Encounters Along The Line Art Trail W/ Sarah Carrington, Visual Arts Curator

You're bound to get an art education with our guest, curator Sarah Carrington! Our art talk with her explores her work as director of the Public Art Trail in East London The Line, as well as the joys of producing visual arts projects and supporting artistic commissions for an urban space full of wildlife and industrial areas, away from the capital's most overcrowded areas.

Art Insider is an art discussion segment with fascinating visual arts thinkers and curators who lift the veil on their corner of the field (hosted by Joana P. R. Neves).

• ​When is an art trail more than a walk from sculpture to sculpture?
• ​And how does a visual arts curator work with artists for a context such as... a city?

Hosted by Joana P. R. Neves.

Guest: Sarah Carrington, Director of The Line

https://the-line.org/

Buy The Line’s fabulous book here: https://buy.stripe.com/dRmdRacbw7Wn3H7gV0c3m0g

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https://the-line.org/support-us-2/

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Host & Founder

Exhibitionistas is hosted by Joana P. R. Neves, a seasoned curator and writer with over 20 years of experience in the contemporary visual art field. She loves demystifying contemporary art by blending art history, theory, and personal reflections to reveal how art can uncover views on today's hottest topics as much as on everlasting existential questions.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We run wellbeing walks, which you can be referred to by your local GP. People tell us that they go to the doctor less and so come on our well-being walks because of the fact that they feel more socially connected, they've built confidence.

SPEAKER_03 0:11

So, how does an art rail affect the perception of your surroundings? We saw these seashells broken on the puff, and I don't think we would have noticed them if it wasn't the line, so we if we weren't doing this sort of art hike. And there were so many that we presumed that birds brought seashells from the water and just broke them there to eat them. Hello and welcome to Exhibition Nistas. Welcome to another episode of the segment Art Insider. This episode has a little bit of a background story. It turns out that during this Christmas break, my family and I we went on an art hike. We visited The Line, which is a public art trail in East London. It goes or it cuts across the city from Stratford to Greenwich. It is much more than just a walk from sculpture to sculpture. You get lost in industrial spaces, crossing uh through very old buildings, and you also visit a completely new part of the city, specifically Stratford. There's new buildings over there, there's a whole new world that you wouldn't visit if you hadn't decided to do an art hike. So today I am welcoming the recently appointed director of this project, Sarah Carrington. And as usual, I ask her how she encountered art, but more specifically, I was really interested in knowing the specificities of this project, which is to take art beyond the museum walls to unusual spaces where people literally run into sculpture, installations, perhaps even listening to a the line audio experience. This is art in unusual places, unexpected encounters along an art trail. Exhibitionisters is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevis, because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life. Hello and welcome to Exhibitionists to another Art Insider episode. Today my guest is Sarah Carrington, Director of The Line. Sarah, thank you so much for joining us here at Exhibitionisters in your very, very busy schedule.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

SPEAKER_03 2:58

It's been a long time coming. I've I've been meaning to reach out for a long time because I'm really curious about this project. I'm not sure many people beyond London know it, apart from the answers that maybe you commissioned a few works from. But first, I would love to, you know, know a bit more about you and about maybe your first relation with contemporary arts or art in general. When did you encounter it?

SPEAKER_00 3:26

So I was lucky enough to have quite a, I guess, creative family. Um, my mum's very artistic, and um my dad was quite involved in supporting different arts organizations, they're very musical, so it was just second nature to them that we would go and do things at the weekends. One that I always seem to refer to, but it really stands out in my mind, is a visit to the Burrell collection in Glasgow. And I think I was probably nine, eight or nine, and um I remember this display of lace, and they talked about the makers who made the lace, and the lace was displayed so beautifully, and you could see this incredible intricacy to the work. And they talked about the women who worked on the lace, and that over time many of them would become blind, and the process of that and the labour that went into the making of this exquisite object, which was something that was then given to somebody else to wear and enjoy. And I just remember the way they presented it was so moving. I think I actually did cry. I just you know, but I think it really showed me the power of objects and making and um artistry and the stories that are embedded within them. And I remember making my parents buy me a poster, oh, it sounds very pompous, but um, of the lace, so I had it in my room and I always looked at it, and I think, yeah, that was a real moment. I think also just thinking about that, the interpretation, the way that it was presented. So I think that was building that connection around curating and how how that's managed and the narrative that we uh are given by an institution around objects was very exciting. I think.

