Image credit: Jamboree observer and PCA student Kat Hall
My second day of Jamboree began with an early morning yoga session with artist and yoga teacher Carly Sellers. Great to stretch after the inevitable slow deflation of the camp airbed! Yummy coffee from Dartmoor-based Peace and Coffee also ensured I was ready for a jam-packed programme.
‘Rooms Designed for a Woman’, Emily Speed
I attended the seminar led by curator Lucy Day, which started with the provocation: is separation the best way to tell marginalised stories? Day used her current curatorial project ‘A Woman’s Place’ based at Knole, a National Trust property in Kent, to kickstart group conversations around developing projects outside of the white cube.
A Woman’s Place at Knole shines a light on historical women’s voices, through six contemporary art commissions by Lubaina Himid joins CJ Mahony, Lindsay Seers, Emily Speed, Alice May Williams & Melanie Wilson whose themes encompass love, betrayal, class, gender and inheritance. It was a fantastic and discursive session where we shared ideas around working with and without institutional power structures, the blurry lines of participation, collaboration and co-authorship, and the politics of naming yourself a feminist practitioner. Lots of the conversations continued after the seminar session ended – a lot to talk through!
Image from Rosalie Schweiker’s 20:20 talk
I started the afternoon with a 20:20 session. The 20:20 programme strand are a series of quick fire artist talks in a pecha kucha format; where artists share twenty slides for twenty seconds each. I loved hearing about Rosalie Schweiker’s notion of being a sausage artist vs a mince artist – the former being an artist whose practice follows a traditional trajectory of commissions, awards, solo shows, and gallery representation, while the latter embraces a methodology of making that may not translate well to documentation, that is often immaterial, and often collaborative. Long live the mince artists! Green & Owens shared their collaborative practice and ideas around friendship, domesticity and precarity via wonderful performance scores. Jamboree founders LOW PROFILE shared recent works and their plans post-Jamboree, which include a civic planting project working with Plymouth-based arts organisation Take A Part.
I then soaked up some sun with Simon Bayliss’ Walk and Talk session, Landscape Painters Anonymous. It was lovely to have a part of the day to focus on creating after discussion and absorbing a lot of information, as well as taking a closer look at the amazing context of the Dartington Estate.
I continued participating in the walk and talk sessions with Plymouth Art Centre Assistant Curator and Dartington alumnus Lucy Rollins’ session playfully titled ‘Wassup Dartington’. Lucy shared personal and historic narratives and anecdotes of the site. Big thanks to Lucy for soldiering on despite her knee injury, thankfully the only tent –induced minor wound sustained!
I then attended AJ Stockwell’s incredible Communal Making session ‘Sonorous Stones’. AJ led us in a human-geologic choir, as we activated her ceramic stone-formed instruments to create an otherworldly sound and atmosphere. AJ was an awardee of a bursary place sponsored by WARP (Wales Artist Resource Programme); there are 36 artists attending on such bursary schemes via artist associate schemes over the UK and its brilliant to have the practitioners with us this weekend.
A real highlight of the day was Simon Lee Dicker’s ‘Silent Swim School’. The group silent swim in the river Dart provided a moment to reflect on the day’s discussions and workshops and a chance to cool off.
Still from Bryony Gillard’s ‘A cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body’
After some delicious Punjabi food by Plymouth-based Desi Junction, I finished the day by watching Jamboree’s Moving Image programme. Films that struck a chord with me included Bryony Gillard’s ‘A cap, like water, transparent, fluid yet with definite body’, Megan Broadmeadow’s ‘Let The Stars Be Set Upon The Board’, and Jenny Cashmore’s ‘In and Out (Building Circuits)’.
All image credits Andy Ford unless otherwise noted.
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