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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 ...

Marianne Hirsch opens chapter 9 of her book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by outlining Hal Foster’s identification of an ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art around the turn of the millennium. For Foster, it is an impulse in contemporary artists to connect the unconnected and redress failures in cultural memory through creating imaginary pasts and futures. Hirsch, however, applies the notion to readings of postmemory, aftermath work that seeks to ‘reclaim historical specificity and context’ (pp. 227–8). A similar turn, or at least something in between the two, can be drawn from the sort of work I studied for my PhD on visual culture in contemporary, post-Agreement Northern Ireland. But that’s if you look at the more widely known names in art and film there. Beyond them, something else has been going on, but a lack of regular critical engagement and analysis – itself lacking appropriate platforms and resources – means the e...

It was an unusual and welcome surprise to see live performance art in the Tyneside Cinema. The work took place in the Gallery, a space used for screening artists’ cinema and video installations during the day and which is transformed into an intimate cinema screen at night. The event was part of the cinema’s Rise Up: Ending Racism, Poverty and War series of screenings and talks aligning with Newcastle’s ‘Freedom City’ celebrations commemorating the 50 th anniversary of Rev. Dr Martin Luther King’s week-long visit to the city in 1967 to receive an honorary degree from the then-named University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Sandra Johnston’s practice tends to be site-reactive and rarely takes place in such institutionalized surroundings. In the small, muted cinema space, she decided to do something she hadn’t done for some 15 or so years: use her voice in the work. Johnston often explores or channels the power of silence. She mentioned afterwards that she felt as if using her voice wa...

FLARE 3 was a three-day event exploring different approaches to understanding connections between the mind and body through live encounter. It was organized by three artists undertaking PhDs at Northumbria University, Helen Collard , Denys Blacker and Harriet Plewis , who established FLARE ( Forum for Living Art Research and Education ) in 2015. This third annual event spread the exploratory activities across three days, hosted by Vane contemporary art gallery. Each day was led by one of the organizers to investigate via the participation of artists, scholars and members of the public the broader themes and issues involved in their research projects. In this written response, I reflect on the activities that most (re)ignited my curiosities. Co-Arise Unfortunately, I could not attend the first day, Sync-Down, led by Harriet Plewis. The day’s focus on ‘sly, dormant and illicit research methods’ and its workshop exploring visualization by drawing on the principles of ‘lucid dr...