OLDER (SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE POSH CLUB)

Phyllis and Robert Deacon in 1967 and in 2023 (Visiting Christchurch Park, Ipswich)

One of the reasons I came back to live in the UK after ten years abroad was to be closer to my parents. Both are in their 80s now, and whilst they are active and in good health, I have a distinct memory of how the pandemic led me to question my assumptions of being able to hop on a plane to go and see them, whether in an emergency or otherwise. 

In the 2019 book Elderhood by American clinician Louise Aronson, it is pointed out that how we define ‘old’ (in Western cultures) has shifted according to extensions of life expectancy. According to Aronson, for more than five thousand years, ‘old’ has been defined as being between the ages of sixty and seventy. But with humans now living longer than ever before, many people alive today will be elders for forty years or more. Yet despite the fact that many of us will spend more years in elderhood than in childhood, old age still remains ‘…a condition to be dreaded, disparaged, neglected, and denied.’

I have similarly come to think of age as somewhat taboo in terms of identity, especially for artists. If you are a regular reader of these posts, you might remember a previous one where I discussed the idea of the ‘submerging artist’, the fate of the mid-career artist who is no longer the young, new thing.

As a teacher of performance in universities and art schools, I remember a period in the mid 2000s where I would share with my students a text by Yvonne Rainer, the seminal American experimental dance practitioner and filmmaker. At the crux of the essay were multiple  descriptions of ballet dancers on stage at an age where the physical capacity for these exertions begins to elude them. Yvonne Rainer asks us to consider when it might be time to just stop:

‘So when is it time to say “farewell to dance?” When and how must we begin to think of ways to avoid becoming objects of pity or caricature as we attempt to engage movement that is ever — and obviously — more difficult?’ 

Despite my finding this text both beautiful and fascinating, it never seemed to land with the students. In conversation, the students (mostly in their early twenties) would often say they could not conceive of being old in the way that Yvonne Rainer described. In many cases, they would talk about ageing as it relates to career, and what the ideal age would be to have ‘made it’ as an artist; i.e. before you got ‘too old’. I asked one of them to define what old was to them, and whether I (as somebody in their forties at that time), would be described in that way. The answer to the latter question was always a resounding yes. 

Fast forward to June 2024, and I am standing in the Grand Hall of Ipswich Town Hall, watching what I would consider to be old (or rather, older) people dancing. This is The Posh Club, an afternoon tea event for patrons over 60, or as the flyer describes the suggested clientele, ‘…swanky senior citizens, elegant elders and glamorous golden girls and geezers.’ 

Posh Club, Ipswich Town Hall, 4 June 2024 (Photograph by Alexander Ward)

Programmed by SPILL and attended by 220 guests, the event had sold out many days in advance, primarily due to the incredible advocacy of Julie Stokes, CEO of ActivLives, a charity working across Ipswich and Suffolk to keep older people active and connected to their local communities.

The Posh Club is the brainchild of Duckie, a London-based artist collective and, in their own words, ‘a group of veteran LGBTQ club runners that emerged out of the wasteland of south London’s Vauxhall a quarter of a century ago.’ Posh Clubs happen all across the South East, with regular events in Hackney, Brighton and Crawley.

Simon Casson from Duckie (Photograph by Robin Deacon)

Flyering for Posh Club on the Cornhill, Ipswich (Photograph by Robin Deacon)

Posh Club, Ipswich Town Hall, 4 June 2024 (Photograph by Alexander Ward)

When Duckie’s Director Simon Casson contacted me last year to see if there might be interest in SPILL working with them to bring The Posh Club to Ipswich for the first time, my mind went back to my first experiences with Duckie – probably in the early 2000s in London, with their legendary night club events at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in London. 

As a much younger artist (I must have been in my mid-twenties), I performed at one of these Duckie events. Despite my developing reputation at that time for my rather strange little performances, I was a shy young man; straight, in all senses of the word. My experience that night was both terrifying and exhilarating. I did a 5-minute turn on a tiny stage to a crowd who were as rowdy and boozy as I had ever experienced as an artist still finding my feet and my voice. 

For the performance, I had (for some reason) come dressed as a chef, and used a saw to chop off fake parts of my body made from papier mache and filled with tomato ketchup and strawberry jelly for blood and guts. I remember cooking these dismembered body parts on a portable hob, the pink and red goo spilling all over the place. The audience were a noisy bunch, as they reacted with horror and amusement to the bloody mess I was making. My gestures became increasingly exaggerated and frantic to keep their attention, as well as hecklers at bay; a clear and present danger at Duckie it would seem.

