Riverbed
16 November 2018 — 02 March 2019
Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland
In February 2018 Fiona Jack opened the exhibition Our Red Aunt at the Glasgow Women’s Library in Scotland. Centered around the artist’s Great Grand Aunt, the Scottish suffragette and radical communist Helen Crawfurd (1877–1954), Our Red Aunt employed collaborative artistic strategies to create a shared re-engagement with Crawfurd’s life work.
Riverbed continues the reflection on shared political narratives established in Our Red Aunt, while embedding the development of the Riverbed project within a network of communities here in Aotearoa. Fiona Jack views activist and social justice advocate Sue Bradford as a contemporary counterpart of Helen Crawfurd, and developed the Riverbed project in close conversation with her.
Since 1999 Bradford has been working as a member of the education-based social justice collective, Kotare Trust. Based in Wellsford, the trust provides a physical space and the pedagogical resources for reflective, collaborative learning. Aiming to assist others to ‘regard the world with clear vision, speak with a strong voice and act with a bold heart’ Kotare Trust works to proactively support the wairua of those working at the coalface of social transformation. The kaupapa of the Kotare Trust is at the heart of this exhibition.
Fiona Jack and Sue Bradford have facilitated a series of workshops at Artspace NZ and Kotare over the winter months of 2018. During each workshop participants have been invited to shape rocks from a variety of clays while engaging in facilitated group discussion around a topical issue. Emerging out of these dialogues among many hands and voices, each rock included in this exhibition perhaps carries an echo of collective thought within its vibrant matter. Together the rocks become a socially formed lithosphere.
Through the dialogic nature of this process, Jack and Bradford prioritise our political present as one in which listening and action are both embodied and intersubjective, where the experiences we each draw on can find shared value. Listening, engagement and the exchange of knowledge are at the heart of any true potential for social and political transformation.
Jack cites artist and former teacher Michael Asher (1943-2012) as a key influence in the development of her own artistic methods. The extended and polyvocal critical praxis he developed while teaching at the California Institute of the Arts reverberates in the ethos of Riverbed. Jack herself is now a teacher at the Elam School of Fine Arts, and many of her past and present students have also been actively involved in the Riverbed project. The Auckland Studio Potters society where Jack has been a pottery student for six years is another community connected to the exhibition. At the society’s Onehunga teaching centre each of the rocks made by workshop participants have gone through a 15 hour-long wood firing.
Bringing the pedagogical praxis of Bradford and Asher together through the contexts of The Glasgow Women’s Library, Auckland Studio Potters, and Artspace NZ, Jack gestures to an open field of learning. As such, Riverbed is an imaginative provocation that connects artistic, pedagogical and political concerns, asking how we might use our hands to organise, and to enable our korero to shape our world, together.
Information on the workshops can be found here
