Public
Dundee Contemporary Arts
As part of my DCA Engage Everyone Residency I am looking for compulsions and rituals to contribute towards an art work. I am seeking the C’s from OCD and rituals with obsession. Your contributions will be anonymised. I am attempting to normalise certain aspects of Mental Health. For example – Man locks door leaving house. - It’s a pefectly ‘normal’ everyday behaviour. However for some it can be a compulsion and represent a significant impairment to daily life. It goes without saying we are all somewhere on the continuum of good and bad mental health. We all have good and bad days. If you have a compulsion or ritual you would like to contribute please email textartist@yahoo.com thankyou. An example is given below – again this is ‘compulsion light’
Newcastle Bridges Festival
The Bridges Festival was a major event in Newcastle over the weekend of 13th and 14th of August 2011. For my part I was working with Julia Barton who designed the Lost and Found garden on the Swing Bridge. I did all the participatory work – involving 4 community groups from Newcastle and 4 from Gateshead. We worked together to design potager beds – small scale kitchen gardens set around formalised patterns – ‘potage’ meaning for the pot from the french. Normally doing planting projects you have months to design, sow, bring on the plants so they are ready and prime for the event. We had 6 weeks. Amazingly it all came off. The 2 days of install were well worth it. The feedback from the public was a resounding ‘It should be like this all the time’ or comments along that theme. Needless to say the delicate construction and planting was more laboured than the tractor dominated dismantle – All trace of it was gone in a few hours – Lost and found and lost again. A wee bit of Brigadoon – but hey, let’s hope it’s next year and not next century when we do it again. Some shots of it are below. If you want more of an explanation go to Julia Bartons Blog