It was funny having these memories bubbling up in response to Simon's proposal to SPILL. This expansion of my perception of Duckie as hip London nightclub impresarios to them also providing experiences specifically designed for older people  - especially those who may be lonely or isolated - has always fascinated me. How can we make sense of the contrast between tea and cake in the afternoon in Ipswich relative to the edgy London club nights they still do, where a young, queer crowd parties and dances into the wee small hours. 

In a public talk at our Think Tank venue held in the run up to the Posh Club event, both Simon from Duckie and Julie From ActivLives presented the ethos and histories of their organisations. It was only through witnessing the following conversation that I began to see more clearly affinities between them that went beyond questions of age or ageing. Simon and Julie spoke about the importance of breaking bread for the kind of social events organised by both Duckie (afternoon tea) and ActivLives (lunch clubs). Both talked about service in this regard. 

Posh Club, Ipswich Town Hall, 4 June 2024 (Photograph by Alexander Ward)

ActivLives state that their remit is to support not just those of a particular age (55 or over), but also those who live in ‘hard pressed areas in Ipswich and across Suffolk’, whereas Simon’s perspectives on the importance of class (or, as he put it, ‘the C-word’), also position The Posh Club in a wider conversation about tackling societal disadvantage. Something that Simon said in a BBC Radio Suffolk interview stayed with me: that British people don’t always look after the elderly well. 

If you have been following American politics in recent weeks, questions of ageing remain current. Watching the dancing at Ipswich Town Hall continue into the late afternoon, I was conscious of the fact that in less than 10 years, I myself will be eligible for entry to The Posh Club as a punter. Something to look forward to of course, but combined with my recent acquisition of an over 50’s railcard, such a realisation makes me even more aware of the accelerated passage of time that comes with ageing. These days, a decade can fly by. 

YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'VE GOT 'TIL IT'S GONE

The mayor's car outside the Ipswich Caribbean Association's International Community Centre, c. 1980.

Photo courtesy of Suffolk Archives

The title of this entry is of course a reference to the Joni Mitchell song that so articulately describes what it means to lose something of value. As you will see, the reference to a parking lot in that same song is also pertinent to what follows.

Early March saw SPILL Festival share a call out for a new artist commission, having been awarded funding in the form of a Historic England ‘Everyday Heritage’ grant: https://www.spillfestival.com/artist-callouts

We are seeking artists to create new works and experiences inspired by the history of the Ipswich Caribbean Association building, which formerly stood at 15 Woodbridge Road. I have already written in these notebook entries about how participation and community engagement is new territory for me as an Artistic Director; this project is a further step into this kind of artistic practice.

As I said in an interview with the East Anglian Daily Times, ‘The story of the Ipswich Caribbean Association building is fascinating – of music, food, conversation and people coming together across cultures. It is also a story of loss, with the Woodbridge Road building having been demolished in 2012. With our funding from Historic England, SPILL Festival will commission artists to connect with local communities to activate memories of this space, and also think about their needs for the future. I hope going forward that SPILL Festival can build on this kind of approach, where the input of Ipswich communities through their stories and interests can help us shape what we do.’

The origins of this project are interesting. In early 2023, we did a public call out to get some input for a festival project with French artist Olivier Grossetête who was renowned for building monumental architectural constructions from cardboard boxes. What building, we asked, would the people of Ipswich like to see built as part of this project? 

A lot had to be factored in when making this decision, including the structural feasibility as a large-scale object constructed from cardboard boxes (the many suggestions of the Orwell Bridge were apparently a no go for this reason) and the artist’s own interests in the building itself. Ultimately, we landed on a reconstruction of Ipswich’s Wolsey Gate and an imagined depiction of the ultimately unrealised college that was originally to be built around it, but we received a significant number of votes for the Ipswich Caribbean Association building as one they would like to see reconstructed.

In the end, a fun (and sometimes hair rising) time was had by all, building, demolishing and disposing of this 16-metre-tall construction. However, the interest many had expressed in the ICA building stayed with me, planting the seed for a project that is now coming to fruition.

