Title
Dreaming of home
Year
2016
Location
Partners and coverage
Joshua Sofaer and ANDfestival (producers), Eden Arts C-Art , Rheged, Westmorland Group, Arts Council England, Cumbria Life, Cumberland News, Cumberland and Westmorland Herald, BBC Radio Cumbria
Description
Working with Joshua Sofaer on his Workshops in People's Homes project, I explored the interplay between the intimate space of the artist's home, with the performative elements of the art workshop.
In the project, Dreaming of home, without the participant needing to leave the comfort of their own home, they were able to take part in conversation with myself, during which I conducted a semi-structured interview concerning the home or space of their dreams. I later posted them an illustrated version of this dream.
"Dreaming of Home is the extraordinary possibility to see your imagination visualised by a painter. I had long been dreaming of a space, a space that I shall probably never be able to fully afford to create, except, with the help of Celia, I now have it. I can't think of many other opportunities where someone listens to you intently and then uses their skills to portray what they have heard. You get to see yourself through the eyes of another. It's a rare and wonderful thing."
Joshua Sofaer.
Further notes:
Prompted by the expansion of Artificial Intelligence, I began grieving for the post-war social project (investment in health and education, give every person a chance), as the late capitalism project (digital technology, speculation and free markets) gained momentum.
AI seemed a dubious replacement for the unique imagination of each person. Throughout my community art career, we, the facilitators had to continually make the case to different sectors, on two counts;- a) imagination wasn’t just a case of binary questions and data sets, it was a complex interrelationship between a host of things, such as individual memory, environment, cognitive style, learnt skills and emotional/spiritual feedback registered through the body; and b) that the (community) arts were the perfect vehicle for the stimulation and evolution of this system within people.
I constructed two projects, which I unofficially thought of as ‘community art lite’. In Dreaming of Home and These Four Walls, like a magician, I would turn people’s imaginative thoughts, memories and dreams into a 2-dimensional reality. I had previously piloted this idea during my fine art degree, channelling an urge to build utopias (see figure below), inspired by Vito Acconci and his architecture studio.
The participants went away happy, as I had listened to a part of them that didn’t usually get an airing. The second part of the process, where I made the artwork, not only gave them their dreams, it also commemorated a moment of deep sharing.
It was all very nice to have given people their dreams, a product historically offered exclusively to the wealthy, thus subverting a little bit of the system; however, I hadn’t the least interest in more mass consumption.
I had relieved the participants of the hard work they would have needed to put in to make the artwork themselves. I had saved them from the wrestling with failure, the risk of wasted time, the frustration of materials not bending immediately to their desires. I had saved them from a function of the art process that I realised I deemed to be most vital: the journey through which you finally meet yourself.
In the project, Dreaming of home, without the participant needing to leave the comfort of their own home, they were able to take part in conversation with myself, during which I conducted a semi-structured interview concerning the home or space of their dreams. I later posted them an illustrated version of this dream.
"Dreaming of Home is the extraordinary possibility to see your imagination visualised by a painter. I had long been dreaming of a space, a space that I shall probably never be able to fully afford to create, except, with the help of Celia, I now have it. I can't think of many other opportunities where someone listens to you intently and then uses their skills to portray what they have heard. You get to see yourself through the eyes of another. It's a rare and wonderful thing."
Joshua Sofaer.
Further notes:
Prompted by the expansion of Artificial Intelligence, I began grieving for the post-war social project (investment in health and education, give every person a chance), as the late capitalism project (digital technology, speculation and free markets) gained momentum.
AI seemed a dubious replacement for the unique imagination of each person. Throughout my community art career, we, the facilitators had to continually make the case to different sectors, on two counts;- a) imagination wasn’t just a case of binary questions and data sets, it was a complex interrelationship between a host of things, such as individual memory, environment, cognitive style, learnt skills and emotional/spiritual feedback registered through the body; and b) that the (community) arts were the perfect vehicle for the stimulation and evolution of this system within people.
I constructed two projects, which I unofficially thought of as ‘community art lite’. In Dreaming of Home and These Four Walls, like a magician, I would turn people’s imaginative thoughts, memories and dreams into a 2-dimensional reality. I had previously piloted this idea during my fine art degree, channelling an urge to build utopias (see figure below), inspired by Vito Acconci and his architecture studio.
The participants went away happy, as I had listened to a part of them that didn’t usually get an airing. The second part of the process, where I made the artwork, not only gave them their dreams, it also commemorated a moment of deep sharing.
It was all very nice to have given people their dreams, a product historically offered exclusively to the wealthy, thus subverting a little bit of the system; however, I hadn’t the least interest in more mass consumption.
I had relieved the participants of the hard work they would have needed to put in to make the artwork themselves. I had saved them from the wrestling with failure, the risk of wasted time, the frustration of materials not bending immediately to their desires. I had saved them from a function of the art process that I realised I deemed to be most vital: the journey through which you finally meet yourself.