Today I'm thinking about another connection between my current project and the bubble disturbances. Going to a food gathering for most people is an interruption in the daily more insular family eating that we do. When we take this detour from the normal routine of eating at home with our immediate family we open ourselves up to new experiences that can lead us and be a catylist for our desire for even more connection and experiences with others. It's been a few weeks since the Mexican Grill Fiesta. The guests included a few of our friends who are also new parents with small children. Since the dinner we all have included one another in our lives socially on a more regular basis: we've shared in some impromptu babysitting, had a potluck lunch, met up at a nearby playground, and got together for a picnic at an evening concert at the river  (Rhythm on the Riverfront concert series).  While before the dinner, we had “meant” to get together and do something, it was as if for all of us, getting together put it in our radar that we all wanted to continue this circle of community getting together. This interruption of our daily routines or of the ways in which we connect to one another allows us to really see if we are living the way we want to live, if we are being with others as much as we want to be. In today's world, most of us don't live with or close to our extended family and so staying close to others becomes so important.  Of course you can raise your children on your own, but when you connect to like minded parents you form the village that sustains and supports. I noticed at our dinner, without verbally acknowledging we were doing this, we took turns being the parent or two who watched the kids, allowing the other parents to sit and talk. This seemingly small gesture was so powerful. Afterwards my friend Alice remarked that it was such a rare and welcomed treat for her to have her youngest child (a 5 month old baby) passed around amongst the adults whom she all trusted that she barely held him all afternoon. This kind of all taking care of all the kids is something very special that I hadn't predicted when I began the project. Fortunately it's something that is continuing long after that first event which brought us together.

My work in London of blowing bubbles to commuters as they hurry by was a way of changing the way in which they interact with me and with each other. I realize now that the dinners are not just a way for me to connect to others as a realization of my sense of self and identity, but are becoming a way for others to connect to one another as they navigate who they are to each other and how we go forward as we continue to create our community.

As my last few blog posts illustrate, my work this year has been about exploring self and the concept of identity or more simply, my work has been identity practice. I have looked at my self, my identity and the concepts of self and identity through practice, art making, writing, reading, theory and pedagogy. I am continuing this work here through the Sunday Dinner Project which is performative, conceptual and “socially engaged art”. This term has been coined by artist educator Pablo Helguera in his recently published book Education for Socially Engaged Art. His basic definition claims that SEA is “a social interaction that proclaims itself as art (p.1)”, but he acknowledges that “as a category of practice, [it] is still a working construct (p.2)”. Otherwise known in the contemporary art world as “social practice” this new terminology honours artwork like my Sunday Dinner project that is a “critically self-reflective dialogue with an engaged community (12)”.

One criticism that I anticipate is that these dinners are not open to the public as often (but not always) works of art considered social practice or SEA are. In brief response, my work here is about both connecting to and constructing community and while the dinners are not publicly open, the blog post, art exhibit and continued research, presentations and writing is. Working with a somewhat predetermined group (that included friends and family) was a conscious decision that I made after first trying out some public art “bubble disturbances” in London.

The Sunday Dinner Project and the bubble works are similar in that each honoured what is/was important to me at the times they were created. In London I attempted to relate to the public, while back home in Beacon, NY I am reconnecting with family and friends.

The bubbles performances took place over the course of the last few months that I was living in London. At this time, I was feeling particularly disconnected to the people in this big city. The friends I had made through Goldsmiths all lived at least an hour's commute away and I would rarely see them outside of class sessions. The weather in London was a particularly grey and rainy spring. I performed these public joyful and playful disturbances of simply blowing bubbles in places where I travelled during my normal everyday commutes. First I blew them while waiting on the platform for the Overground train at my local station in Brockley. Instantly I received a great response and interrupted the normal interaction between myself and my fellow commuters. Instead of avoiding eye contact, many people smiled at me. This seemingly small engagement changed their and my experience of the commute. Smiles and laughter and even a few comments like “you've made my day” made my experience of city living so much more enjoyable. Inspired by this I blew bubbles out of my studio window where they flew out onto the busy sidewalk (pavement) and street. Finally I blew some over the escalators at London Bridge station where dozens of people came and went transferring from the Tube to the Overground train system. This work was partially inspired by the improv group Improv Everywhere, by the artist collaboration group casagrande and by the traveling “bad dancer” Matt Harding. Their work continues to inspire me as they explore universal themes of joy and play between strangers.

