Pea Arts About

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.  *** 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 an...

On 29 December 2021 as the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 settled in to its rampage across the UK, my party of three managed to visit Coventry and spend much of the day in the delightful Herbert Gallery and Museum . We tentatively booked our free tickets a couple of weeks before, unsure until the morning of 26 December that we'd even get away to the West Midlands to visit family. Testing negative on the Wednesday morning, Andrew, his mum (textile artist Jacky Shail ) and I struck out east from Malvern to the 2021 UK City of Culture and found the Herbert. The staff were welcoming, informative and helpful. We felt as secure as could be from seeing them regularly cleaning surfaces and kindly but firmly putting across a message of 'no mask, no entry' to anyone not covering their germ-holes. I'm going to mostly focus on the Turner Prize show in these notes, but it's also worth pointing out the venue's other offerings. The Herbert's museum section traces Coventry...

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...