Artist Peer Group

About

These events are an opportunity to hear from two artists about their practice and meet other artists working in the arts & health sector. Our peer groups provide the space for artists to share active ideas, projects and challenges, with peer support from audience participants. Each artist has approximately 45mins to share works and receive feedback and support from you — alongside designated unstructured time to meet others from a variety of backgrounds and disciplines.

This event is facilitated by artist Paloma Tendero.

Our artists this month are transdisciplinary artist, composer and vocal improviser Jaka Škapin, and photographer Karl Fletcher.

About Jaka Škapin

Jaka Škapin is a London based transdisciplinary artist, composer and vocal improviser. He is the musical director of Collective IDentity, a community inquiry centred around co-creation with dancers with Parkinson’s. As part of Sound&Music’s New Voices programme, he is currently completing a solo theatre performance featuring live vocal looping, projections, movement and words with the support of PRS Foundation’s Open Fund. 

“I don’t know a better way of authentically connecting, as well as questioning and creating new ways of being, than through the channels of body and voice. Through the practice of collaborative improvisation, we’ll engage with language and movement as catalysts of change, all while being supported by a vocal score created on the spot with the use of live looping.”

About Karl Fletcher (aka Mr Rabbit)

“At the age of 49 I enrolled into a access course at art college not knowing the exposure triangle. I learnt this in October 2019. And everything just clicked for me suddenly I could turn the images I saw in my head into pictures others could see, it was like I could suddenly communicate with others my feelings and emotions as I never been good with words due to being dyslexic. Lockdown hit and I had the time to just enjoy a camera and the opportunity it gave me to express how I see everything around me. By October 2020 I was using the camera to understand anxiety by taking invisible feelings and turning them into characters I could relate too and use to further my understanding of anxiety. My works is done from the perspective a 3 rd party so as it can be seen and understood by others that are aware of it butdon’t really understand it.”

Karl is sharing work called ‘Vilomha (against a natural order)’. This work is about the loss of his first daughter and how the emotions of hurt anger and sorrow have stayed with him, from the view of point of an expectant father. Karl says “it is a very powerful piece filled with emotion yet by creating it helped me finally deal with it, and helped cement in my mind that art is therapeutic for the mind and encourages verbalisation by others that have been through similar life events.”