Dialogues & Interviews | Interactive Arts Enquiry

‘Mixing It Up: An Intergenerational Perspective’ interrogates the sustainability of artists’ practices (financial, motivational, environmental, political) and creates opportunities for intergenerational learning between the artists as well as a better understanding of these practices for audiences.

Aaron Williamson’s work as an artist is inspired by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised, yet humorous sensibility towards disability. Mostly, he devises unique artworks that are created on-site immediately prior to their public presentation. These consider the situation he encounters and represents, in part, his response to it. A constant theme is to challenge and subvert the romantic valorisation of social ‘outsiderness’ and thus he portrays himself in performances and videos in the guise of sham-shamans, pretend-primitives, hoax-hermits, fake feral children, charlatan saints and dubious monsters. With these figures he explores and devises humorous or absurd actions that reference and pay homage to the ‘classic’ period of performance art in the 1960s and 70s. In the last ten years he has created over 200 performances, videos, installations and publications in Britain, Europe, Japan, Greenland, China, Australia and North America.

http://www.aaronwilliamson.org

Katharine Meynell has been working as an artist since the late 1970’s. She studied at Byman Shaw School of Art and the Royal College of Art where, in 2000, she also completed a doctoral thesis on Time Based Work in Britain since 1980. Her works drift between material media, emerging as performances, bookworks, video installation and drawings. These are often in series, as records of precarious things. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in spaces such as Franklin Furnace, Cabaret Melancholique, Serpentine Gallery, De La War Pavilion, Ikon Gallery and Tate Britain and her films are included in Luxonline with a monograph essay by Dr Andrea Phillips.

http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/katharine_meynell/index.htm

Ellie Harrison (b.1979 London) is an artist based in Glasgow shortlisted for the Converse/Dazed 2011 Emerging Artists Award. She studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, Goldsmiths College and Glasgow School of Art. In 2011 she was artist in residence at Wunderbar festival in Newcastle and at Artsadmin’s Two Degrees festival in London – a week exploring art and activism, climate and cuts. In 2009 she founded the ‘Bring Back British Rail’ campaign and in 2010 became the first individual artist to openly publicise an Environmental Policy on her website.

Jordan Mckenzie is a performance artist who also works with drawing, sculpture and installation. He has exhibited extensively both in the UK and internationally including The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, The Courtauld Institute, London, Museu Serralves, Portugal and DOLL Exhibition Space, Switzerland. He has received research bursaries from both Artsadmin and The LIve Art Development Agency and has had residencies in Oxford, Nepal and the USA. Currently he is a senior lecturer in Drawing at Camberwell College of Art and in FIne Art Practice at Kingston University. He co-curates a performance space LUPA (Lock Up Performance Art) located in Bethnal Green, London.

Yoko Ishiguro is a performance maker, performer and actress. She studied psycholinguistics at the University of Tsukuba and has worked with theatre companies in Japan. In 2005, she started to make her own site-specific pieces and to explore the relationship between time and distance as well as presence and absence, self and non-self, and the functions of those dichotomies. She has performed in Japan, China, Indonesia, UK and other parts of Europe and is currently studying on the Contemporary Performance Making MA course of Brunel University.

Fiona Templeton‘s work includes poetry, installation and performance. She is director of the New York-based group The Relationship, specialising in experimentation in language, relationship with the audience, and use of site. Current work includes Aguas Dulces, Aguas Saladas, in the San Juan Estuary in Puerto Rico, and a 6-part performance epic, The Medead, forthcoming in New York in December. She has received awards in various disciplines and has published 12 books. Fiona leads the MA in Contemporary Performance Making at Brunel University

Robbie Lockwood is a Hackney based artist working mostly with sound and video. In collaboration withLucie Galand, he has been working with the local civil rights group Hackney Unites and is a member of a non-hierarchical art education group AltMFA.

Stefan Szczelkun is an artist interested in culture and democracy. In the early Seventies he was fortunate to be part of the Scratch Orchestra. His doctoral research into Exploding Cinema collective was completed in 2002. Recently he has produced the collaborative project Agit Disco, published as a book by Mute

Barby Asante is an Artist, Curator and Educator based in South London. She studied Fine Art at the University of East London, where she began making work in film, photography and installation, placing herself in the frame as a means of confronting the audience with the perceived problem of her image. Asante is interested in creating works that stimulate dialogue around the cross-cultural and multicultural and how we view and frame these questions in contemporary Britain, often using familiar or popular culture triggers as a means to begin the dialogue. Recently Asante has been working on projects exploring music and its cultural and social significance, with particular emphasis on black music and it’s importance in the creation of a post-war British cultural identity.

Sonia Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning black British art-scene of that time – becoming one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her work purchased by the Tate Gallery, with paintings that spoke about racial identity and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s Boyce’s practice has taken a more multi-media and improvisational approach by bringing people together to speak or sing about the past and the present. Since 1983, Boyce has exhibited extensively throughout the UK and internationally and has completed an AHRC Research Fellowship at Wimbledon College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London with her concluding research project the Future is Social.

Hunt & Darton is a Live Art collaboration between Jenny Hunt and Holly Darton. Having met at Central Saint Martin’s, Hunt & Darton have been collaborating for the past 5 years approaching performance from a Fine Art background. Hunt & Darton work with spoken word, movement, sound and installation. Their work comes out of a shared interest in what it means to be human. They make work about common problems, embarrassment, human behaviour, love, life and art. They tend towards the deadpan and the absurd.

Richard Layzell is a London-based artist affiliated to ResCen at Middlesex University. His work in performance, video and installation – and with industry and communities – has been recognised internationally.His interests and areas of focus include: environmental and gender issues; architectural space; experiential learning; expanding the audience for contemporary practice and exploring the public realm.From 1996 he developed a series of innovative residencies in industry, defining the role of the ‘visionaire’, with: AIT Plc, Promise, Chordiant International and Unilever. His development of the artist’s role in redefining corporate culture and community has subsequently been applied to a series of artworks and commissions in the public realm. He is the author of The Artists Directory, Live Art in Schools, Enhanced Performance and Cream Pages.