Where to begin?
There is a massive backstory to this project, which reflects both the rapidly changing and extraordinary socio-economic climate we are living in, the historical threads that underpin it and within that my own personal and at times intensely painful experience of the impact of financial and associated emotional debt on mine and my family’s life over the last few years.
It was never my intention to make a work about debt, my/our last taboo. I have tackled birth, death, cultural displacement and loss in many forms, through a number of live and public installation projects over the last decade.
I went through a period of intense questioning – intensified by cuts in public funding – as to whether a complete change of direction was approaching, perhaps a complete move away from ‘making work’ at all. All I can say is that, to some extent, this project was gifted to me in unexpected ways, which will be narrated through the course of this blog.
On November 12th 2011, I was one of 6 artists out in Liverpool city centre making live work under the auspices of Present in Public, (PIP), a programme of gift-based interventions curated by Tim Jeeves through Giving into Gift,supported by the Bluecoat /Arts Council England and now in its second year. It is defined as ‘. a meeting point between artists, their peers and the public… the beginning of a conversation around ideas of generosity and reciprocation and how these themes manifest’.
The proposition which drew me in when I read the callout was of PIP as ‘ an interrogation that shifts focus between dissecting the common conception of gift as an altruistic act of generosity and the darker undercurrents within the concept – feelings of indebtedness, unwanted gifts and the potential for the abuse of generosity by individuals, institutions and the state’
Both the chance to unravel the darker sides of gift and the chance to do this in parallel with other artists with a related focus, facilitated by someone immersed in the subject from a live art perspective ticked a lot of boxes for me. The fee was minimal, (£500) barely enough to cover our subsistence, but this was open and it was clear that the value lay elsewhere, something I can rarely say about many other public commissions that I have seen offered that expect artists to give blood for rapidly decreasing fees and pay inordinate proportions of their budget to intermediary agencies (but I digress..). In the case of PIP, the scale and expectations of the project were in direct proportion to what was offered and there was a degree of transparency (including the publishing of the budget on the website) that was intended to reflect on and feed into the core concept of the project.