SPEAKER_03 4:51

But in terms of contemporary art, do you have a memory of the exhibition that kind of led you to be more in tune with what is the art that is being made today?

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Um that I feel like is harder. Um I mean, it's a bit of a cliche, but I remember going to Sarchi's gallery in Boundary Road all those years ago, and um probably when I was at six form, maybe, uh, and just thinking, oh my goodness, you know, and probably actually seeing Richard Wilson's um oil installate, you know, and just thinking how extra- I mean, actually getting goosebumps, which is really weird, but just thinking this architecturally the space was so different to anything I'd seen before, and it felt very urgent, and sort of um the scale of the works was so extraordinary, and that moment of the 90s and that kind of feeling of something contemporary art being something that people wanted to connect with and that was provoking people to think in very different ways, I think was probably quite formative. Um, even though I'm not, you know, I think there's definitely works within that moment that I don't necessarily relate to as such, but I think probably that that that space and that moment in time was probably quite a big turning point for me.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

But you know, you're not the only person, because Ben Luke also talked about uh Saatchi Gallery as a very specific space, and I'm really fascinated by the 90s, and we had a chat about that because the 90s was such an important time. It was not about loving the work, but it was also the fact that me as an outsider, as someone who was probably you know between Lisbon and Paris at the time, and learning about this later in curatorial studies, I'm fascinating by the 90s, fascinated by the 90s in uh the UK in general, because it was a moment where it touched the mainstream, didn't it?

SPEAKER_00 6:46

Definitely. Yeah, and it was like a fusion of art and fashion and music. And you know, I look back now, and I got you know, my I've got teenagers, teenage children, and they're obsessed with the 90s, and you sort of think, I was so lucky. It was it was an amazing time to be in London and to be studying, and yeah, that culturally m magazines, writing, and no internet really. You had to go to the places. You had to be there and you had to write everything down and read the articles, and reviews were so important, and you know, it was yeah, it I'm not saying that what we've got now is terribly bad. I just still feel like that was it was to come of age in that context was pretty special, I think.

SPEAKER_03 7:23

Yeah, yes, absolutely. And um, I'm also curious to knowing what other kind of art or what other practice has an impact on your work with contemporary art. Is there any connectivity with other areas of creativity for you?

SPEAKER_00 7:40

You did start with lace. Yeah, I mean I think heritage objects and historic and kind of decorative arts or everyday um objects in that sense, the kind of heritage and storytelling within those is probably something I'm always fascinated by, are things like folk art, and um that's something that's always been interesting to me. An artist that kind of connects with those trajectories, I think, is really exciting. I think fashion is always an inspiration, and I was lucky enough to work with Roxander on a collaboration with Rana Begum, and I think definitely growing up, like just mag I was obsessed with magazines and fashion and the artistry and Alexander McQueen, you know, these kind of people that were really the sort of performative elements of fashion, um, and then thinking about how fashion draws on historical references all the time and those interplays, I think it's probably been a big in in a way, probably more than I realize in some ways.

SPEAKER_03 8:33

What do you mean by performative aspects of fashion?

SPEAKER_00 8:36

So I guess in fashion shows, in the way that shows are um Catwalk, you know, the way that people particularly, I guess, someone like McQueen used music and light and drama, uh, you know, or John Galliano, these kind of again, I've got to everything seems very 90s, but those those are very um yeah, extraordinary kind of platforms to experiment and explore different cultural references.

SPEAKER_03 9:01

When you think about it, it's true that I I'd never thought about the catwalk as a sort of exhibition space, as a sort of performative space, which is now that you say it, the 90s were absolutely about that.

