine, I spoke to her about how I feel less happy with some of my commissioned pieces than my ‘studio’ based practice, but I do not think that this is inherently because working with place is wrong for me. She responded that she can see a coherence running through the projects in my portfolio but that some of them are more interesting to her than others. To put it bluntly, these seem to be the projects that I did off my own back that weren’t money earners. I wonder partly if this is because I put less pressure on myself about these projects and give myself permission to be more playful?
I think it is also to do with time and to do with uncertainty about who or what the work represents. In my studio-based work I tend to play around with language as a formal element and with the double meanings of words (for example). More recently I have used conversations with individuals within particular communities as generators for verbal material. The constraint to have an outcome NOW and a feeling of not being able to muck around with people’s words too much means that I have somewhat quoted people verbatim, I haven’t manipulated the words that much. The ‘art’ part comes in, in the selection and sequencing of content and where it is sited, rather than altering it in any way. I have written a bit more about this elsewhere about how a current project I am doing explicitly involves manipulating content generated by others .
An issue that came up repeatedly, in my meeting with Elaine and in later meetings with artists, is framing. How is the project presented to those who are contributing or within whose locale it takes place? What is their expectation of the outcome? I wrote in my last post about the difficulties of being critical or provocative in a place you don’t know very well. Related to this, I had an interesting discussion with Elaine about artists coming to a place quite briefly to do a project. In her view this can be fine if properly handled, but the curator has a role of being more embedded and providing a permanent presence or more overarching programme.
An important element of working with curators is that they might act as a buffer and as a conversation partner. Elaine talked realistically about her own role and how 90% of it is project management and 10% is artistic discussions. But she is very aware of making space for such artistic discussions. With this in mind she is currently putting together a programme of lectures/events to talk about critical contexts for art related to place and the practical concerns of this; aside the rhetoric of ‘public art’ and regeneration.
It was also interesting to hear how In Certain Places don’t set out to work specifically with artists who have a site-specific or participatory way of working. They select artists whose work they are interested in and then find a way to work with them. This is the same for Pavilion who do extensive research to find artists with whom they wish to work.
