Harsh Light: Rosie Morris & Fiona Larkin
Wednesday 03 March, 7 – 8:30pm
Online (via Zoom)
Free & open to all
Accompanied by BSL interpretation
Harsh Light is back in March 2021!
Our webinar series Harsh Light was introduced in September 2020 after a few months’ programming pause at Bloc Projects. A conversational space for practitioners and publics alike, the webinars serve a number of important functions during a particularly difficult year: for critique and restoration, for ‘going public’ with the ways we work as an organisation.
In each session, we invite two or more speakers to talk about their practice in relation to arts funding structures like Arts Council England (ACE) and the interrelated crises of health, environment and social discontent.
Bloc Projects wants to keep growing this platform as a place for regular reflection on the state of the art worlds around the UK and how we shape and understand them in such uncertain times. In 2021, Harsh Light will be spaced out to a session every two to three months. We hope that this will give each webinar the room to breathe and be more closely considered. As with 2020, we will continue to question the ways in which the four ACE investment principles (inclusivity and relevance, ambition and quality, dynamism, and environmental responsibility) affect our practices, as well as how we situate our work and lives in the complicated contexts of ‘now’.
Cover of the publication for Artist/Mum, 2020
The first webinar of the year welcomes artists Rosie Morris and Fiona Larkin in conversation. They will work through some of the aims and language used in ACE’s investment principles in relation to their project Artist/Mum, which is a collection of recorded conversations with artists who are also mothers. How does the official request to demonstrate greater ‘ambition’ or ‘quality’ land with those of us who have to manage interminable emotional and reproductive labour? And thanks to the pandemic, many of us are also learning what it means to live in a fraught tangle of work and domesticity. So what could Artist/Mum look like in its next phase? Or — in ACE terms — how might it become a more ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’ proposition?
About the speakers
Rosie Morris
Rosie Morris is an artist living and working in Newcastle. Her practice aims to enhance viewers’ bodily perception of atmosphere within architectural space, working with perspectival painting, architectural installations, projected light, print-making, sound, film and text, in gallery and heritage locations in both UK and European contexts.
In July 2020, in response to feeling, as a new Mum, a conflict of identity, feminism vs biology, lack of time, invisibility, guilt, extreme tiredness, depression and at times discrimination, Morris set about interviewing and sharing the stories of 10 artists, who are also mothers. Extracts of these stories are collated in the publication Artist/Mum, together with a Forward by artist and researcher Martina Mullaney, and parallel text by artist Fiona Larkin.
Fiona Larkin
Fiona Larkin is an Irish artist living and working in Newcastle. She works mainly in photography and moving image which stems from a practice of performance to camera work. She is concerned with ideas of perspective shift, of long looking and the possibility for alongsideness as a productive and creative structure. She recently completed a PhD at Northumbria University and is currently teaching first year Fine Art students at Northumbria.
The webinar will be recorded and available to view via our website following the event.
This event is free but booking is essential.
Still from Vernon’s Right Hand, 2019, by Fiona Larkin
Bloc Projects is proud to maintain a public programme that is free for everyone. However, attendees are encouraged to donate to the S2 Foodbank, who are carrying out essential work during this time. To donate either follow the link on our homepage or click the button below.
This programme of events has been generously supported by Arts Council England