Artist's Presentation: Claire Webster Saaremets
Artist's Presentation: Rajni Shah
Artists' Presentation: Theatre Replacement
Audio from the discussion is available here
Critical Conversations: An Overview
At Helix Arts we are committed to offering artists the opportunity to reflect on their participatory practice. We think that opportunities for artists to examine their practice by sharing it with other artists, academics and arts professionals are important.
So, in order to create more of those opportunities, we’ve developed the idea of “Critical Conversations”. These are spaces for artists whose practice is based in participatory arts to present their practice to others, be paid appropriately for their time and to learn from the conversations and discussions that follow.
We think that these conversations are very important in helping to shape ideas about what quality means in participatory arts. We think that we’ll begin to understand the detail of really excellent participatory practice by giving the opportunity to lots of artists to undertake this process of reflection, and to share that reflection with others by making recordings of these presentations and discussions available via our website.
This is just part of Helix Art’s attempts to understand and articulate quality in participatory arts better. See here for some of our other writing and thinking about this.
We hope that other participatory arts organisations will want to share with us in this practice, which has begun as a collaboration with Wunderbar Festival and is continuing in a programme of “Critical Conversations” within the Artworks: North East professional development programme, which you can find out more about here.
We think that if enough organisations undertake this practice, and share it with others, we’ll jointly be able to create an incredible archive of learning material which will help artists and organisations learn about great participatory practice, and which, by analysing the kinds of questions and answers artists ask one another, we can build into a framework for genuinely understanding quality in participatory work.
For the Wunderbar event, we brought together artists who are different points on the spectrum of participatory practice. We thought that this would provide a great opportunity to compare and contrast the different approaches that different artists bring – giving them the opportunity to talk about their different philosophies and the detail of their practice.
I hope you find it as interesting as we did, and if you’d like to find out more, please get in touch.
Toby Lowe
Chief Executive, Helix Arts
An Artist's Viewpoint: Claire Webster Saaremets
Writing and sharing about your practice...as an artist, director of an arts organisation, co collaborator, participator which are interconnecting roles executed within principles of working effectively with a very wide diversity of people.. is a constant editing process within itself as a task. Phew!
Why? Because there are so many forms and interpretations, understandings and models of participation…so what is ours?
Writing the presentation about our practice involved many hours of soul searching, dialogues, scanning previous documents, business plans of vision etc…..and settled it all into a rather straight forward ‘Power Point Presentation’ – what??( I didn’t even know how to do a PPt!!! One of our young artists we work with helped me !)
Each time I have presented about our process and practice to different contexts home and abroad – it has encouraged a sifting through our meanings and ask those questions…what do we mean by Participation? Roles? Decisions? Authorship? Ownership? Quality? Etc How do we define ourselves as a professional process and product organisation, INCLUSIVE of participation?
Over the last 15 years of exploring this debate within our ever evolving processes of artistic interventions, experiences and happenings through the creation of site specific artworks WITH many different groups, it is the expectation that we are EXPLORING, EXPERIMENTING, CONCEPTUALISING and CREATING that underpins what we do COLLECTIVELY, IN RESPONSE to one another.
As an artist I am stimulated by participation as it opens my mind to new dialogues, be it with other professionals in the wider arts world, alongside people of any age, creed, socio/economic background/ ability/ ethnic origin/mental wellbeing etc. It is often the labels given to people that restricts possibilities from the outside that need to be rewritten, participation can do this.
So the opportunity at Wunderbar enabled the wider debate around the table, expertly hosted by David Butler, to talk about HOW we go about and value the concept and delivery of participation. What are the ethical principles that we operate within? I particularly respected the honesty of Theatre Replacement for their ‘ Preditory participation I,e using participation as a means to an end.
I suppose that the impact of the experience, the quality of the exchange and the inner shifting of thought about life for the participant is at the heart of what we would wish for…..
A significant aside – participating in this event – must be the clarity of powerpoint(!) as well as the debate.. has influenced our latest documents, website development and is causing further debate….always a good thing!
Artistic Director, Skimstone Arts
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