S U S T A I N A B I L I T Y
Artist Bursary 2018
Q: Why is the opportunity provided by A-N professional development bursary crucial to your artistic and professional development?
A: It will place within a research-lead, conference-based, international environment the central tenets of my practice over the last 20 years. Namely an exploration into the politics of material values within socio-economic frameworks.
Set against these frameworks Open Engagement 2018 takes SUSTAINABILITY as its core theme; ranging from artists livelihoods and socio-economic paradigms to political, institutional and environmental urgencies. Attending the conference will offer an unprecedented access to global and local thinkers, to change-agents and artist-lead initiatives and to key-note presentations from Lucy Lippard (Feminism, dematerialization, ‘cultural amnesia as political strategy’) and Mel Chin (cross-cultural aesthetics, complexity, multi- disciplinarity).
It will allow me to question how arts practice can encourage communities, as well as individuals, to critically review their existing ‘visual cognitive strategies’ whilst developing new methodological approaches ‘that dislodge discipline boundaries, override media conventions, and disrupt political interests’ (Sullivan, 2012), whilst also exploring work that shifts the focus from objects to relationships (Capra, 1996, p28). The conference will prompt me to not only question my own personal sustainability but my global framework of activity as a practitioner. It will provide a location to consider systems thinking, ecological perturbation and the disjuncture inherent between profit & value in potentially resource scarce environments. As I work across a wide framework that engages with multiple project partners from national charities to broadcast channels and from primary school children to vulnerable and hard-to-reach adults, attendance at the conference could benefit not only my aforementioned collaborators but also all of the intrinsically-related stakeholders/commissioners in equal measure.
‘This era, called the Athropocene since 2000 is also dubbed the Misanthopocene or Anthromosaic. An era of loneliness and isolation as species go extinct and desertification increases, as the oceans rise and the ground waters sink. The sense of urgency is so overwhelming it can stop us in our tracks and make us hide our heads in the sand – which by the way is another endangered material.’
— Lucy Lippard (Keynote) / Queens Museum / 12th May 2018 / New York / Open Engagement 2018
