Title
These four walls
Year
2017
Location
Eden Arts C-Art Cumbrian Artist of the Year Exhibition, Rheged, Penrith
Partners and coverage
Eden Arts C-Art , Rheged, Westmorland Group, Arts Council England, Cumbria Life, Cumberland News, Cumberland and Westmorland Herald, BBC Radio Cumbria
Description
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.
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.
The palette for the resulting illustrations are virtually monochromatic, as if like memories, they have lost their colour. However, the balance of the tone, and the drawing style point to a haunting or bittersweet quality that memories can sometimes possess. The illustrations were exhibited alongside a film of me interviewing each participant whilst simultaneously transmuting this into a charcoal sketch.