I went to a great talk at Portsmouth University yesterday afternoon, given by Dominique Ghesquiere, the artist on the Art Space Portsmouth International Residency 2011. I had previously only seen a few examples of her work on the blog, so it was a good opportunity to see more of her work. I had a feeling the work was going to be my kind of thing, and I wasn’t disappointed. I thoroughly enjoyed it. An exhibition – the culmination of the residency programme – takes place at the end of November, taking in three sites around the city.
For my own practice, I am trying to drum up support for forthcoming discussion sessions with blind and partially sighted people (details here). Twitter has been a great help in spreading the word (so far tweets have been fed to approaching 16,000 people!), but finding participants is not straightforward. People have expressed interest from as far afield as Glasgow, but there are obvious logistical limitations. Some of the channels I had expected to be the most useful are proving, surprisingly, to be something of a let down.
The 3D painting project is well under way. Preliminary stages have yielded some finished works, I have a pile of materials in the studio, another behind the sofa, more under the bed… I desperately need more studio space!
I have had to extend the reach for particpants for the ‘focus’ groups. The original contacts are either being evasive, or maybe the person(s) I was dealing with no longer work for the organisation(s). It will be a pain to have to start again at this stage. I have set up an info page on my website and tweeted a link to it to try to drum up more support. A request for re-tweets was very helpfully taken up by ACE South East – they have many more followers than me!
Are you, or do you know of, a blind or visually impaired person who is interested in contemporary art and/or would be interested in taking part in an informal discussion?
I am currently working on a new body of work exploring concepts of 3D ‘paintings’, and I am trying to contact groups and individuals who might be interested in taking part in small, very informal discussion groups made up of other blind or visually impaired people. This project is not about creating art aimed specifically at blind and visually impaired people, but rather to explore a hypothesis that a blind or visually impaired person may have an advantage over a normally sighted person in the understanding of the concepts behind the work.
This project is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
More details are here – thank you for your help!
www.philillingworth.com/3dproject.html
Here’s a question: Are artists the driving force in the dialogue about art?
