Art Confined | ladykitt

Art Confined and Feral Futures- social making with social distance

May-Nov 2020

A socially engaged live-art / craft project conceived and facilitated by Lady Kitt

Produced by Sarah Li

Created through collaboration with co-authors:

Sofia Barton. Cat Hurst, Tee McGahey & Dylan. Kev Howard. Deborah Nash. Jan Secret. Edwin & Sarah Li. The Witches Child. Riki Tsang. Members of the DGA.

Supported through commissions from Norfolk Street Arts, Durham University and disabled artist led consortium Disconsortia

Together over the last 5 months we’ve scrummaged around in and played about with the question:

“How the hell do we “do” social practice in a socially distanced world?”

Through text, images, video and a publication (available as a free PDF download HERE) we've documented some of the stuff that’s happen so far. We also suggest and imagine things we could all do to build and nourish creative connections (or “creative intimacies”), even when we find ourselves physically apart.

For us, it’s vital to carry on finding and sharing tools and actions that tenderly incite and fiercely care for these precious and delicately unfolding points of contact.

These collaborations resulted in the creation of a series of 3D paper objects, shared via post. We all made photographs/ performances/ installations incorporating these objects, shared via digital technology. Everything we created and documented was done in isolation, at our individual homes during lockdown. After social distancing restrictions eased, a sreies of giant paper "shrines", combining the objects created through the project, were installed by Lady Kitt and Sarah Li at Star and Shadow Cinema (Newcastle, UK) and Norfolk Street Gallery (Sunderland, UK). The installations were created in accordance with social distancing measures at the time and were never open to the public. Instead they are being shared here:

Norfolk Street Arts

Disconsortia

The project was facilitated by Kitt using their “From Abstract to Object”** methodology. During this project a variety of interesting, useful, beautiful and funny stuff happened, including:

Individual images of performance/ installations
A giant collaborative sculptural installation
New working relationships/ connections and friendships
Some resources for doing social art/ participatory practice/ collaborative craftivism /art-with-people with social distance
Some ideas for using socially distanced, collaborative crafting as a catalyst for organisational policy development
Book of images and texts documenting the activity of the project and sharing some of the ideas and resources created, grown and gathered