Failed Supporting Statement - Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Aug 2019

Writer In Residence

In the past couple of years I have been transitioning from an academic career to becoming an active contributor to cultural production who troubles and teases the boundaries between the creative and the critical. As my CV indicates, I do so through my Audiovisual Cultures podcast and in continued writing projects aimed at broader audiences than my previous academic output. Since 2013 I have pursued an interest in various forms of written and verbal documentation of live performance art, and am interested in finding ways of capturing and articulating the live experiences of spectators during arts and culture events. As shown in my writing sample from my recent residency responding to the Yorkshire Sculpture International engagement programme (due for online publication in late September), I experimented with poetic and direct address approaches to capture the liveness of the workshops I attended and the diversity amongst the participants. In using shaped verses, I draw the objects we studied, made and discussed to share ideas of the past, present and future. By changing the direction of the voice and writing in present continuous tense, I also attempt to transfer others’ shared experiences during the live workshop events to the reader.

Being of Ulster-Scots heritage and now based in Newcastle, I appreciate the dual or plural sense of identity mirrored in BFMAF’s location and its emphasis on media arts as equal to film. I would use the residency to tread those blurring fault lines while capturing the varied nature of the events and people at the festival. Local, mixed and experimental film and arts festivals have been of interest to me for some time but I have not had the means to attend many. I am keen to diversify my writing and I increasingly contribute to and platform conversations around reclaiming histories of women and other under-represented groups in film and arts cultures, including cinemagoing and other forms of engagement with and responses to cultural events. To observe this in a specific setting, I would aim to use the residency as a reflexive exploration of what it is to be a woman, an outsider and a person from a regional working-class background attending the festival and how this relates to others’ individual and shared experiences of the same with the understanding that so much of our experiences are determined by what we bring to them, which differs for each of us. During the YSI residency which I completed in stages in May, June and July, I was personable and joined in with workshops, and it was through casual chatting with participants and seeing through their experiences that greatly informed my own. The Berwick residency would give me the opportunity to work through and communicate to readers the different ways of being an audience member and what impact the festival has on locals and visitors culturally and socially – and perhaps even politically – throughout the event. It would enrich my developing writing career and build on the ways I draw the critical and creative together.

Me scribbling notes in Cluj-Napoca, October 2015