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Braziers international

By: Niki Russell

The most recent Braziers international artists’ workshop enacted a purposeful shift, away from the idea of a residency as undisturbed individual activity, to that of a collaborative disruption of existing modes of practice.

This required artists willing to “place themselves and their practice into question”, to open up their usually internal workings to varied forms of interaction, participation and collaboration; to take risks with previously unknown others. Braziers has taken place each August since 1995, acting as a meeting point for artists from across the world. The workshop briefly joins this community, a place set up as a conscious experiment exploring the advantages and problems of living together. Braziers intentionally provides a context removed from the artists’ routine studio practice, and has always sought to enable a similar shift in artistic thinking. However, they also recognise that “the success of the workshop has sometimes led to artists creating extensions of their existing practice and the focus has often moved away from artistic risk-taking”. The challenge: to redress this contradiction, moving the workshop closer to its original intention and also to the guiding principles of its host venue. This year, Braziers brought together nineteen artists to live and work alongside each other for sixteen days. Greasing the wheels of collaboration, Braziers Park...

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