Lady Kitt

Art Confined - social art in a time of

social distance

About Art Confined- social art in a time of social distance
'Art Confined' is a socially engaged*, live-art**, craft project conceived and facilitated in UK lockdown 2020 by Lady Kitt, created alongside co-authors Sofia Barton, Sarah Li, Adam Carruthers, Kev Howard, Finn Ratford, Edwin Li and members of the DGA***. 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?”

“Initially presenting a challenge to more regular methods of socially collaborative making, [in Art Confined] the physical distance between [participants]… becomes the very inspiration and catalyst for their creativity. It has enabled new explorations of slowness ,for example, the use of ‘snail mail’ post, and contemplation, focusing on the hand-made as a method of communication and demonstrating care."
Alix Collingwood-Swinburn, Curator, Contemporary Art, Durham University, 2020

Exhibition Description
Lady Kitt's exhibits include beautiful portrait photographs from the process with image descriptions. There is an audio described video of an installation at Star and Shadow Cinema which was created in accordance with social distancing measures at the time and was never open to the public. There are images of the publication, Art Confined, documenting the research. The book is available below three formats:

1. An ‘issuu’ copy of the book you can flick through here on the website
2. A downloadable text only transcript (including image descriptions)
3. A downloadable PDF of the publication (as it appears in print) which you can save or print off.

Photographs from the process - people wearing papercraft

Head and torso colour portrait. Interior- dark. Finn, an 8-year-old, white human with dark blond hair looks up, mildly bored, cheeks puffed out, towards the camera. She is wearing a necklace of large red and green 3D paper strawberries. The background is very dark, the image is lit from above

head and shoulders colour portraits. Interior- dark. A South Asian woman in her late twenties with black hair wears a bright red top and lipstick to match. She is looking down, her eyes nearly closed. She wears three red 3D paper chilies in her hair.

Couple smiling with eyes closed, noses almost touching. Non-binary white human wears peach headdress on the left. British-Chinese man wearing the star fruit headdress to the right. The background is royal blue. Only their heads and bare shoulders are in the portrait.

A little more info

The “Art Confined” project took the form of a series of creative interactions between individuals in the group, conducted via post and digital technology. Kitt made wearable, 3D, paper objects for all co-authors, based on things which were important to them during lockdown. These were posted to each person / household and then used to create a performance / installation in their own homes. These performances / installations were documented through photography, by co-authors.  

The exhibition shares images from, and text about, these creative interactions, or “creative intimacies”, as we call them in the project. It also shows documentation of an installation that was created (after social distancing restrictions were eased) by combining the paper objects made by Kitt for the project. Kitt describes the installation as “A collaborative shrine to “us-ness”; celebrating our desire to make things different & better. Our collective ability to elicit, exchange, respond, and support, despite (perhaps especially), when finding ourselves physically apart”

This installation was built by Lady Kitt and Sarah Li at Star and Shadow Cinema (Newcastle, UK). The installation was created in accordance with social distancing measures at the time and was never open to the public. Instead it is being shared here in the form of a short audio described film and a book, both commissioned by Disconsortia. 
 

Lady Kitt and Sara Li

Art Confined Video Installation

Press play on the Art Confined Installation Video with subtitles and audio description

Art Confined - The Publication
There are two images, an issuu copy of the book which you can flick through, and a text only transcript of the book.

Photo Credit: Sarah Li. Image Description - soft cover book, closed. The book is landscape, 6 by 10 inches and around 0.5 inch thick with glossy pages. The cover shows multiple repeating images from the Art Confined project. Each image is a photographic colour portrait depicting one or two subjects. The subjects are various ages and ethnicities, each wearing a 3D paper ornament, for example a crown made of star fruit or an arm-guard made of chili peppers. Along the spine, from top to bottom, in bright pink capital letters reads the title of the book "Art Confined". The book is closed, resting on a red background.

Photo Credit: Sarah Li. Soft cover book, held open at the mid point by two hands. The book is landscape, 6 by 10 inches and around 0.5 inch thick, with glossy pages. The left hand page shows two colour, head and shoulders portraits of Sofia , a South Asian woman in her late twenties with black hair. She wears a bright red top and lipstick to match. She is looking down, her eyes nearly closed. She wears three red, 3D paper sculptures of chilies in her hair. The right hand page is white with the name "Sofia Barton" written in the middle of the page in red. The book is resting on a red background.

