We're please to be sharing a guest blog written by on e of the exhibiting artists in TRACE, Kevin Walker. Recently Kevin and Context Project Manager and Curator, Emily Bull met to discuss the background to Context. Here's what Kevin heard:
Context as arts practice
I
come from a visual arts background; I did Fine Arts at Nottingham Trent
University. And I became interested in the communication between the
art and the audience - what happens when you make a piece of work
and put it into a gallery and somebody sees it. I did an internship at
the Tate, and from there went more into working in learning and
participation. And I've constantly been intrigued by that communication
between the art and the audience - and vice versa, how the audience can
provide content for art as well, and bring it to life. As far as I'm
concerned, the audience is part of the art for its life; it wouldn't
exist, evolve or continue to be without the audience.
So Context
is my practice as an artist; it's what i do instead of making work.
Context is a project-led organisation that I set up in 2010. I was doing
a Masters degree and looking at increasing the amount of provision and
opportunity for rural audiences to access work, and for artists to be
able to produce work in a rural setting - as well as bringing artists
into a rural setting - mainly in Somerset and the Southwest.
Rural contexts
I
did a big project that looked at how that could be done. It consisted
of one-day, intensive residencies bringing artists and materials
together to generate ideas and conversation; to taking over the whole
of Somerset College for the summer holidays, thinking about unused
space.
We also did a touring outdoor film exhibition where we
got digital film and screen-based artists to make short work. So we went
to village halls and quite rural places in Somerset, and invited the
audience to choose from the programme of art to create their own evening
- so they screened the films, they voted on what they wanted to watch.
And
then the last piece of the project, we did what we called An Evening of
Progress, which brought together artists, funders, stakeholders, people
from venues, to come and have a big dinner party - sit around a
table and eat food and discuss. It was a really interesting - excuse the
pun - context. Bringing people who knew each other, speak to each other
when they go to private views. But they had never had the
conversation: 'Okay, so you’re the local authority and you provide
funding. How do I access that funding?' Or, 'You’re the venue - what
space have you got available to show my work?' The conversations that
were fundamental to each other’s practice.
So that was the
project, and we evaluated it, and I wrote my thesis on how you could
make work happen, and about the role of the arts manager; I was doing an
Arts Management Masters.
Audience analytics
It
was through my Masters that I started working for Audiences London
Plus, and I got into a full-time role, now as Regional Engagement
Manager for the South West. There were all these regional
development agencies all doing the same thing, so by combining we've
become a sort of best of breed. Audiences Southwest used to be about
numbers and audience data, and I've brought more community engagement.
The
simplest way to describe it is that we can help organisations
understand their existing and potential audiences through research and
data. And the second spoke of our work is about practically advising
and consulting about engaging with audiences, whether community
engagement and outreach, or saying for example 'Our business plan's
telling us that we should be looking at targeting families, or older
people.' Then we would start looking at focus groups and evaluations and
actually getting those audiences in. It's not just the arts, but
includes heritage, science museums, the National Trust; culture being
the bigger picture - cultural engagement.
I didn't know a huge
amount about data analytics when I started. I was working for a dance
company as their Education Officer, and before that, the same role in an
arts centre. So I was coming at it from an engagement background. But
now I think the most valuable part is pure evidence, because there's
only so much you can presume about your audience.
For example, a
rural village out in Somerset that you know has a lot of affluent
people who engage when, say, there's a village fete. With data you can
say, '
This is how much people in that village attend the arts;
they either visit it outside or visit it in; this is their tendency to
visit something should you put it on there; this is their lifestyle,
their behaviour.'
It's stuff that you see used commercially, for
selling products, but the way we use it for the cultural industry
is thematically, for programming - being able to really deepen
engagement with an individual or a group of audiences, and to really
think about who your audiences are, how your programming and facilities
fit them. And then including them in a sort of 360 approach with a
review of your organisation and where it sits.
Sharing data & practice
We
recently worked with Spike Island on a project called Understanding
Audiences - a national benchmarking project looking at visual arts
audiences. It was kind of a layered cake where we were funded to make a
standardised questionnaire for visual arts venues that don't have box
office systems. Showing how they could collect data in a standardised
way, and also to train front-of-house staff to collect that data;
and thirdly to create a data hub for us to analyse that data for the
benchmarking report. Spike was one of 12 organisations in the whole
South West, and there were four other regions that took part - East,
East Midlands, London and the North West.
It was a really
interesting process. Our standardised questionnaire had core data - full
postcode, date of visit, stuff like that. And then we had optional,
qualitative questions like why they visited, where they travelled
from. It's one thing gathering the data, then analysing it, then telling
about it, then getting people to use it; and there's always the danger
that it can be interpreted in different ways. So our work is supporting
people through that interpretation, and applying it so that they
benefit.
