Lauren Craig: Part 1 Desire Lines - Reading for Pleasure and Writing for Pain

Artist Lauren Craig leads this online restorative writing circle that explores where the desire lines of our practices meet. Taking a reparative approach, we will create a shared gaze for the archives our bodies hold. What are our stories? What are their formations? How do we listen and share? An invitation, a call to action, to gather in a way where rendering our collective experience creates ethical, cultural memory. The circle offers 'microacts’ artworks such as collages and slide walks contributed by curator Althea Greenan, who opens the Women's Art Library (WAL) collection to create writing provocations.

A space to remember and make-believe, make sense of things, not understand, and not be understood. Demarcating the space, you are drawn to being within.

Expression of Interest

Spaces for this online workshop will be limited to maintain a mood of intimacy and exchange. If you would like to take part, please send a short Expression of Interest by Thursday 8th July to feministduration@gmail.com. We will let you know by 15th July if you have been selected, and provide further details of the session. 

Lauren Craig is a London-based cultural futurist. Her practice as an artist, curator, full-spectrum doula and celebrant is untethered, sprawling and liberatory. Carefully marrying concept with materiality, she moves slowly between performance, installation, experimental art writing, exhibition making, moving image, research and photography. Her auto-ethnographic works are meditations on celebration, commemoration and tribute. Through archival research and reactivation, she centres on lived experience while striking through and reframing past and present dominant narratives. She offers her creativity as calls to action to create ethical, cultural memory and collective intelligence. Her work is an invitation to convene and proposition our futurities.

Craig is a member of the social history and curatorial collective Rita Keegan Archive Project (RKAP); its forthcoming exhibition, Between There and Here, opens at South London Gallery in September 2021. Her current project Rendering Experience offers a re-appraisal of Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990), edited by Maud Sulter. Grounded in the present, the research questions the text’s visibility, urgency and art-historical impact on curatorial futurities. Craig’s previous encounters with Passion include RKAP at South London Gallery (2020) and Show and Tell, The Women’s Art Library (2015). Her forthcoming partnerships, publications and events include collaborations with Feminist Review, Photofusion, Eastside Projects, The Women’s Art Library and Arts Catalyst.

Dr. Althea Greenan is Special Collections Curator at the Women's Art Library (WAL) at Goldsmiths, University of London, an artist-initiated project historically rooted in gender politics and the subsequent emergence of a radicalised women's art practice and feminist art criticism. She is author of the 2018 PhD Feminist Net-work : digitization and performances of the Women's Art Library slide collection.

Images:

Lauren Craig ‘After All That: Acts of Giving up Everyday Beauty,’ 2015-2020

Lauren Craig presenting material from X Marks the Spot, Women’s Art Library, London, 2020. Photograph by Helena Reckitt

This event is part of Feminist Duration, generously supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership.