What is your proposed artistic activity, and what do you want to achieve by doing it? (500 words)
This morning, trying to start filling in an R and D application for Grants for The Arts, and feeling confused and overwhelmed after a few hours.
What exactly are my activities? Who will I engage with? What groups can I work with? Will I run workshops? Who will benefit? Who are the participants? Who are the artists? What counts as R and D and what is an actual project?
Arrgh.
Talking to N over lunch is always good, though it’s left him with a headache. He asks questions and challenges me. As an artist and my other half he has a different view of my activities. He asked me – why do you want to work with people on their family albums? For what purpose? How do you they know they want to be worked with? What will it achieve? Isn’t exploring subjectivity, identity etc something that artists are interested in? Are other people generally interested in this?
He suggested that I am trying to marry two separate areas of practice: my own artmaking in response to my family stories memories and photographs – essentially an individual, autobiographical process – and the dialogical, social practices I’ve been involved in, and that these may not necessarily fit.
Bringing the family photography work into a participatory practice – I’ve defaulted to looking at models I’ve experienced and worked within, and the project begins to looks like a community arts project, and not the investigative, exploratory research that I am actually engaged in. I decided to stop doing community arts work a few years ago because I was increasingly uncomfortable with the processes of engagement with participants – I found them inflexible and hierarchical, and not about exchange but bestowal. This is a project for you, the community. This is how we are working, and this is what you will gain from it.
N said he thought that the interesting aspects of my activities and recent practice has been in asking questions about the nature of exchange, of community, conversation – setting up the darkroom co-op, running gift circles, talking to a range of people across disciplines about their experiences and perspectives on collectivity and dialogue.
A project getting people to respond creatively in a directed/circumscribed way to their family albums (ie using processes I have used in my own practice) isn’t open-ended and investigative and closed and limiting, the opposite of what I want to achieve.
Maybe then instead: rather than using a space to run workshop and participatory exhibition, perhaps a set of questions, in which the dialogue, and the discussions are the research; and the research is the work. Inviting other artists and professionals from art, health and social practices to come in to a research lab space to have discussion and debate about the ethical, and aesthetic issues of working with people on their family albums. Have open access so members of the public can come and join the discussion.
Ask a series of questions from people of different ages, cultures and social groups about how they see and use their family photographs.
How does my own work in response to family and archival images, fit in to this process? Perhaps, displaying it as a starting point and a trigger for dialogue for members of the public to respond to about their own memories, stories and photographs. This dialogue can be documented via text and audio and pinned to the wall, and I take my own work down as these other voices and responses are added – part of the evolving discussion.
This exchange is the research, this is the work.
Maybe I just needed to reposition, tweak, reframe a bit. Ok now I’m going to have another crack at that form.
