Artists As Parents As Artists

Letter to the school attended by our elder two daughters.

This drawing is a collaboration of sorts. Our elder two daughters were arguing about the ownership of two tiny plastic dogs. The dogs had, in fact, been stolen from school, although neither girl remembered this. Partly to resolve the ownership issue, we made drawings of the dogs. They each then added marks to the drawings we’d given them. This is the drawing which our elder daughter added to.

We met Judith when we were employed as Associate Artists at firstsite gallery, Colchester. At the time Judith was Artists’ Support Researcher at firstsite, and like us, she was regularly commuting to Colchester. Every so often we would coincide on the train. During these high speed discussions we were struck by the way Judith emphasised the place of the political within cultural events, and by the way her understanding of theory informed her aesthetic decisions. Our work on Artists As Parents As Artists caught her interest and she offered to discuss it further and possibly to write something about it.

Watching The Teenagers from Next Door (2013)

The aim of our collaboration with Judith Stewart is to conceive an intellectual context for the work we’ve been making.

We are committed to developing domestic and employment routines which allow parenting and artwork to co-exist without one of these becoming dominant over the other.

The way our practice is sustained at the moment is by using opportunities and portions of time that open up during the family day or whilst at work. The drawings, films and photos we have made in this way go under the group title Artists As Parents As Artists. A few of these works have been shown publicly, but mostly they exist out of the public view. For us, this makes the works’ status unstable. At times these works seem to be making a statement of wider relevance about the creative possibilities of the everyday, and about the tensions and hierarchies that are expressed in domestic life. At other times their relevance seems to contract to the borders of our own family, and the practice appears to be simply an expanded version of the family photo album.