ONLINE: What is the role of the studio in a pandemic?

About

Join us for an open discussion event co-hosted with artist-educators Emily Haws and Emily Furnell expanding on their recent research into the use of artists studios. 

The event will be framed around a series of discussion points posed in advance by event attendees and gathered through ongoing research. We will explore the relevance of studios on current practices, touch upon how we use space, how we make, alternative structures, impacts of care and what a pre and post-pandemic studio might look like. This event is an open conversation, together we will talk, explore and think through what a studio means to us.

Please email your questions and thoughts in advance to amelia@eastsideprojects.org . These questions will inform the shape of the conversation.

--

Emily Haws and Emily Furnell have been researching the role of the studio by asking the question; What is a studio, anyway? They have been inviting artists, practitioners, curators, and art students to respond to and reflect upon across the past couple of months.

A studio can be a space in which work is made, produced or simply thought about. It can be a place of study, where research is collated and distributed. It can be a space to install work or document it, to perform, record, do physical exercise or meditate. It can be a place for conversations, critical thought and supportive exchanges. It can also be a space of retreat, solitude and ritual. It might describe the area of a home, a workplace, a park, a restaurant, the back of a taxi. Perhaps the studio is not a physical space, but an online community, a piece of animating software, or a hard drive. Perhaps it is a period of time, like a commute, or a lunch break or a walk...

In the current context of uncertainty, where access to artist studios, art school studios and other places of work have been limited, the project aims to open up a timely and collaborative discussion about the studio within contemporary art practice and arts education. Through collective thinking, their research seeks to challenge and expand upon the notion of the studio, generating an anthology of ideas and sharing insights and strategies for how we may think about the studio today.

--

Emily Hawes is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, based in Boscombe, Dorset. Working between moving image, sculptural assemblage and text-based work, she integrates forms of interdisciplinary collaboration, site-specific research, and collective thinking. Matters of concern include material feminisms, critical pedagogies, modes of preservation and knowledge-making. Her enquiries are best characterised by the Italian word ‘intrecciarre’; meaning to weave, plait, braid or intertwine. She currently works as a Technician Demonstrator at Arts University Bournemouth (Fine Art BA & MA) and is studying for a PGCert in Creative Education at UCA. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MFA programme in 2014 and The University of Brighton in 2012, with a BA Hons in Fine Art.

Emily Furnell grew up in Bristol, which was voted the happiest city to live in the UK in 2019 by a Gala Bingo study. She studied Fine Art at Bath School of Art and Design, and prior to this, won a rosette in primary school for ‘best smiler’ which she still cherishes to this day. Her practice plays on misinformation and an excess of arbitrary information. Through diagrams, casts, texts, objects and gifs she pits present-ness and blandness against phrases and imagery lent from popular culture to explore the strange mood of our time. Emily is the Studio-coordinator at the Slade School of Fine Art these days. She enjoys the phrase ‘very gently’.