We began our new year with a first meeting of our steering group (who will be leading on the artist selection process) and I soon came to realise what a complex story this is. These initial conversations made it clear that the communities who originally used the ICA still felt its absence as a wound.

The possible sensitivity at play is making me think about my own relationship with the histories and experiences that may come to the fore in this project. My family heritage has its roots in the Caribbean; my mother is a Trinidadian who came to work for the NHS in the 1960s. In 2018, I made a spoken word performance where this part of her biography was explored. My mother was also a musician, a member of La Petite Musicale, a choral group that performed the traditional folk music of Trinidad and its sister island Tobago. In my performance, I recounted my experiences of trying to find copies of La Petite Musicale records with my mother as a member, as well as sharing mum’s memories of making these recordings before emigrating to the UK.

(My mum, by the way, is standing in the second row, fifth from the right.)

In the performance, I tried to find some connection between these three dates, and three occurrences happening over three years:

• Trinidadian Independence in 1962

• The recording of this record in 1963

• The departure of my mother for the United Kingdom in 1964

So there was the fact of a country becoming independent (and the idea of this being this new dawn for the country), alongside the fact of someone leaving that country for this other place - the place that they had just become independent from. In our conversations, we never quite got to the bottom of all this, but I remember my fascination with my mother telling me how, as a younger woman, she would describe the UK as ‘the mother country’. However, I recognise this alone does not give me an inherent understanding of the Ipswich Caribbean Association, and the specificity of its stories in the context of this town and Suffolk. 

Fast forward to February 2024, and I am sitting in The Hold, the home of Suffolk Archives in Ipswich. I am watching a DVD containing a series of interviews generated by the Ipswich Caribbean Experience (ICE), a 2005 project that recorded and preserved the experiences of those who migrated from the Caribbean to Ipswich during the 1950s and 60s. It is interesting to hear that same phrase my mum would use - ‘the mother country’ - being used by interviewees from other Caribbean Islands: Jamaica, Barbados, St Kitts, Nevis. As I hear the different cadences in speech, and differing descriptions of cuisine from differing islands, I am reminded of the need to keep thinking of that word ‘community’ as a plural.

Turning my attention to the fragments of papers, leaflets and documents in The Hold’s archives, I am instinctively drawn to the minutiae. I find myself thumbing through thin sheathes of typewritten paper that mark out a more mundane history of the Ipswich Caribbean Association and its home on Woodbridge Road: agendas from meetings, confirmations of attendance, notes of apology, memos about building maintenance and toilet cleaning rotas.

The evolution of the differing logos for the ICA over the years of its existence were of particular interest:

Images courtesy of Suffolk Archives

A member of our steering group spoke of a fleeting memory of the blue martial arts outfits worn by kids walking up Woodbridge Road to the karate classes the ICA would hold. Other conversations I have had since our project was announced suggest other points of entry for artists who may be interested in this commission: the role of food and lunch clubs in forming community for elders, the importance of the ICA as a venue for music, whether sound systems or drum and bass, and of course, dominoes. I am told dominoes are really key to the history of the ICA. Of course, these need not be competing narratives, but hopefully represent starting points for all kinds of responses to the history of this space and the people that used it.

It important to place the Ipswich Caribbean Society project in a wider context of other projects funded by Historic England which focus on working class heritage all over the UK: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/feb/21/hidden-stories-historic-england-funds-56-projects-on-working-class-heritage?CMP=twt_a-culture_b-gdnculture 

Images courtesy of Suffolk Archives

I am also excited by the possibility that this project may unearth the unseen and unheard. For example, I hear rumours of battered old boxes of photographs or memorabilia from the ICA in people’s lofts, unseen for many years. In my experience, some of the best archives are domestic rather than institutional. 

We look forward to hearing from artists and creative practitioners who may be interested in this exciting opportunity. Our deadline is 2nd April 2024 and there’s more information elsewhere on this site. If you would like to have a preliminary conversation about your proposal before applying, feel free to write to me at robin@spillfestival.com. 

You might even want to visit the former site of the Ipswich Caribbean Association on Woodbridge Road to help imagine what might be possible. At the moment, it is a car park.

Having spent nearly two years living around the corner from here, it does strike me as funny how one can walk past such an unremarkable location nearly every day, and not realise its remarkable history or significance.

Thanks to Emily Shepperson and the staff at The Hold, Historic England and our steering group for their guidance on this project.

