Ineligible SIAP application, August 2022

The following paragraphs are my supporting statements from an application to Arts Council Northern Ireland's Support for Individual Artists Programme. Even though I reside in England I was encouraged to apply on the basis that others who have had to move from Northern Ireland to Britain for work have been awarded grants in previous years and much of my work is still concerned with home and I still have a family address there. My application was ineligible this year.

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In observing arts and culture in Northern Ireland for the past 15 years, initially as a scholar of film and visual studies and now as a practitioner developing a creative-critical writing practice, I have identified what I call a performative impulse. The generation of artists prominent in the 1980s to 2000s, to generalise, exhibited more of an archival impulse associated with memory and post-memory processes as examined by Marianne Hirsch, and for example include Willie Doherty, Alastair MacLennan, Victor Sloan and Sandra Johnston. I think what we’re seeing in the younger group of artists in the Millennial generation is a more immediately live and performative impulse, as encapsulated by Array Collective and their peers. I propose to undertake a period of research and interviews in Belfast and Derry from which to produce a creative reflection of this impulse that conveys that same sense of liveness, immediacy and performativity. I aim to produce writing for audio in a contemporary take on oral storytelling which will be publicly accessible online. Only with ACNI funding can I undertake this urgent work to record an impression of this moment in NI’s cultural history while making my own contribution to the arts in the region.

My practice is grounded in extensive knowledge of contemporary art, particularly in and about Northern Ireland, in which I hold a PhD awarded in 2011. Since 2018 I have developed skills in audio production largely through making Audiovisual Cultures Podcast, which experiences continual reach and renown. I am a current recipient of Arts Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice grant scheme with which I am stepping up my creative non-fiction writing (funded until February 2023). This is on the back of excelling at artistic writing commissions including the Bending Glass exhibition guide (Belfast, 2022) and residencies like Yorkshire Sculpture International (2019). These are examples of where I have experimented with liveness in writing and producing audio versions of the texts which are publicly available.

Through my PhD and subsequent academic publications I have contributed to the arts since 2008 in a critical capacity. More practically, well before I left academia in 2017 I was a regular contributor to the live performance art scene, mostly in Belfast. This included frequent collaborations with Bbeyond and solo artists such as Katrina Sheena Smith. More recently I co-edited and provided text for a publication marking the life and work of Alastair MacLennan and I wrote the guide text for Johanna Leech’s Bending Glass exhibition about neon in Ireland and UTV’s former headquarters. Additionally, I make a bi-weekly arts podcast called Audiovisual Cultures that regularly features interviews with artists and creatives, including many from and working in Northern Ireland. Guests have included Susan Hughes, Clinton Kirkpatrick, Catherine Hemelryk, Robin Price, Jacqueline Wylie and Emma Campbell.

My overall aim for the proposed project is to demonstrate through doing the benefits and possibilities of converging the creative and the critical. Critical engagements with the arts are often left to the realms of academia with little public access or engagement with findings. I am attempting to foster an inclusive practice and a new kind of voice that bridges practice with analysis and facilitates learning by doing. This will demonstrate just one way that the critical can be creative and the creative can be critical. Within that broader aim my objective is to take a journey through a pivotal moment in Northern Ireland’s creative landscape and account for it in my own unique way in the production of an audio series exploring the performative impulse I have identified in the younger generations of artists. The outcome itself aims to embrace and enact liveness and performativity in work that reflects its subject. It will be both a resource and an artwork.

At the time of applying I am working on an Arts Council England-funded project to develop my creative non-fiction writing practice. Applying this to the arts in Northern Ireland where I have already contributed new academic knowledge will be an excellent demonstration and further progression of those skills and will allow me to take risks as I transition closer towards creative practice. It will also be an increased step up to do that with audio in mind. I have been podcasting for 4 years and feel ready to jump out of my comfort zone with that too and produce more artistic audio work while still being grounded in the knowledge base I have. SIAP will buy me the time I need to experiment and take risks for the next leap.

Undertaking this proposal will improve my employability as a creative freelancer in the arts and culture sector and will enhance my skills in creative non-fiction and audio production to an extent that I can confidently produce a range of outputs and train other practitioners.

 

'Differences' blackboard from Derry Girls, Ulster Museum, July 2022

 

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