Lacuna: Artists Role in Society - working with communities and not for
Join Polly Brannan and Laurie Peake to explore: What happens when artists are embedded and working with & not for local communities?
Join Polly Brannan and Laurie Peake to explore: What happens when artists are embedded and working with & not for local communities?
Super Slow Way Director, Laurie Peake is a curator who works with artists to help people transform their own neighbourhoods, committed to commissioning work with communities & artists that is deeply rooted in the local context of where she is working from.
Through the session, Laurie Peake will present two key innovative social practice models & artworks that have become some of the most significant social practice works in the UK today which include Jeanne van Heeswijk’s 2up2down (Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial) which created the Community Land Trust and bakery, Homebaked, in Liverpool, where the community took matters into their own hands to re-imagine and reclaim their homes. Also, US artist and pioneer of public art and socially engaged practice, Suzanne Lacy’s Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope (commissioned by Super Slow Way) that looks at how a post industrial town comes together in extraordinary ways, over 3 years to create a mass participation artwork at Brierfield Mill, Pendle. We will explore communities & young people’s perception of where they live & what change they can make, carving out their own future, on their own terms.
Location:
Foyle Rooms, Turner Contemporary.
Timings:
5.00pm – 7.00pm
Register for your free ticket here.
Speaker Biography
Laurie Peake is a curator who works with artists to help people transform their own neighbourhoods in projects such as Suzanne Lacy’s Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope in Pendle, UK and Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s 2Up 2Down in Liverpool, UK. She is currently Director of Super Slow Way, a cultural development organisation which is one of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programmes, located along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal corridor in East Lancashire.
Previously, Laurie was Programme Director at Liverpool Biennial for 10 years, where she developed strategic partnerships to deliver temporary and permanent commissions with international artists in public spaces across Merseyside. Projects such as Antony Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach, Jaume Plensa’s Dream and Jeanne Van Heeswijk’s 2Up2Down which created the Community Land Trust and bakery, Homebaked, in Liverpool, were all notable for their transformative effects.In the 1980s, Laurie was one of a small team that set up Tate Liverpool, often cited as the UK’s first regeneration project to use culture as its driver. She later went on to work with Alsop Architects on a host of regeneration projects in post-industrial towns and cities across the North of England. Laurie holds a BA and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Super Slow Way
Super Slow Way is a cultural development programme in Pennine Lancashire that uses the Leeds & Liverpool Canal as a vehicle for bringing people together to create social and cultural spaces on a waterway that everyone shares. Their work is shaped by and delivered with local residents from Blackburn to Pendle, working with artists using art as a tool and a vehicle for social justice, improved health and wellbeing and positive social change to help build more resilient and sustainable communities.
Over the past seven years, in collaboration with partner organisations and residents, Super Slow Way has engaged over 200,000 people in the canal side communities of East Lancashire as co- commissioners, creative participants and active audiences, building confidence with residents to articulate the meaning of culture in their lives with new-found skills and voices.
Project Details
Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope, US artist, Suzanne Lacy
In the project, Shapes of Water, Sounds of Hope, US artist, Suzanne Lacy worked with people for three years in Brierfield, a town built around a cotton mill that closed in 2010. The result was the creation of a new artwork, produced over three days at the mill when residents were invited to take part by observing performances, participating in singing sessions and coming to a large banquet for 500 people. They were able to share their stories and experiences of the mill and living in Pendle in the largest event of its kind the area has ever seen. Suzanne and her local collaborators produced a film installation, The Circle & The Square which premiered in the mill, went on to be shown at Sydney Biennale in 2018 and has since been acquired by the Whitworth, Manchester.
2Up 2Down, Jeanne Van Heeswijk
At Liverpool Biennial, Laurie worked with Dutch artist Jeanne Van Heeswijk on 2Up 2Down where the community took matters into their own hands to re-imagine and reclaim their homes. A group of more than 20 young people worked with architects and other design specialists to re-use a block of empty properties, condemned for demolition, comprising a former bakery building and two adjoining terraced houses. Taking the community as their client, they designed an affordable housing scheme and shop, as well as meeting and project spaces. At the same time, a cross-generational group of local residents set up Homebaked Community Land Trust that enabled the collective community ownership of properties in the area, and allowed the group to reopen the Bakery as a social enterprise, building a new idea of community, work and social space, and with it a new community resilience.