MY OLD SCHOOL

The University of Wales Institute Cardiff, Howard Gardens, Cardiff, circa 2014

This was where I received my arts education between 1993 and 1996. These images were doing the rounds on social media sometime around 2014, and at this time, I would often start my public speaking engagements by showing them, referring to the demolition of these buildings as a metaphor for arts education being ‘in ruins’. Since then, out of the rubble has emerged a new building consisting of hotel-like accommodation for Cardiff Metropolitan University students; clean, sleek and well appointed, this new usage is as far from my own rough, dirty, chaotic art school experience as it is possible to imagine. 

At the time I studied there, the Howard Gardens campus of the University of Wales Institute Cardiff was home to a genuinely unique visual art programme, creating a generation of British artists who did much to shape the direction of experimental performance in the UK in subsequent years. Dartington College of Arts in Devon had a similar status during this period. As a very particular convergence of artists, educators, learners, buildings and facilities, neither of these institutions exist anymore.  

Why should they?, you might ask. Times change.  

But other things have changed too, including the fact that my local education authority paid the entirety of my tuition fees when I began my degree in 1993. By the time I left the UK to work abroad in 2011, the tuition fee cap had just increased from £3,000 to £9,000. The final arc of this journey through arts education found me working for a decade in a private American art school (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago) where yearly tuition cost a student just over $50,000 a year. I soon realised that conversations with my American students about my experience of education relative to theirs were informed by a certain kind of guilt on my part. 

When I first came to SPILL in 2021, I hadn’t realised that the Think Tank, our beautiful headquarters and venue, was housed in a building that once functioned as an art school; even though it is plainly stated as a plaque on the front of the building. Sometimes you just have to look up.

The Think Tank, High Street, Ipswich, 2023 (Photo, Robin Deacon)

Occasionally a guest to an event, or a passer by just popping their head around the door, will tell us that they used to do life drawing classes in what is now one of our meeting rooms. Gazing up at the vaulted ceilings with a wistful smile, they will regale us with their memories of the old Ipswich School of Art, an institution with alumni that include Maggi Hambling and Brian Eno. Luckily, as a listed building, it will not have the same fate as my alma mater, so these moments of reverie will still be possible in the future.

Why am I in such a reflective mood regarding the history (and future) of art schools and education? Perhaps because every other day it would seem there is a new article claiming there to be a devaluing of arts and creativity in school, or highlighting a shift away from the arts and humanities within university education. Of course, such observations are nothing new. I can’t remember a time when there haven’t been portrayals of creative arts courses as being, financially speaking, ‘not worth it’. Add the current high cost of living and a seemingly never ending spiral of inflation and these issues have an increased urgency.

I have been wondering what role SPILL might have in responding to these concerns. How can an experience of arts education be uncoupled from a lifetime of unreasonable debt? How can we question the idea of arts education as an indulgence or extravagance? What might we offer those who are creative, but do not believe a career in creativity is an economically viable path?

Over the last couple of months, my research has taken me to organisations like The Other MA (TOMA) in Southend, The Margate School and Open School East (also in Margate), to learn how others might be addressing these kinds of questions. In each instance, I saw a series of fascinating models for independent programmes of education that function outside of (and sometimes, in critique of) traditional forms and structures of institutional learning. In conversation with the directors of these programmes and some of their students, it was clear that all had completely different financial models and cultures of learning. But what was shared is a sense that something is awry in the way mainstream graduate and post-graduate educational provision in the UK is funded.

The Margate School (Formerly Woolworths), 31 - 33 High Street, Margate, 2023 (Photo, Robin Deacon)

Rightly or wrongly, I had always worked on the premise that artists were generated by educational institutions, whether in BA programmes like Cardiff where I studied, or postgraduate/MFA level at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago where I taught. As a lecturer or professor in both universities and art colleges, I was sometimes guilty of not giving a great deal of thought about what students experience before they reach higher education. In a recent Instagram post, British artist Bob and Roberta Smith claimed that in 2023, 40% fewer children took GCSE art than in 2010. If correct, this raises some interesting questions regarding what might be going on ‘downriver’.

Bob and Roberta Smith, Instagram post, 14 May 2023

Way back in the 1980s (having received utterly mediocre grades for all of my A-level exams), I remember telling my mother I was worried that I had made a horrible mistake having chosen to only take academic subjects, and really didn’t know what to do next. 