SPEAKER_00 9:17

Going back to the lace reference as well, probably, but craft I think has always been something I've been um in terms of the link between art and craft and thinking about ceramics and these kind of more everyday materials, um, and how those have kind of entered into contemporary art and the flow between them, and that I've always found that quite fascinating, and that they were historically often considered quite separated, and um, and then people like William Morris in the way in which he celebrated the potential of our of artistry and everything that's around us, and I yeah, I kind of hold on to a lot of those ideas, I think.

SPEAKER_03 9:51

In your career, you've um you've done very different things. So you've done curating, but you've done also managing, you commission artwork, but you've also um organized boards and um worked on funding, you worked in Australia, you worked in the US, and each time with kind of like grassroots or at least um burgeoning um endeavours, let's say. So, how would you define your profile and how and can you also from our listeners, because I I do realize that people don't quite know what a curator does, can you tell us a little bit about how that's also incorporated in the work of a curator sometimes, at least in your case?

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Gosh. Um I mean, in terms of defining my own profile, as I mean, that's quite difficult. Um I mean, I guess just going back to basics, I was always really fascinated with how art connects with everyday life and where art can appear in ways that people weren't necessarily expecting. Um, so for instance, I commissioned art in a hospital for five years and worked with, you know, um project managers and clinicians and people who would very rarely be talking about art and creativity as part of their everyday.

SPEAKER_03 11:09

Okay, can you tell us a little bit more about that hospital? Because it's a very specific time and a very specific area of London.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, so I was um commissions manager at Vital Arts, and they are the Arts Charity for Barth's Health, um, NHS Trust, which is the Royal London Hospital and Barthes in the city, um, as well as a number of other hospitals now, Newham Hospital as well, and Whittscross. Um, and yeah, it was so that kind of gave me an opportunity to work in very much in within East London community, but also with the East London artists. And the hospital were often quite keen that we were always working with artists that were local, and that meant we could call on all sorts of extraordinary artists that happened to live in Spittlefields or Shoreditch or and a lot of them had a direct link to the hospital. So um, you know, our budgets weren't huge, but artists are often incredibly generous because they felt very passionate about the role that art can play. I think that was sort of um, you know, 20 um 200 uh seven to 2013, probably I was there, and I think now there's a much, much richer understanding about the potential of art in health. And I feel like we were doing an awful lot at that time, and now there's much more research that backs it all up. I mean, it was beginning then, but it's it's it's interesting to see now, it's almost a given that hospitals should have art within the buildings. But at the time it was relative, we had to keep kind of reminding people in a hospital, for instance, it's you know, it's got to function as a building that's doing all sorts of other things during that time. It's also in many ways a bit like installing art outside because people behave in a hospital and it's yes, particularly in Whitechapel, people behaved in quite surprising ways. So we had to have everything very, very robust and you know, but also bringing joy and bringing surprise and giving artists an opportunity to do something extraordinary for them. So you're having to balance all of those different things. And actually, for me, I'm always like, what do you want to do as an artist? I want to start from there and push it as far as we can. But I've also got to be very mindful of clinical demands for that space, what patients uh need to feel like in there and what we can do to support that. Um, how the space needs to be cleaned, security, like really boring practical things, power, how you access power, if they want to work with neon, what are the light levels, you know, all so and I find that, you know, it's incredibly challenging, but it's also so fascinating. And every single commission is completely different.

SPEAKER_03 13:27

I'm really interested in knowing a bit more about the difference between curating or commissioning an artwork for a space where people are not expecting an artwork, which is what defines, I guess, um, contemporary art outside of the gallery and the museum. Um are the parameters different? And also, do you have a sense of the reaction of the public as well, of the people who are patients slash spectators suddenly?

SPEAKER_00 13:56

We did things with sound, we worked with extra nature recordist Chris Watson and installed his nature recordings alongside Bob and Roberta Smith's paintings of national animals to celebrate um, you know, global heritage, which is again another characteristic of East London, people from all over the world live there. And um yeah, and then you kind of would get feedback from parents saying, Oh my gosh, my daughter saw that on the way to surgery, and it lifted her spirits, or it made her think about her relatives elsewhere, or you just like little anecdotes like that. And um, that's the kind of thing that's quite hard to sort of track in data, but it's it's very powerful to know that, and for the artists to know that that work has had a um, because a lot of the time artists don't have that feeling that their work has a kind of specific connection um in a particular moment for somebody's life, and that's what art in hospitals can do. And people like hospital rooms are doing that in an extraordinary way now as well, as well as vital arts are still doing amazing things as well.

