Contributors — Social Art Library

Socially Awkward

Socially Awkward are Bethany Stead, Elaine Robertson, Kat Bevan, Rosa Postlethwaite, Sara Qaed, Sarah Stamp and Lady Kitt.

Socially Awkward focuses on ways of communicating and collaborating in non-hierarchical ways. Gathering on public transport or in everyday public spaces across Newcastle upon Tyne, the city forms the backdrop to their work, creating an uncontrived space for the artists to connect with people outside of traditional cultural spaces.

The project is process-led and fully steered by the group of artists. Lady Kitt is working alongside the 5 supporting artists, who were selected through an open-call process, to explore their interests and to facilitate and strengthen their practices through collaborative learning, social engagement and hands-on professional development in the public realm.

Together they are exploring what art can do, and what it can’t or shouldn’t be expected to do, and their approach does not subscribe to the assertion that social practice can be used to solve all our problems or that it can plug the gaps left by austerity politics.

Lucy WrightSeptember 2, 2020Socially Awkward

Antonia Attwood

Antonia Attwood is an UK and international artist, working with moving image and photography. She has just finished her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. Antonia's body of work has developed a focus on illustrating and visually interpreting how mental illness “feels”. Using still and moving imagery and sound, it depicts the effects of chemical changes in the brain, and the phenomenology of mental illness. Her work explores how it feels for particular individuals to be vulnerable and overwhelmed by the world living with a medical condition. It is not about communicating a straightforward message, but rather sharing interpretations of experience of altered mind-states. Antonia Attwood graduated from London College of Communication with a BA Hons in Photography in 2014 and is graduated from her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2019.

ContributorSeptember 2, 2020Antonia Attwood

Tony Humbleyard

Tony Humbleyard is an artist whose work engages with site, collaboration and seeks to engage with social, psychological and physical space, to understand the ‘UseHistories’ of place and how they inform the urgencies of now. Exploring what it means to live an embedded relationship to place. He has lived and worked on Unst since 2005 engaged in a process of Deep Listening and a sustainable Social Art practice. He works within walking, cycling , kayaking distance of the Shorestation, inviting others into this ecology to collaborate and to develop a sustainable engagement through ongoing projects and residencies.

Tony uses random journeys, direct experience and the gathering of found objects. Constructing sculptures, interventions and poetic statements. Seeking out the patterns and continuities, the connections between our internal and external geographies. Exploring the perceptual landscapes that frame our actions in the world. As experience becomes increasingly commodified, his work is a reclamation of being present in any given place. Using space itself as an element that conjures form and narrative, a way of testing this present moment and our relationship to it.

‘Rock, fences, cloud and houses/ marks in a landscape/ looking for the continuities/ an alchemical gathering of found objects and direct experience/the space between thoughts/ liminal places/ dissident voices carried in the wind/ new ecologies ebb and flow….

Abandoning guidebooks/maps/signs in favour of wandering/direct experience. The ‘found object’ offers an aesthetic of things imperfect and impermanent, a simplicity of form. Marked by time, eroded by the elements, artefacts of our past and present. In engaging with the past I don’t seek to romanticize it, but to see it as waymarker to possible futures. Often my final sculptures arise from the relationship between different objects/materials, an intuitive process unfolding over many months and many journeys.

https://www.axisweb.org/p/tonyhumbleyard/

ContributorSeptember 2, 2020Tony Humbleyard

The Women's Art Activation System

The Women’s Art Activation System (WAAS) is an artist collective that aims to activate women’s art. Principal artists Sharon Bennett and Sarah Dixon collaborate to make live art, performance and socially engaged works.

The WAAS makes artworks that question established structures that inhibit and marginalise people, particularly female-identified people and those experiencing pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Working with humour to address serious issues The WAAS makes rituals and processes that enquire into, and shift, widely-established social power dynamics.

Sharon and Sarah are representatives for Pregnancy and Mothering on the Disconnected Bodies Arts Advisory Board and most recently worked with Axisweb, Social Art Network and Manchester Metropolitan University on a commission called Social Art for Equity Diversity and Inclusion (SAFEDI) funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council. Other works include interactive performance A Visit by the Bureau for the Validation of Art performed at the Grace Exhibition Space in New York via Zoom in 2020, Offbeat Performance Art Festival 2021, Social Works?:LIVE in Manchester, and Art Licks London and The Baby Makers, a series of facilitated workshops for women in pregnancy and post-birth currently funded by a grant from the National Lottery Community Fund.

http://thewaas.org

ContributorSeptember 13, 2019The Women's Art Activation System

Michael G. Birchall

Michael G. Birchall is a curator, writer and PhD candidate in Art, Critique & Social Practice at the University of Wolverhampton where he is researching the role of the curator as a producer in socially engaged practices. He has held curatorial appointments at The Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada, and Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany. His texts were published in Frieze, Frieze d/e, thisistomorrow, C-Magazine, Modern Painters and various monographs and catalogues. Michael's recent curatorial projects include Wie geht's dir Stuttgart?/How are you doing Stuttgart? - at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Since 2012, he has been lecturing on the Curating Program at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), and is co-publisher of the journal OnCurating. Forthcoming projects include: Exhibiting the Social at the ERC in Liverpool, and together with the Zurich Kunsthalle, They Printed It! Invitation cards, press releases, inserts and other forms of artistic (self-) marketing. He lives and works in Berlin.

