Pea Arts About

After some enriching conversations during catch-ups at events celebrating Hugh O'Donnell's life, I've been thinking in depth about art writing practices and the ways we engage with art for ourselves and how we communicate it to others. Explaining my Arts Council England-funded Developing Your Creative Practice project to Brian Patterson and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach of Bbeyond was hugely helpful in nudging me back on some sort of track with things somewhat derailed between mothers flinging themselves about with bone-shattering consequences and friends taken from us far too soon. With everyone's memories of Hugh flowing, my own encounters with him came to the fore, and so I'd like to add to my previous post another instance of where cause, effect and encounter led to my own early experiments with blurring the boundary between written documentation and live performance.  I may well be misremembering and misattributing as it was nine years ago, but let's run with ...

In November 2020 North East-based artist Sally Madge died. At 74, Madge was still creating her legacy. She was renowned for her radical approaches to arts pedagogy with a reputation as a mischief-maker at Sunderland where she taught for years, and for being a woman who made space for others in the arts throughout her lifetime. An avid collector, particularly of debris, detritus, discarded objects and clothes, minerals and animal droppings – all traces of life in waste – Madge left a wondrous (or wandrous) archive from her encounters with the Northumbrian landscape and coast. Barring essays by Tom Jennings, there has been little formal engagement with Madge. I interviewed her for Audiovisual Cultures Podcast in 2019, and in 2021 produced a 2-hour episode filled with testimonies of fellow artists and colleagues who had been impacted by Madge’s interest in them (she also collected the living whom she nurtured). I propose to use this opportunity to create a text for and using the WA...

I wasn't planning to post anything this week as I'm working on other things that, although not urgent, I feel a sense of urgency to complete, but the sun is too good and rare to waste. I just had to recharge, grab a pen and paper, and jot something down about what I'm working on.  My own work plans are on a bit of a hiatus while I have the great undertaking of contributing to various aspects of activities amounting to retrospective and memorial events for my dear friend, the artist Sally Madge. I'm compiling an audio patchwork of testimonies generously provided by people who've known and been impacted by Sally in some way, and I am in the process of finishing textile artworks Sally had been working on for some time. The aim is that an exhibition and symposium will take place in November around the first anniversary of her death. The textile work is something Sally talked about when she kindly guested on Audiovisual Cultures podcast in 2019. Her idea for the finishe...