Inspired by the launch of our new community platform, we've selected five artists who have made work around notions of community, featuring: Blair Cunningham, Gemma Riggs, Walter Jack, Charli Clark and Zoe Childerley
Urban Agriculture Growing Care, 2015
This art work was commissioned as part of a larger body of research looking at Glasgow’s growing community gardens. The larger research project was carried out by researchers at the University of Glasgow (1) that concluded that these gardens were of immense importance in the development of community empowerment, social inclusion, community cohesion and spaces for informal learning. I was commissioned to create an artists book to explore some of these issues and strategies that considers community gardening as an example of what a more caring city looks like. Caring here should be understood as an everyday urban activity, which, as Joan Tronto suggests, involves “everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (2). This artwork represented a glimpse of another Glasgow, a Glasgow that generates new forms of value in places and people all too often neglected or exploited by purveyors of the ‘profit first’ logic.
(1) Project Report, Glasgow’s Community Gardens: Sustainable Communities of Care can be accessed via the University of Glasgow webpage at http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_398225_en.pdf
(2)Tronto, J. 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice New York and London, New York Univeristy Press.
Folkestone Moves, 2014
Folkestone Moves is a participatory project made and presented as part of the Folkestone Fringe 2014, made through support from Arts Council England.
The project brought three artists together: A filmmaker (Gemma Riggs), a choreographer (Laura Murphy) and a sound artist (JJ Maurage) to work with Folkestone residents.
The work takes Folkestone’s changing social landscape as its starting point, and explores how the ongoing development will affect how people move through the town, how they connect to its urban geography and how memories of the town affect their everyday engagement with it.
An open call for participants brought together a group of local people who met for two weeks in October 2014. Through a series of choreographic workshops, the group explored gesture and movement relating to everyday stories of past and present and the body’s relationship to space and architecture.
The final multi-screen film work was shown at the Brewery Tap Gallery and installed outside in Folkestone Harbour on 25th October 2014.
Pass The Parcel, 2009 - 2015
The Eastern Expansion Area of Milton Keynes will become four thousand or so new homes, several schools, and so on. But when we arrived here we found only plans and mud! The idea was this. ‘Passtheparcel’ would start at the new Primary School (the first civic building). It would stay for a period – but when it left it would leave a gift – made from its own oak. When it arrived in its next location it would metamorphose to be appropriate and useful here. Passtheparcel is a little over a mile of oak beam. It is currently in the grounds of the school. In 2015 we will dismantle it – and it will become something else. And so on. This is just the start.
For: Milton Keynes Council.
With: John Hall and many others.
Take One Down, 2014
A dialogical community performance centred around beer brewing, song, seasonal produce and recycling. The project was developed collaboratively between myself, fellow artist Steve Maher and Könsikkäät all male voice choir.
Taking inspiration from the historical and cultural significance of brewing and singing, this socially engaged performance was developed over 6 weekly meetings exploring the human relationship with alcohol, both in its consumption and production and increasing awareness of the process of making to empower the individual to create their own cyclical system within their local community. During weekly meetings with myself and Steve we shared our knowledge of brewing and gained an insight into the choir. At the end of this collaboration we shared our efforts through the gifting of our produce and practice during a 40 minute choral performance at MUU Gallery, Cable Factory, Helsinki on the 18.10.14.
Playing in the Dunes, 2016
This body of work is made with the community based around the edge of Joshua Tree National Park in California. It is an intimate portrait of a peripheral and charismatic community of the high desert, struggling to find meaning and moments of grace in a hostile environment. The work explores the encounters between people and nature, it is a play with light, impermanence and the faculties of seeing.
Published 6 January 2023