ContributorAugust 19, 2019Michael G. Birchall

Sheila Ghelani

Sheila is an artist whose work spans performance, installation, participatory eventand moving image. She enjoys the weight of words when spoken or held and finds multiples of objects and actions arranged in repetitious patterns very reassuring. She likes to cut things up, break things apart and mix things together. She is also very interested in the practice of medicine and care and the relationship between art and science with particular focus on hybridity. She is currently sharing Common Salt with artist Sue Palmer as part of her ongoing Rambles with Nature series, and developing her latest project Elemental.

https://www.sheilaghelani.co.uk

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Sheila Ghelani

Ania Bas

Ania Bas is an artist and arts project programmer who works across text, performance, publishing and social engagement to create situations that support dialogue and exchange. Through her work Bas explores ways of working, making and thinking together that can challenge modes of participation, bring together people from diverse communities and make art relevant in everyday life.

Her work has been commissioned by the Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, Art on the Underground, Radar, Yorkshire Artspace. Bas is a co-founder of The Walking Reading Group (2013 - ongoing). She is Open School East Alumni (2013- 2014) and Faber Academy Alumni (2018).

http://aniabas.blogspot.com/

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Ania Bas

Andrea Francke

Born in Peru and now based in London, Francke is an artist currently developing two main research projects: Invisible spaces of parenthood and The Piracy Project. She was a recipient of the Red Mansion Art Prize in 2011.

http://www.andreafrancke.me.uk

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Andrea Francke

Sophie Chapman and Kerri Jefferis

Sophie Chapman + Kerri Jefferis make interdisciplinary artworks with people, places and things to explore collective agency and enact prefigurative forms of resistance. Utilising modes of hosting and intervention they open and claim space for critical and convivial exchange, inviting those present to re-orientate, unlearn or embody a different way of being together.

Informed by feminist ‘practices of doing’ and histories of punk, common to each work is the desire to provoke the social imaginary: straddling the push-pull between chaos and control, poetry and politics, singularity and the collective. The work exists as ephemeral, collaborative encounters and text, performance, drawing, sculpture and film - records or re-workings of the residue that lingers.

Recent works include: Private Insurrections to Loosen Public Ground and Mum Q’s/Diaristic Mirrors 2017/18 - a publication and evolving auto-ethnographic archive on social time and how we make ourselves through others. Guttural Living 2018/19 - film, sculptures and performance scores on erotic uprisings, orientation and movement. Each work hinges on open invitation, experimental improvisation and collaborative process: all of which are at the core of our practice.

https://www.sophieandkerri.com

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Sophie Chapman and Kerri Jefferis

Mark Storor

Mark Storor is an award-winning artist with an international reputation and extensive experience of working collaboratively with a wide range of organisations and communities, including work in hospitals, prisons, schools and housing estates. Working in the unique space between live art and theatre, he has been described in the British press as: ‘a genuinely visionary theatre maker,’ ‘an alchemist,’ and ‘one of the most distinctive voices in British theatre’. He specialises in platforming the voices of those we all too rarely choose to hear and usually works over several years to create extraordinarily beautiful, tender and uplifting work in which community participants and professionals work side by side in genuine partnership.

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Mark Storor

Eelyn Lee

Eelyn Lee is an award-winning artist and filmmaker who has exhibited across UK including Barbican, Tate Modern, National Portrait Gallery and Whitechapel Gallery as well as internationally in Paris, Berlin, Bogotá and Toronto. Eelyn’s socially engaged practice combines collective research, devised theatre, screen writing and filmmaking to create frameworks for ensembles of collaborators to work together. Her Chinese/English heritage motivates her interest in race, identity and ’othering’. In 2016 Eelyn co-founded Social Art Network who convened the inaugural Social Art Summit [2018], an artist-led review of socially engaged arts practice in the UK and beyond. Eelyn has extensive experience of working in collaboration with young people.

https://www.eelynlee.com

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Eelyn Lee

Claire Barber

Claire Barber has pursued a peripatetic career since her graduation from the Fine Art department of Royal College of Art in 1994 exhibiting widely and completing over twenty artist-in residency and commissioning models in the UK and across Eastern Europe, Australia and Japan. Most recently VIII Biennial of Contemporary Textile Art, Museo Del Traje, Madrid, Spain (2019) and an installation presented at Contextile18 Contemporary Textile Art Biennale, Guimarães, Portugal (2018). Barber is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Fashion and Textiles at the University of Huddersfield with an interest in the interconnection between place and the way people are connected to their surrounding environment.

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Claire Barber

Rabab Ghazoul

Rabab Ghazoul is a visual artist interested in exploring our negotiations of the political:

“I work with different media and different processes, often with a slant on the performative or the conversational. I draw heavily on text - found, written, sourced or invited. I am interested in the nuance of private and public affiliation; the relationship of wider (political) frameworks upon the personal, and the daily.