History: D

English: E

Geography: U (Ungraded)

In response, my mum went on to do some research on my behalf (probably at the library; these were pre internet times), and came back with the suggestion that I could do a thing called an ‘art foundation’ course and this would be a way to get into art school. I followed her advice, gained entry to the BTEC Foundation Studies course at my local college, and at last, everything made sense again. 

The question I have been asking myself of late is this: if I was now in my late teens or early twenties, would I still consider going to art school? What if my parents hadn’t encouraged me to follow a creative path? If there were other kinds of provision that were not so associated with debt and unstable career options, would I avail myself of them? 

Counterfactuals of this kind can present us with infinite scenarios. But if I step outside of myself and apply these questions in the context of SPILL Festival (and in particular, the work we do at the Think Tank), a bigger picture starts to emerge. Some of the most memorable experiences I have had at SPILL in the last couple of years relate to the work we have done with artists that has opened up creative experiences for children. Most recently, Nottingham artist Bruce Asbestos spent a few days with us leading a series of workshops with Year 5 and 6 children who were charged with creating miniature monsters from clay. Bruce will fabricate some of the characters they created in larger form, to be shown in our October festival alongside his own enormous inflatable sculptures. 

Bruce Asbestos, Ok Cherub, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 2022 (Photo, Roy Battersby)

Bruce’s instructions to the children were simple and open ended, but he made an interesting clarification at the start. He said that if the task was to make an animal, the children would likely produce a predictable series of dogs or cats. But if the task is to make a monster, then the imagination can run riot. As Bruce pointed out, a monster can have twenty five legs or six eyes. It can be pink, green, blue, or a mixture of all these colours.

Clay ‘monsters’ made by year 5 and 6 pupils, St Matthews School, Ipswich (Photo, Robin Deacon)

Of course, Bruce’s workshops with these children are not ‘art school’, at least not in the sense that I have been writing about here. But what is the line to be drawn from these kinds of childhood experiences of making and the possibility of creativity still having a central significance in one’s adult life? As I wrote this question, I was suddenly reminded of an observation from the late, great British artist Brian Catling. In a 2021 BBC documentary about his life and work, he shared a childhood recollection of making something with clay, mud and sticks at school. As he remembers it, it was a model of a caveman’s house, and his realisation was the following:

‘There was something about getting dirty. You have to let the hands think. You don’t work it out with a pencil, you don’t work it out in your head; you put your hands in the material and see what happens. I don’t think that’s taught anymore. I don’t think that’s even discussed.’

It is important to remember that such creative revelations can also be found in the most unlikely of places. Might there be something to be said for activities and processes that happen outside the walls of educational institutions? All those solitary hours I spent as a child playing with Lego were no doubt creative - building objects, stories and worlds with my own hands. ‘Thinking with my hands’ indeed. In retrospect, I even think the time I spent doing menial warehouse jobs in my teens and early twenties was not unconnected to the kinds of repetitive actions over long durations that my educators in Cardiff would later claim to be ‘performance art’. Paradoxically, I sometimes wonder if not taking A-level art (of not learning how to draw) was what ultimately made me an artist.

Thanks to Leon Clowes, Polly Brannan (Open School East), Emma Edmondson (TOMA), Andrea Cunningham (METAL, Southend) and Maz Stuart (The Margate School) for their generosity and time, and thanks to Bruce Asbestos for his brilliant workshops.

www.toma-art.com

www.openschooleast.org

www.themargateschool.com

WE HATE IT WHEN OUR FRIENDS BECOME SUCCESSFUL

Oriana Fox (Image courtesy of the artist)

It took me ages to get round to it, but I finally wrote a curatorial statement. No great fanfare, no big deal, but the realisation is that writing a statement of intent as an Artistic Director is no easier than writing an artist statement. It has been interesting to see which of my concerns as an artist have carried over into my curatorial role - for example, exploring the relationship between the marginal and the mainstream. This has always been a fascination of mine. Back in 2005, I made a video entitled ‘What is a Performance Artist?’ that compiled instances of uses of the word ‘performance art’ in mainstream television and cinema. My theory was that despite the collected cliches, dismissals and misunderstandings the video depicted, the idea of a marginal art form like performance art did already have a presence within popular culture.

