The Textual Trace: Writing and Socially Engaged Practice – Fiona Whelan and Gretchen Coombs in conversation
Video
As part of Create’s Conversations for Change series with leading practitioners, thinkers and activists, we are delighted to host a conversation between Irish artist, writer and educator Fiona Whelan and Australian based academic Gretchen Coombs. This conversation explores writing both as a form of practice and encounter in collaborative work and writing as a form of advancing the analysis of practice and its critical coordinates in the diverse contexts in which socially engaged art occurs.
Dr Daniel Jewesbury is a visual artist based in Northern Ireland.
All art-making proceeds by questions. And each attempt at an answer brings more questions: it’s a dialectical process, always unfinished, always leading to some other consideration, some new problem that can enrich the understanding of a situation, not necessarily by being ‘answered’ definitively, but by suggesting yet more questions, more problems and concerns and new approaches.
‘What matters is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second, to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is readers or spectators into collaborators’
– Walter Benjamin – ‘The Author as Producer’
Six artists from Ireland and four artists from the UK initiated and continued an intense conversation, part in private, part in public, over two days in Middlesex University and Soho Theatre, London on the 26th and 27th February. The initiative forms part of an ongoing bigger ‘conversation’ and initiative between NCAD, Create and ResCen, Middlesex University.
The overall purpose was to share understanding of individual practice and the audiences encountered, but in the process much larger philosophical issues emerged, making for a fascinating and illuminating event. An additional focus was on the role of the audience in the creative process and how these artists conceive of an audience during the creation of their work.