Nearly ready to hand in my journal for the next MA module so up early with too many thoughts and ideas rattling around my poor old brain.

I have promised myself to post here weekly so here’s my effort for April Fool’s Day. The image is from an Art of Hosting gathering I helped to organise in December last year.  It’s here to illustrate another element of the art I want to do- broadly referred to as social practice.  It seems to mix more or less harmoniously with political or social ‘activism’ (Suzanne Lacy, Nato Thompson, Rick Lowe), and harks me back both to my working life and my own activism.

So, I’m trying to introduce ‘artistic intention’ in a piece of local activism here in Leeds.  I’m part of a group of women who are ‘hosting’ a conversation event in May with Bea Campbell coming to open things up by discussing her new book,   ‘End of Equality’.  Our aims are:

• To respond to Bea’s book, and to find out what we all think is going on in these times
• To chuck a pebble in the pond- get women together to talk and see what happens next- we hope more things will happen, and will want to stay involved
• To recognise and support the new wave of women’s activism
• There’s an old saying that ‘The world will change when the women talk’. We’ll see.

We’re establishing a social media presence and getting on with all the usual planning and organising.  And I’m trying to add the extra element of recording and orchestrating which can make it into ‘art’, without pushing my own agenda.  This takes a lot of thinking about.

So far I have asked women I know to film and photograph the event (permissions will be agreed).  We aim to gather words and thoughts in a range of ways.  We want to make space for more things to happen as a result of the event.  I plan to make books from the material gathered (hand-made, photo-books…).

I want to develop this practice and my confidence in it so as to include this element in my ‘toolkit’ for the main exploration, of people and place and connectedness.  Perhaps my continued reading of Doreen Massey will guide me towards integrating this more clearly.