- Venue
- Sheffield Institute of Arts,
- Date
- Saturday, November 5, 2016
10:00 AM - Address
- The Old Post Office Fitzalan Square, Sheffield, S1 2JH
- Location
- Yorkshire
- Organiser
- Second Degree Potentias
Art l Possibility l Action is a one-day workshop bringing together artists, campaigners, community organisers, students and academics to look at how art can help bring other worlds into being. It will be facilitated by Rhiannon Westphal from Seeds for Change and the speakers will be the artist Nina Edge, the writer Mel Evans of Liberate Tate, Kerry Morrison of In Situ and James Marriott of Platform.
Come and learn how Nina Edge used art strategies and tools to help prevent the demolition of hundreds of homes in the Welsh Streets in Liverpool; how Platform highlighted the use of arts and culture to provide social capital for oil companies; how Liberate Tate shifted public opinion against BP’s sponsorship of the Tate; and how In-Situ breathed life into a derelict mill in Pendle.
This event is for those who want to change the world with their art, and those who want to find out how art can help them change the world. It aims to bring people together and help them find kindred spirits and potential collaborators; to suggest creative tools for community organisers and campaigners; to look at the differences between making political art and making art politically, or between being an art activist and an activist artist; to share ideas and information about making work that has an effect beyond the confines of the gallery; to look at what artists and art strategies can offer to campaigns; to think about art in the service of life.
The event costs £6 including refreshments (£3 concessions, free to Sheffield Hallam students); booking essential at https://www.artpossibilityaction.eventbrite.com/
Presenters:
Nina Edge: rooted community mobilisation and resistance
Liverpool artist Nina Edge played a prominent part in the successful campaign to save the Welsh Streets in Liverpool from demolition. She has appeared as both an invited guest and a gatecrasher at Tate Liverpool, as a representative Black British radical in the Bronx Museum of the Arts, as an immigrant in Hull Ferens at the Trophies of Empire commissions and even as a Welsh presence at Philadelphia’s Painted Bride. She crops up craftily as a ceramicist, carnival designer, and producer of political textiles in the Arnolfini and as a costumier, performer and purveyor of contemporary mass ritual all over Liverpool…Edge has been a holder of the Henry Moore Sculpture Fellowship and exhibited at venues such as the John Moores Gallery, the Liverpool Biennial, FACT and the ICA. See http://www.2up2down.org.uk/events/expert-meeting-5/ for more information about Nina’s work with the Welsh Streets campaign.
Mel Evans: targeted and sustained artistic direct action campaign
Mel Evans is an artist and campaigner, part of Liberate Tate and Fuel Poverty Action. She has poured oil, written, slept and tattooed in Tates Britain and Modern. Her book Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (2015), based on years of undercover research, grassroots investigation and activism as well as performance and cultural interventions,tells the story of oil sponsorship of the arts in Britain and the campaigns against it.
James Marriott, Platform: research-based art activism
James Marriott is a writer, artist, activist and naturalist a co-director and founder of PLATFORM, which he helped to set up in 1983. Platform has supported striking hospital cleaners and their trade union, proposed the digging up of London’s buried rivers and the re-establishment of valley communities, and generated hydro-power from the River Wandle to light a nearby school. In 1995, the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed by the Nigerian government and a battle raged over the disposal of Brent Spar, Shell’s North Sea oil storage rig. Those seismic events turned Platform’s focus onto the human rights and environmental impacts of oil companies, in particular BP and Shell, a focus which continues to this day with projects such as SHAKE!, which brings together young people, artists & campaigners to develop creative responses to social injustice, and the memorial Remember Saro-Wiwa!
Kerry Morrison, In-Situ: building long-term relationships in and with an area
Kerry Morrison is an experienced environment artist and ecologist who has worked throughout the UK, including commissions for Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool, and Grizedale Forest. Since 2006 she has endeavoured to create art without creating demands on natural resources.
Kerry is a director of In-Situ, an artist-led organisation based in the milltown of Brierfield in Lancashire. In Situ’s vision is to make art be a part of the everyday life of Pendle, changing people’s perception of place, creating more resilient and innovative communities and helping them find solutions to local issues and challenges.
In Situ has set up a cinema, powered by rain collected from the roof of Brierfield Mill; renovated the Mill’s clock, which now chimes when there is good news to be broadcast in the town; set up a temporary skate-park; served up an edible Pendle Hill made from waste food; run The Shop, a series of artist’s residencies in a shop in Nelson; and brought a range of contemporary artists to Brierfield and Pendle.
Part of the 2016 Festival of Debate http://www.festivalofdebate.com/
