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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 ...

On Saturday 26 November many of us woke to the deeply sad news of the death the previous day of artist and friend-to-all Hugh O'Donnell. Hugh was a member of the Belfast-based performance art collective Bbeyond, a studio-holder at Flax, and an active campaigner for disabled and LGBTQ+ artists and access to the arts. Most importantly, when you had a conversation with Hugh you came away feeling fantastic, elated, as if you and what you were doing mattered. His loss hits hard. I hadn't seen Hugh for ages, mostly because I hadn't been to Belfast for nearly three years and I didn't bump into him when I finally did visit again this summer. My encounters with Hugh, and often together with his partner Aaron, usually occurred when we were having a skinful at Late Night Art or after a Bbeyond performance monthly. In the interim we'd occasionally 'react' to each other's Facebook posts and that's how I knew he was okay and there.  I didn't see enough of Hugh...

I've had heaps on lately and haven't been blogging but I couldn't let this week pass without marking Array Collective's historic win of the 2021 Turner Prize. Although Willie Doherty has been nominated twice before and 2014 winner Duncan Campbell had studied and worked in Belfast, this is the first time the UK art prize - which began in 1984 - has been awarded to artists from Northern Ireland. And what a win it is. While important, this is so much more than acknowledging the work of individuals and even collectives, as is the emphasis of this year's exhibition. For us nordies it's recognition, it's not being so much a place apart, it's being seen and heard at last, it's no longer being the little backwater to be pitied, written off and ignored. The vibrant subculture out of which Array emerged and have taken by the horns has been around for a while. Through their concentrated efforts they're charging ahead, showing how it's done and what can...

A topic that is frequently on my mind because it figures behind the scenes in much of the artwork I analyse is art labour, particularly when that labour is invisible. For the past few months I've experienced first-hand what it is to make things for someone else's name as author or artist to be attached to it. These projects have all gone towards upcoming events celebrating the life and work of my dear friend Sally Madge . As I've written about before , this includes completing some of her in-progress work, and more recently, doing some mending and adapting to one of her performance props for another artist to use in tribute to her. Messy adaptation for a performance prop. It is not work I ever envisaged myself doing, least not because I do not think of myself as an artist, and, I find, neither do most other people. Sally and our friend Alastair MacLennan would have something to say about that, but there we are. Partly spurred on by learning languages in which you do not per...

Arranging myself with pen and paper at my maker table rather than computer desk (that sounds more luxurious than the cramped reality of each), I am determined to get writing again. It has been an intense few weeks of action working on all aspects of Audiovisual Cultures podcast , and my brain and body need a break away from computers and electronic devices in general. I have had to have the same word with myself as I've had before about not equating being hunched over a laptop with productivity. I've probably said this before on the blog, but words just flow out of me when I handwrite them, whereas I get exhausted after typing half a sentence I've just thought of.  So, no, better to jot this by hand and type it later; a method that befits the intermedial qualities of the artworks I want to discuss in this post. Following a wonderful phone catch-up with my dear friend, the North East-based artist Richard James Hall , Dick sent me an equally wonderful gift: several intricate ...

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...