We see our approach as consultative but practical, so
that we provide people with skills so that they can sustain their own
practice. Which is why we did a standardised questionnaire - so that
they have a format, a template they can continue to use. And we can
compare organisations - say Spike and Arnolfini, or Motorcade
Flashparade - and then compare that with others across the region, like
for example Stroud Valley Art Studios. So we can notice any gaps where
we can help or start to shape something that can be sustained.
And
this is what lots of our work is about - sharing audiences. You know,
how can you increase your audience footfall by sharing audiences with
the gallery up the road, recognising that audiences will travel. I think
it's a redundant idea that galleries are in competition with each
other. Audiences just want to see work.
And I think there's a
lot to learn from the museum sector as well. There's a big project
called New Expressions 2 happening in the South West at the moment, with
I think four museums - M Shed, Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery,
Barnstable, and RAMM in Exeter. They got funding to employ
artists-in-residence to better engage with audiences, and to look at
their artefacts and shows and stuff, to bring them to life through the
residencies. I remember having conversations with them last year and
saying, you know, I wonder what would happen if it was the other way
around, and art galleries were employing historians or something? Like
Spike Island - an old tea factory.
Tracing back
And
this year I’ve started to think about Context a bit more. I did a lot
of work looking into urban and rural audiences - the nature of the two.
And where people travel, and how art travels. Hence there was a lot
of correlation between the idea of context and what happens when you
take work out of a studio and into another environment, and how that
environment might change, whether it’s a village hall or a
white-box gallery. And what happens with the artist as well, and what
happens with reflection of their work. If you invite an artist from
outside a rural context, do they perceive that as being as high-class as
a sort of urban, streamlined gallery? Likewise, the appreciatoin of the
audience - what happens when you go to see a piece of work in a local
environment, as compared to when you travel to go see something?
I’ve
spent my professional career working in the South West, and have seen
people leaving the South West to go to London, or what they perceive as
urban environments, to experience culture. The thinking behind that is
that Bristol is the epicentre for the work, really, in the South West,
with regard to that cultural, urban environment.
So
the work I’m doing at the moment is based in Bristol, working with
Motorcade Flashparade, and we’re looking at the context between
contemporary craft and visual arts. I’m interested in the notion of
journeys and travels - how work can be taken from place to place, shown
in different context - not solely a contemporary crafts exhibition for
example, or a visual arts exhibition, but an exhibition of objects, each
of which can be just an idea or a physical object. It's a case of
taking the concept of context and applying that to different ideas and
notions, and being responsive as well.
And that leads back to
Trace. It's partly a response to my now working in Bristol, whereas the
one we did in Somerset was exploring different ideas of how to create
opportunities. And Trace seems to be an opportunity in its own right -
it's a curated exhibition, it's got a theme, it's a one-off, it's over a
week - it's relatively intense. So the idea of Context comes from those
boundaries of visual art and craft.
Future contexts
I've
got some ideas for what to do next. I really want to do some projects
with the notion of popup shops. Popup art galleries in spaces where you
wouldn't expect them. It's the same idea as flashmobbing: What would
happen if the arts manager and the artists knew they were going to do
something in a particular place, and you had followers - audience
members - and you just told them, 'Right, okay, tomorrow night from 7 to
9 we're gonna be doing this there.'
I quite
like ideas like that. It was actually on a train coming from Peckham Rye
to London Bridge, a few weeks ago, that I was looking into a block of
flats. And I thought it would be really nice to do an exhibition in,
like, a stairwell. So looking at opportunities in different places work
can be shown.
And I really want to do something about the
transport infrastructure in rural environments as well. Because there's
the problem of transport in rural places - there's little to none, and
where there are, it's really expensive. And placing artists to make work
responsive, so like on the back of bus tickets or in bus shelters, or
on trains - because there's a massive tourist trade as well. That same
idea of the audience travelling and noticing things. Being somebody who
would actively get a bus ticket from Bristol to Highbridge to
experience something they'd heard about. To provide work where work
isn't usually seen. To provide work by artists who don't usually get the
opportunity to make. And to do things that increase the amount of work
that people can access.
I'm quite interested in online stuff
too, because I think we've barely scratched the surface of how art uses
the online world. So the same way I talk about taking work into new
contexts and spaces - it's usually within a walled environment, a
physical space. But I'm interested in taking it out of physical
space and putting it somewhere where people can still access, and making
it quite an organic form that lives in a different realm.