The third work I created about my identity stretched my artistic boundaries as I chose to work in areas I had until this work had little experience in. The piece I created began with mixed media collage but was ultimately a conceptual and experiential performative work of art. Aesthetics were in play here at the onset, but the process and overall concept was the driving force behind and within the work.

Mapping Self: Past, Present & Future is a mixed media collage map and conceptual work of art. The physical piece of work measuring approximately three by six feet is a visual representation of my sense of self in relation to my past, present and future identities. It was exhibited as part of an art show in early 2012 at Goldsmiths College in London. Following the show, the collage was burned to conceptually represent the temporality of self identity constructs honouring the idea that our sense of a past, present and future self is only true for a current moment in time and will change as often as we do.

The contour of the collage map was constructed by combining the outlines of land masses from places I'm from, have lived, and plan to live in the future including Northern Ireland, Southern Italy, New York, Massachusetts and California. The collage imagery within the map includes writing, cloth, paint, photos, copies of identification documents of my ancestors and other ephemera which represent the many facets of who I have been (and where I'm from), who I am and who I hope to be. Burning the finished piece honours that the work is about concept and process and challenges me as an artist to accept that art is worth more than its aesthetic. Through this act of art destruction, representing the temporality of this self construct, I release my attachments to stories of my past, to ideas of my present self and to the hopes of my future and open myself up to the possibilities of constructing new identities. 

This work is part of a series of works created in 2011-2012 that explore issues surrounding identity. Also in the series is the visual/textual poem “I look at You” and the “I Am / Am Not My Things Are Not Me” event which explored the destruction of my belongings by flood due to hurricane. Each work has allowed me look critically at the constructs of self I create. Here I ask:

The second work I did as a self portrait was a performative “event” entitled “I Am/Am Not My things are Not Me”. This work looked at my identity in relation to my possesions, specifically those I lost just before attending Goldsmiths...

[below is taken from my artist statement]

Hurricane Irene hit the northeast coast of the United States in the last days of August, 2011 causing widespread destruction and more than 50 deaths. The storms hit my hometown in upstate New York with torrential rain fall and mass flooding. The worst of the damage hit my parents home just four days before my departure date for London, England to study at Goldsmiths College. In order to study abroad for a year, my wife and I packed up all our belongings and stored all but the 9 bags we were taking with us in the basement of my parent's house. Overnight, the area around their house began to flood and eventually poured into the basement reaching a water height of over three feet high, causing all the items on the floor to be submerged and ruined. For the three days following the flood, my family and some friends and I pulled out the damaged items, saved what we could and documented each ruined item in a list for insurance. We calculated that we had roughly lost about 70% of all our belongings. During the process of cataloguing, I was the person who carried out the wet boxes outside so that my wife and friends could go through them and write up what couldn't be saved. Although I had seen the piles created of our damaged items, since I wasn't the one writing up the list, I never had a full detailed picture of what was damaged beyond repair. I brought a copy of the list with me to London. I hadn't read the list until my reading of it as a performance at the Autumn art exhibit.

The days before we left the United States were supposed to be days of tying up final loose ends and saying goodbye to our family. Instead they were physically and emotionally extreme in a state of crisis. There was no time to process. The performance/event was part of the processing of the loss not only of the objects, but of the identity I've tied to them. How much of a reflection of who I am is held in the things I've surrounded myself with, in the objects I've bought, in the art I've made, in the art I've been given by friends?

List Pages 5 & 6 (of 16) 

I Am/Am Not My things are Not Me
A performative event by artist Stacey Ward Kelly

I am my things

I am not my things

I am more than my things

My things are not me

By reading aloud all the items that were once a reflection of who I am but are now gone, I ask myself, I ask the viewer...