About
Alongside, a programme of events is organised around sharing, supporting and highlighting the alliances, anxieties, and conflicts of working in public space.
The Proposals are composed as suggestions on paper for wild, often unthinkable, physical interventions punctuating the landscape and encourage us to look and re-look at our own shapes and paths in these spaces. As our neighbourhoods as we know them - including the area of Somers Town around Chalton Gallery, poised for redevelopment - shift and morph into something new or disappear altogether as property developers re-imagine them for us, Joyce’s Proposals are a call for resistance against this bland takeover of our public spaces and to make a claim on what is ours and what is special.
Over the past four years Joyce has developed a series of public art commissions in towns undergoing major redevelopment, including Sittingbourne, North Woolwich and Milton Keynes. Using her Proposals as starting points, she creates unexpected sculptural interventions taking over familiar spaces that surround us; the construction site, house or billboard to site momentary actions that cause the passerby to stop for a moment and look at their surroundings. For Joyce, her Proposals are an important way to think through what it means to occupy public space and and how to negotiate being invited in as an artist, and then exiting again.
The programme of events is organised as an invitation to think together about how we can support each other to make space for ourselves and others in a rapidly changing environment. And as artists commissioned to work in and with publics, what happens when we enter and leave these spheres, what is our responsibility to the space and its communities, and what is left at the end?
Exhibition dates: 15 - 30 July
Organised together with Eva Rowson
Programme of events
Space Invaders
Saturday 15 July 4-6pm, followed by drinks in the Cock Tavern
Free, all welcome
An afternoon of films selected from artists and the Cinenova archive, a non-profit organisation dedicated to distributing feminist films and video, followed by an open discussion led by Lucy Joyce and artist Rita Evans about making work in public space as an opportunity to share proposals for how we can support each other in holding space in surroundings new and familiar to us
The event is organised around an ‘Eat Parade: Cooking with the Community’ led by Rosanna Garau, local resident, cook, gardener and activist.
Standing Ground: Screening of ‘The Amazing Story of Talacre’
Organised with London Community Video Archive and Somers Town History Club
Wednesday 19 July 6.30-9pm
Free, all welcome
This 1974 documentary tells the inspiring story of how a local, self-organised group in Camden came together to campaign for years to turn a disused 2.5-acre site into a permanent community space.
The screening is followed by a discussion between Lucy Joyce and Anna Hart, founder of public projects studio AIR, about the rhythm of presence and absence in public art commissions, formed alliances with a particular site or struggle, and what is left at the end of it all.
Reading together: Support Structures
Thursday 27 July 7-9pm
Free, all welcome. Please email eva.rowson@googlemail.com to register your interest and get a copy of the selected reading
Organised with with Sophie Chapman and Kerri Jefferis
Join us for a reading and discussion of selected texts from Support Structures (authored and edited by Céline Condorelli, 2009), proposed as a beginning of forging a support group for support workers, administrators, coordinators who prop up the art (and other) worlds.
Support Structures is: A manual for what bears, sustains, props, and holds up. It is a manual for those things that encourage, give comfort, approval, and solace; that care for and provide consolation and the necessities of life.
Lucy Joyce is an artist and makes public commissions alongside exhibiting and teaching. This year she was Artist in Residence at Studio 5 Porthmeor, Tate St Ives Artist Programme and has recently exhibited in London at 53 Beck Road, ICA and Whitechapel Gallery. She is working on upcoming projects at Tate St Ives and 38b, Peckham in 2018.
Eva Rowson is an organiser, producer and curator. Her work is organised around questions of how we work together, how we host each other and how we build organisations. She has run the living room project space 38b since 2010 with Luke Drozd and is currently Programme Coordinator at The Showroom, London.
