WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Last week, I was helping to tidy up our White Room in the Think Tank. This is the space at SPILL where our visiting artists present performances and talks, or hole up for a few days for a residency. On the huge whiteboard that takes up one wall of the space, I saw these words scrawled –

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been to Ipswich.” (Photo, Robin Deacon)

As I knew that Sonia Hughes, one of the artists who had been using the room had been in Ipswich to perform as part of SPILL Festival in 2021, I concluded that Jo Fong, Sonia’s collaborator for this particular project had contributed this note to self. Jo and Sonia have worked together for a long time, but following a break in their collaboration, their visit marked a return. Jo had travelled from Wales, Sonia from Manchester, both meeting in Ipswich to create something new.

All this got me thinking about my own experience as an artist who for many years travelled to perform or talk about my work - how my usually solitary experience of a city would often be reduced to journeys between hotel and venue, and perhaps a particular café or restaurant I would return to for the comfort of its temporary familiarity. Perhaps this fragmented kind of experience shares a kind of uncertainty similar to Jo’s. In my case, all the places I have been to, but not really visited. Beyond buildings and spaces we pass through, what is an artist’s relationship with a town they visit, especially when brief or fleeting?

Artists Sonia Hughes and Jo Fong present Nettles as part of Think Tank Live, 6 April 2023 (Photo, Robin Deacon)

Of course, every town has differing demographics with needs and interests - sometimes collective and overlapping, other times highly specific to a particular group. Before Sonia and Jo visited the Think Tank, our guests were ‘secret agency’, a German artist collective who are working to create a new work for SPILL Festival in October based on a programme of activities with women in the maritime across Suffolk and Ipswich. ‘Shefarers’ is the delightful phrase they use. One of the secret agency artists talked to me about their interest in convening ‘improbable assemblies’ of people. This phrase has been rattling around in my head as I think about what it means for our visiting artists to be in Ipswich, and what their points of contact are with those who live here – those who are our audiences.

Artists from ‘secret agency’ on the deck of Sailing Barge Victor(ia), Ipswich Waterfront, 13 April 2023 (Photo, Robin Deacon)

As I approach the end of my second year as SPILL Artistic Director, I am thinking a lot about the baggage I bring to the role. As an art student in the 1990s, my education was about the pursuit of individual vision and singular expressions of self. Any idea of art that engaged with community seemed removed from this way of thinking, and was sometimes sneered at by some. In all my years performing, my sense of the audience has remained as an unseen thing lurking in the shadows as I do my thing. Of course, I still value this way of working. But since coming to SPILL something has shifted in this regard, perhaps most of all my ability to appreciate and advocate for work involving a much more participatory relationship with audiences. 

In 2021, (not too long since I had returned to the UK after a decade living in the USA), I travelled to my home town of Bedford to see a performance called News, News, News by British artists Andy Field and Beckie Darlington. Andy and Beckie had worked for three weeks with children from a local school to produce a portrait of Bedford in the form of a live news TV broadcast. As I remember watching their interviews with the mayor, along with interviews and vox pops on streets that I had loitered as a teenager, the question of uncertainty about my relationship with locations returned. Having been abroad for so many years, Bedford had this strange sense of familiarity and unfamiliarity, but my experience of watching News, News, News helped me acclimatise and reconnect with this place.

News, News, News (Photo, Andy Field)

Andy and Beckie will be at the Think Tank on Thursday 27 April to talk about their ongoing projects with children and young people before returning again in the run up to SPILL Festival in October. They will work with the children of St Matthew’s School, Ipswich creating a new version of News, News, News that will see this kind of responsive, topical approach transplanted to Ipswich. 

As the rest of our festival programme takes shape, my conversations with the SPILL team keep returning to this question of audience and place, and how we can work with landscapes, histories and people with more certainty and familiarity. I wonder if this is because of my own outsider status? After all, I had never been to Ipswich before moving here.