Button below this line to download a text only version of the Art Confined book with image descriptions

download TEXT ONLY VERSION OF THE BOOK WITH IMAGE DESCRIPTIONS

Button below this line to download a PDF version of the Art Confined book as it appears in print

download pdf version of the book through this link

Click in the centre of the image below for access to a full screen version of the Art Confined issuu flick book

So “how the hell ARE we doing social practice with social distance?!”

The “Art Confined” publication documents some of the stuff that’s happened during the project so far. It also suggests and imagines things we could all do to build and nourish creative intimacies, even when we find ourselves physically apart: tools and actions that tenderly incite and fiercely care for these precious and delicately unfolding points of contact. Stuff like:

• Grow projects/ interactions on foundations of safety and care. Building opportunities for support into the project. Ask how everyone is, listen and have strategies of offering support if needed (to everyone one involved, including facilitators)
• Think of projects as a series of exchanges, not a series of outcomes. Consider ways of sharing the exchanges (making maps of new connections forged during a project, collating quotes from everyone involved, audio recording conversations)
• Consider the “exchange rate(s)” you are working with / to. What is everyone giving to the project (time, creativity, technical skill, emotional labor, physical resources), what will they get out of it and how do these exchanges happen? Being flexible and transparent about this worked well in our Art Confined project.

 
Internet access/phone line has been vital and some technical know-how is useful. There are huge problems with a lack of access to both of these, endemic and structural barriers exist and we are working on addressing these. For those of us fortunate enough to have access and very basic skills there are huge possibilities for making art (and social change) together, connecting through communication technologies.

Over the last 5 months some of the most profound, most emotionally, ideologically, creatively intimate experiences we have had, happened with poor internet connection, fuzzy visuals, glitchy audio.

We’ve found the skills most useful for creating points of contact are the same with distance as they are right up close:
Focus, humour, empathy, curiosity, vulnerability.

Pockets of time, built into activity. Pauses for thinking and processing. Listening to understand, not just to immediately respond.
These are the things that have supported us to make alongside one another, share ideas, create support. Allowing us, even in quiet confinement, to collectively dream of and create wild art and change.
 
“…it [the project] really proved that we could forge connections with each other during lockdown…it felt very possible to have powerful connections with each other, I guess despite lockdown.”
Art Confined Co-author, 2020
 
Mutually growing and sharing knowledge is really, really important to this way of working. If you want to chat about something relating to creating social art with social distance, point to new research, share something that’s happened to you / you’ve made happen please contact email: lady_kitt@lladykitt.com.

The wider “Art Confined” project is funded by Arts Council England through an Emergency Response grant and supported through commissions from Durham University and Norfolk Street Arts. https://www.norfolkstreetarts.com/



*   “art-with-people”, this approach to being creative gets called a variety of things: social practice, participatory art, community art.       It typically includes people connecting with one another through and for creativity and social change. (Definition by Lady Kitt)
**  performances or events undertaken or staged by an artist or a group of artists as a work of art (Definition from Tate.org                website)
*** “Drag King, Gender Fuck and Alternative Drag” Collective. A North East based queer performance  collective                      
      https://www.facebook.com/DGACollective/  

About Lady Kitt
Lady Kitt is a socially engaged maker, researcher & drag king. Their work is driven by insatiable curiosity to explore, share and (gently) insight the social functions of creative stuff. They use paper crafting & performance to create objects, interactions, adventures. Things like: super-sized origami boat races, policy changes & an international feminist art magazine for and by children.   
 
Kitt is Newcastle Lead for Social Art Network (UK)& member of global art activism movement Nasty Women (NW), co-convening the NW International Conference in 2017. Their work’s been selected for inclusion in The Institute for Art and Innovation (Germany), “Social Art Award 2019”. Kitt has recently shown work at Atlanta Contemporary (USA), Saatchi Gallery London (UK) and is currently Artist in Residence at Durham University (UK). 

https://www.lladykitt.com

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