Processes: audience(s) and collaborators generate knowledge and authorship

Although in the word ‘collaboration’ there is the notion of ‘relation’ and ‘relationship between’, this project is not about ‘relational art’. RA is the term used to describe a participatory strategy defined by curator Nicolas Bourriaud (1998). RA takes place within the symbolic space of a gallery context. My practice is sited in Herefordshire and includes processes that are often collaborative and participatory but rarely collective.

In this project, there are different degrees of collaboration. Collaborators all contribute ideas and knowledge to the project. Collaborators are also my audiences. One of the great pleasures of collaboration is that this audience is supportive- even if there is no broader response or recognition- so it’s important to me because I am a woman, a foreigner and an incomer in Herefordshire.

1. My primary audience includes

- the collaborators-fabricators- they sign the project as JUST DUST.

-there are also six participants- interviewees

- three people form the advisory group (Perry Walker a game inventor, Katie Brymer, graphic designer, and Nick Read). This group contributes useful ideas and contacts to the project. Perry adapted the climate walk game to fit into the format of the project. Katie is commissioned to design the identity of the project. As a reciprocal gesture for Nick Read’s time (Director of the Brightspace Foundation in Herefordshire), the Herefordshire Word-Hoard produced while researching Voicing the Soil will exhibited at the Cider Museum (28 June). The Word-Hoard links up with his foundation’s green activities. 

Participants- interviewees can appropriate parts of the project.  Malcolm is organising a Climate Walk in his local pub. Moira’s voice, the geologist, makes up one of the soundscapes (The Old Red Sandstone). The knowledge of Councillor Price and Duseline, a garden specialist, inform the newspaper content.

2. The secondary audience is my peer group and teachers, and people who come in touch with the project and react to it. For example, we wanted to publicise the Climate Walk in a village newsletter, Julie the editor found the original description hard to understand. Her difficulty changed the way in which I explain the game. 

Climate Walk game participants will create self-knowledge, in that they discover what choices they make (are they prepared to give up flying to leave oxygen for future generations?)

Myriad living species unwittingly inform the soundscapes which reveal sounds of others, normally beyond human auditory range in Spiders Sex Pheromone, Amphibians and Animalia.

3. Why these collaborations?

-Just as the railway brought the popular press to the villages with mind stretching ideas, I hope participants and audiences can find in the project a space where thinking, about a mundane material like soil, is possible. The project creates a space where audiences can think critically about the visual, intellectual or aesthetic aspect of soil.

-My concern is neither about transforming behaviour nor about convincing. Both my primary and secondary audiences contribute to the project and I treat my audience as intelligent. Hopefully this project provides them with a window on other worlds. They do the same for me.

- I am no longer the main person responsible for the artwork.  I value inclusiveness, reciprocity and pluralism, because the outcome is more layered and richer than being the sole author. And this is reflected in the project’s title voicing the soil. The general public is used to the myth of the artist making and signing their work of art. They may struggle to believe that works of art are rarely made in a solitary garret.