This page is my journal and research as part of the Master of Creative Industries at the University of Newcastle. I’m working with the theme of Sanctuary particularly as a starting point for an online artist residency and collaboration.
The first phase of the project with be a series of conversations between myself and Beck Pope, one of the other sociocreative trust members. This page will document some of the investigations and research into the project.
Working predominantly in an experimental mode of practice, my work stems from a basis in electronic art and has included video art, performance art (online and in physical spaces), sound art, socially engaged practice, text and writing, festivals, residencies, installation and meditation.
My creative lineage () has encouraged me to transmediate, working with technology in experimental ways, for example scanner art, using old technology in new media (80s dictaphones in sound art), tape art, polaroids in performance art, the body as a site - and art as process working with ideas as sculptural forms into socially engaged practice.
Influences to date are varied including artists, writers and philosophers working in outsider art, low art, new media, performance art, situationists, Dada, Punk, Grunge Fashion, text, DIY, sound art, video art, social sculpture, internet art, installation art, environmental art. For me in my research and practice the expansion continues and always returns to a practice that is collaborative.
Some of my early investigations have been around the performative aspects of the everyday. On making an artform from life, and life design as a practice. This mode of practice and research was supported by graduate studies (completed in 2019) through RMIT University in Wellness. This program enabled me to look at some of my wellness practices, for example my interest in nutrition, food systems, yoga and meditation through a lens of elements of life design and methodologies within my arts practice.
Incorporating these methodologies into an experimental practice and using my body as a site, I entered into an expanded field using myself as the model. I am also interested in participatory practice that invites audiences to become participants and setting parameters that opens up to the experiment, where process is the materiality, and where documentation becomes the archive or ‘the work’ in the sense of object. From past projects the audience members vary from those who are ‘initiated’ into the world of art and theory and understand the structure and boundaries of the practice and more interestingly to me, people who may have wandered in from the street, or accidentally encountered what was going on and became interested and engaged.
Over the past few years I have been working with sociocreative trust (SCT), made up of myself and three other creatives - Gemma Robertson, Susie Anderson and Beck Pope. When founding SCT we envisaged a creative platform to connect us in projects with an open invitation to participate when other commitments in each other’s lives allow. Working collaboratively and each bringing our own experiences, backgrounds and skill set formed what we refer to as a ‘brains’ trust’. The trust values what each individual may bring to the group and work well with the flow of this mutual respect and openness.
Some of the projects we’ve worked on have been festivals, curated dinners and performances, exhibitions, online conversations, interviews and publications. We also include discussions with each other in private and public spaces all of which explore our shared interests and philosophies.
SCT is driven by the ideals of a community of practice around areas including sustainability, wellbeing, and possible futures. The trust looks at life issues, societal issues and through our modes of practice looks at ways of solving and bringing others to look at these big questions and open up dialogue and exchange.
The project for this proposal is titled, Sanctuary. With aim to create an online community where artists and audiences may create and contribute works and ideas around their own experiences of Sanctuary.
In our daily lives we create our own places of Sanctuary which may be physical or non-material places in our homes, or places within urban and public space, for example parks, libraries, civic centres. Sanctuary for many can also be an internal landscape which might be reached through meditation and other forms of flow.
Inviting participants to explore what their personal experiences of Sanctuary are to move this into a creative investigation and observation, part of my interest in Sanctuary as an action is to study what happens when certain elements and people are brought together, how this forms and becomes something organic with a life of its own.
The Australian artists Patrick and Meg Jones, as Artist as Family (12) have made the articulation of their lives their public creative practice. The pair shifted their performative and text based experimental practice into living according to their values in self-sufficiency and sustainability as art practice. Their work is documented through the Artist as Family website and additionally they work on projects with arts organisations, groups and festivals alongside opening up their lives as an arts practice. This practice as a performative work brings elements of accountability and creates a public discourse around the themes they explore and embody.
Sanctuary will use the SCT website to curate the experience for participants to entice participants into a reflective space that complements their other work and professional practices. A complementary point of practice.
With an experimental approach with technology as invitation to play and to experiment beyond functionality. This project starts from an idea that the internet could be a place of community, a conversation, to transverse across borders, cultures and languages and to create performative experiences and resources around the theme of Sanctuary.
While the project has been in the making for a number of years, with conversations between myself and collaborators (SCT) interestingly, as I work in this research project, the world has entered into a global pandemic with the onset of Covid-19 coronavirus (CoCoV).
Currently in May, 2020 countries around the globe are restricting ‘non essential’ travel with regions closing borders. Who can travel, which borders are open have now become a very real part of life. We are seeing governments cancelling large gatherings of people and within Australia cancelling major music and arts festivals (including Dark Mofo and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival) and most major arts organisations closing down for an unknown period. Schools and universities shifted quickly to online teaching modes and many people are working remotely and from home.
I’m referencing CoCoV as it shifts focus into how humans connect beyond face-to-face gatherings and in person. Within Sanctuary I explore ways that people, artists and audiences members (also as participants) are invited to participate and to create community within an online space. People are already looking at innovative ways of working, creating and existing within online spaces far more than ever before.
China, where the pandemic first took hold, adopted quickly to encourage the online presence of their cultural institutions.
A letter issued by the government last month directs museums to “enrich the people’s spiritual and cultural life during the epidemic” with “cloud exhibitions” based on planned gallery programming.
With the world entering into isolation for periods of months, masses of people are now looking at online communication more than ever before. Creative communities are responding to this with Live Streaming Music Festivals, online communities, art communities pulling together and creating platforms and live streaming from their homes.
These experiences signal the human need for connection and interestingly how humans find whatever tools and means possible to communicate and connect.
For Sanctuary I look for a time after CoCoV, post-pandemic. What does this time look like and how can Sanctuary contribute and be heard in what is becoming a noisy space.
As we now operate in an environment that is un-chartered and humanity becomes more keenly networked and entering into spaces of physical containment, the internet becomes a supremely integrated technology in terms of social connection. These connective networks are also quickly becoming the spaces in which we work and learn.
The polymath Roy Ascott, states that it is the ‘artist’s responsibility to build socially useful schemes.’
By opening up the SCT website into an online experimental space starting with the four existing SCT artists to enter into the spaces created for them, a diarised account of their aesthetic observations of a new world as it develops post-pandemic.