My work comes about in different ways: appearing as video, installation, text, performance, or public realm intervention and encounter. Sometimes my artworks are conversations, lasting a day or a year. There is always some element of engagement, an invitation to participate.

I see my practice as an expanded realm of interaction, something that happens both within and beyond the gallery or studio. The ‘public’ realm, the realm of people, is my primary context. Whether organising a march, a choir, a gathering or a debate, these activities are often questions to myself around what, in practice and in aspiration, words such as ‘community’, 'democracy', or ‘belonging’ might mean.

I was born in Mosul, Iraq. I've lived and worked in Cardiff, in Wales, since 1993.”

http://rababghazoul.com

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Rabab Ghazoul

Harald Smykla

Harald Smykla studied painting and printmaking at Karlsruhe Academy, Germany before moving to London in 1988. His practice generally merges live art and installation with unorthodox notions of ‘traditional’ media (especially drawing), exploring materiality, time/process, context and interaction. He frequently works in the public realm (street markets, parks, urban and rural spaces, institutions etc), using site -responsive interventions and concepts to engage people of all ages and backgrounds as incidental audiences and active participants in individual and collective art experiences.

Involving low-tech, often ephemeral processes and techniques, narrative invention, play, collective creation, and other methods of communicative exchange, such works generate outcomes from sheer memory to tangible artistic residues, products, documents and pictorial re-interpretations, e.g. through “re-facing” money, chess with produce, collective cardiography, art/emotion research, dental sculpting, drawing on reality with light (‘Reprojection’) and many more.

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Harald Smykla

Joshua Sofaer

Joshua Sofaer (b. 1972 Cambridge, England) is an artist who is centrally concerned with modes of collaboration and participation, which he explores through social sculpture, performance, installation, exhibition and publication.

Equally as comfortable in the clean white gallery, the dramatic curtained stage of the opera house, the carefully positioned vitrine of the museum, the shared areas of public space, and the domestic personalised rooms of private homes, what draws Sofaer’s diverse practices together is a concern with how audiences engage with the world as a place of potentiality. People’s experience is key, as are the material cultures they choose to surround themselves with.

Recurring themes of his work include ‘rubbish’: what we choose to throw away; ‘collections’: what we choose to keep; and, ‘names’: how what we are called becomes who we are.

https://www.joshuasofaer.com

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Joshua Sofaer

Rebecca Davies

Rebecca is an artist with an embedded participatory practice that involves illustration, performance and event. She graduated from RCA in 2010, receiving the Sheila Robinson Prize for Drawing. In 2013 she was made an Artsadmin Associate Artist. She has run outreach and participation programmes with Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, South London Gallery. She continues to work with Whitechapel Gallery, leading on the Whitechapel Community Workshops. Rebecca now lives in Stoke On Trent where she collaborates with artist Anna Francis and residents of Portland Street on The Portland Inn Project. She is currently supported by Arts Council England on her research and development project in partnership with AirSpace Gallery.

https://cargocollective.com/rebeccadavies

ContributorAugust 16, 2019Rebecca Davies, Rebecca & Eva

Chris Dobrowolski

Chris studied Fine Art in Hull and when he first got there he built a boat from driftwood to try to escape. The boat failed but Chris ended up making a whole series of vehicles in a similar vein. The way he makes things has a deliberate “knocked up in the garden shed” aesthetic and each vehicle and escape attempt has its own story attached. Over the years, Chris has retold and refined these stories as both artist and teacher. The result is a performance that translates the experience of creating and testing a theory. This in turn enables an audience to share and participate in a journey of discovery.

http://www.cdobo.com/

ContributorAugust 12, 2019Chris Dobrowolski

Larry Achiampong

Larry Achiampong's solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity.

He is a Jarman Award-nominated artist (2018). He completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster in 2005 and an MA in Sculpture at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. He lives and works in London, and has been a tutor on the Photography MA programme at Royal College of Art since 2016. Achiampong currently serves on the Board of Trustees at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and is represented by C Ø P P E R F I E L D.

https://www.larryachiampong.co.uk/home

ContributorAugust 12, 2019Larry Achiampong

Harold Offeh

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh, often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Modern, Studio Museum Harlem, South London Gallery, MAC VAL, Kulturhusset Stockholm and Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

http://www.haroldoffeh.com/

ContributorAugust 12, 2019Harold Offeh

Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco creates large-scale spectacles of collected cultural objects, cumulative archives, and temporary vending installations, often with an active public component that invites viewers to directly participate as producers or distributors. Using critical wit and collaborative co-creation, her projects leverage open-source systems, shareware logic, and flows of capital, in order to investigate issues of economies and empire. This has included starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods, presenting parasitic art counterfeiting events, and developing alternative vending economies. She is featured in Season 9 of the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. Recent exhibitions include "Being: New Photography" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, "Public Knowledge," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and "This Site is Under Revolution" at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. She will be featured in "Disrupting Craft: the 2018 Renwick Invitational" at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, opening November 2018.

ContributorAugust 12, 2019Stephanie Syjuco