Garden Display: It Matters What Happens Next - Camden Art Centre

To support this recently completed project by students of the RCA, there is a Garden Display available to view at Camden Art Centre.

It Matters What Happens Next is a programme of newly commissioned artworks and events that consider the origins of care and the transition between states of ‘caring’ to being ‘cared for’.

The project brings together individuals, institutions, and the public, intertwining our collective notions of care and looking toward how we maintain ongoing acts of reciprocal care into the future. To ask how do we understand welfare, labour, and communities through the lens of care? And what does it mean to give as well as receive care?

Friday 13 May Saturday 14 May The Organisers

Friday 13 May, 7pm – 9.30pm Talkaoke and the Circle of Care

The People Speak – Talkaoke
7 – 8.15pm
The People Speak will host a roundtable conversation entitled Talkaoke, in the garden led by collective, The People Speak. The pop-up talk show will invite audiences to participate in a collective discussion to explore what everyday acts of care look like today.

Circle of Care – Youngsook Choi and Eva Freeman
8.45 – 9.15pm
Following the conversation, artists Youngsook Choi and Eva Freeman will present Circle of Care. A project centred around knowledge exchange, the sharing of memories and finding intergenerational connections that highlight the importance of everyday care in our contemporary world.

Circle of Care stems from a series of workshops led by Choi and Freeman with residents from Spring Grove Care Home, neighbouring Camden Art Centre, to explore themes of vulnerability, strength, resilience and institutional care through a series of creative workshops. The resulting conversations, physical objects and images form part of a live, multimedia performance and temporary installation presented in Camden Art Centre’s garden, which adjoins the care home.

Saturday 14 May, 12.00-4.00pm It Matters What Happens Next: Garden Workshop with Lucy Steggals

Visitors are invited to drop into an informal afternoon workshop with artist Lucy Steggals in the garden of Camden Art Centre. Participants are encouraged to make and touch, considering care through the tactility of textile-based materials, to create tender moments for the body and explore our intimate relations with objects, places and people.

No previous art-making experience is necessary and all materials are provided.

It Matters What Happens Next highlights the necessity for extending a caring hand toward our local communities that exist just beyond the garden wall. It accompanies the solo exhibition Thank You Darling by Lily van der Stokker, at Camden Art Centre, from 29 April to 18 September.

It Matters What Happens Next is curated by students from the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme, Pierce Eldridge, Holly Pines, Yuwei Ren, Yangjie Zhang, Ruidi Sun, Chuhan Luo, and Mohan Shao as part of the Graduate Projects 2022, Royal College of Art in partnership with Camden Art Centre, and the Spring Grove Care Home.

The Organisers

Youngsook Choi is a London-based artist and researcher. She often develops narratives of non-fictional fantasy – a mixture of research evidence, folk tales, mythologies and performative instructions for audience engagement. Since 2019, Youngsook Choi has developed a series of performances and participatory installations that explore the idea of political spirituality, experimenting with intimate aesthetics of solidarity actions and collective healing.
www.youngsookchoi.com/

Eva Freeman is a London-based artist and designer who loves working with people, colour and materials. Her practice explores ways to support and nourish meaningful, sustainable relationships through material interactions. Collaboration, community and creativity are at the core of all Eva’s work, which currently includes El Warcha London, Play Build Play CIC and her collaborative projects with Youngsook Choi.
www.iameva.co.uk/

The People Speak have been facilitating important conversations in fun and creative ways for 25 years, hosting dialogues from galleries to street corners, schools, shopping malls and everywhere in between.
www.thepeoplespeak.org.uk/

Lucy Steggals is a visual artist and trainee art psychotherapist based in London. Her practice folds around co-creating human spaces where authentic conversations and intimate dialogues can take place. Through a shared playful, material, embodied process woven in the language of textiles. Currently she is working on a series of cloth-based relational sculptures and environments which explore the shifting role of fabric from second skin and form of shelter to in our more stable habitats becoming a vital element of change and flow, a point of connection and warmth.
www.lucysteggals.co.uk/