Perhaps there was something else bubbling under all of this. I’m thinking of artists who work in the margins, but who are also interested in a kind of success that means breaking through to a broader public, beyond one’s peers. As an art student in the mid 1990’s (trying to figure out what ‘performance art’ was) I was often directed toward Rose Lee Goldberg’s book, the neatly titled ‘Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present’. I distinctly remember being drawn to a passage where the author  described instances of “…the performance artist dreaming of becoming a celebrity…” and the ambivalence associated with this possibility - “…how to make the crossover without losing the integrity and the protection…of the art world.”

I was reminded of this dilemma when artist Richard Dedomenici came to present at the Think Tank last year, revisiting his experience of adapting his ongoing Redux project for BBC television in 2015. I remember watching the BBC broadcast of this show, ‘The Redux Project Live from Television Centre’, and laughing as Richard (and friends) reenacted multiple iconic scenes from BBC TV history. A particular highlight was watching Richard get beaten up by television presenter Kirsty Wark.

Richard Dedomenci ‘The Redux Project Live from Television Centre’ (2015)

Over the years more than a few of my artist friends and peers have been sighted on ‘reality’ TV, so that sense of delight in seeing a person I know on screen was not unusual. But somewhere in this viewing experience was another feeling I could not quite place my finger on. It was not as simple as jealousy or envy. Or perhaps it was. For now, I will resort to euphemism, and suggest what I experienced was ‘a heightened consciousness of an evolving relationship with my peers (and their careers).’

Richard Dedomenci and Robin Deacon as young artists in 2007 (Photo, Jamie McMurray)

As artists, Richard and I had been fellow travellers of sorts. ‘Back in the day’ (i.e. 2003), we were programmed as a double bill at Fierce Earth Festival in Birmingham – both as young, emerging artists. This was the point in my career where it was still customary for me to apologise to the audience before I began my performances - just in case it didn’t turn out to be any good. Anyway, during that period and in the subsequent years, I remember that mine and Richard Dedemenici’s work would often be categorised together or somehow held in comparison. But fast forward to 2015, and there Richard was on ‘proper’ TV - and there I wasn’t.

Richard Dedomenci ‘The Redux Project Live from Television Centre’ (2015)

This week at the Think Tank, we welcome artist Oriana Fox who will be exploring similar questions, albeit far more directly and candidly than I am. As she writes of herself – 

‘Oriana Fox was once a hot young artist back in the early 2000s. Now fully in mid-career phase, she’s lamenting what might have been and, perhaps unhelpfully, comparing herself with her peers.’ 

With such daily comparisons writ (and posted) large, Oriana describes an envy fueled by social media. This may be something recognisable to all of us in an everyday sense, not just as artists. But it is likely a blessing these technologies were in their infancy when I was starting out in my creative life. In her work as a podcaster, Oriana is grappling with some fascinating questions on how to judge one’s success, particularly from a vantage point of her description of herself as a ‘young hot artist’ in the past tense. 

Oriana Fox (Image courtesy of the artist)

For all the other intersections of identity we talk about, I believe that age (or more precisely, ageing) is too often neglected. This leads me back to another part of my curatorial statement, and another thing we want to do more of at SPILL, namely supporting and remembering the work or artists who may have been passed by or forgotten by bringing them back into dialogue and relevance. I’d like to think this might become a prognostic process, to pre-empt or prevent invisibility.

I remember being interviewed in 2004 for a publication by the Live Art Development Agency that compiled a series of reflections from artists who had undertaken their incredible and life-changing ‘One to One’ bursary scheme. Although this funding had given me the financial support to give up my job for a year to focus on my art making, in my interview for this publication, I remember expressing a concern that even as a young artist, there was this fear of an eventual mid-career malaise, and an associated loss of visibility. I used the term ‘the submerging artist’ to describe this impending state. This was a simple inversion of that ubiquitous category: ‘the emerging artist’. 

A couple of years ago, this term popped up again in the context of a Facebook thread I was following on this very subject of older artists’ loss of visibility. One contributor cited my original use of the phrase, writing that  ‘submerging artist’ was a description she had applied to herself for some time now - 

‘Sinking under the waves created by the speedboats trawling for 'emerging' artists into the quiet pool of middle-aged/older didn't-you-do-something-once? Waiting to see what's there when the water recedes.’

I will conclude this text on this rather poetic image (thanks Rachel Gomme), and another observation/question that came from the same discussion thread, namely, the possibility of formal categorisation or funding category for the support of ‘the re-emerging artist.’

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.