SPEAKER_03 14:50

So that leads us to the line, because the line is a very, very special project. You've just been nominated director uh a few months ago, I believe. Um Megan Piper was one of the initiators of the project. And the line is basically, well, we could call it public art, but it's a bit more than that, because there's a real um there's a real sense of wanting to be intentional about it and also to create a path in a very specific area of London. So, can you tell us a little bit very quickly about the history and why it came about, but more specifically what it is and how you can experience it?

SPEAKER_00 15:31

So the line is a public art trail which runs from Greenwich in the south up to Stratford, and it's almost eight kilometres long, and it follows the waterways of East London, and it broadly follows the line of the Greenwich Meridian as well. Um, and it was set up in 2015 by Megan Piper and Clive Dutton. And Clive was um head of inward investment and head of regeneration at Newham and was part of the Olympic Games um in Stratford. And Megan was um an art, a gallerist and art dealer, and had also worked at Momart, so she was very aware of the artworks that were in storage, um not being seen by the public. And together they kind of they were from very different backgrounds, but they had this incredible creative chemistry, and they came up with the idea to bring artworks along the route of the line and to draw audiences to really connect people to place. Um, and initially it was a loans programme, so there was a call out, they worked with a kind of a selection panel initially, and there was a call out to gallerists and artists to suggest works, and there was a the first series of works with 10 artworks on loan in 2015, and there was a huge fundraising campaign that went on behind the scenes to get the project up and running. Um and so uh it included works by like Damien Hurst, Martin Creed, Edward Parlozzi. Um, there was also dialogue with the GLA, so a series of commissioned works that were at the Greenwich Peninsula that had been installed for the millennium were also brought onto the line. So it kind of became almost like a joining the dots of work of public art. So I joined in 2019 and we built a new fundraising and sort of um engagement strategy around because I could just see how much extraordinary potential there was that hadn't quite been tapped because of. I mean, Clive actually sadly passed away two weeks after the line opened, and so Megan was left to kind of figure out how on earth to keep moving forward. So in many ways it was sort of fundraising to stay still for a number of years, understandably. Um, and I think I was able to bring my knowledge of kind of health and well-being and the benefits of that of art for health and well-being, as well as experience of working at Future City, working with developers and thinking about yeah, how much I knew people wanted art within new developments and could see how much East London was growing along that stretch, and the line is like this perfect opportunity to kind of bring all of those things together and also really think about how local people could use the line more. And then COVID happened, and we found that people were just connecting with the line in a completely new way because we were the only museum open in London, and people were finding they wanted to be by the water, and then they discovered these artworks, and um, you know, they wanted to use it for running or for their daily exercise, and so it took on this whole new significance for people, which we could never have planned for, and actually it became an extraordinarily busy moment for us because we launched a new app with Bloomberg Connects. We were like one of the, I think we're in the first seven organizations on Bloomberg Connects. We launched a new website.

SPEAKER_03 18:26

How does it work? So Bloomberg Connects approach so through Bloomberg Connects, it provides um audio aids to experience how how does it work?

SPEAKER_00 18:37

So, you know, for I guess for us it was perfect because we couldn't have an audio guide, there's no way we could give people devices to carry along the line. So it just meant on your phone you have an app and you can connect with um artists' audio. We had a we developed a meditation so people could do guided meditation along the route. We have got an audio guide from Bill Nyhe talking about the architecture and the heritage. Um, so it kind of was this new layer of of a way to experience the line whilst you're walking, but also for people around the world, if they want to learn about the line, it's all there as a kind of audio experience. So that was a really big moment for us. And then we also started commissioning in 2019, which is something that I bought from previous roles because it would it had remained alone primarily. Um, and we commissioned Larry Achinpong um again, all through COVID. He developed this extraordinary audio commission in collaboration with the Museum of London, um, which you listen to as you cross the cable car uh on the line.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

I've created uh a new audio work titled Sanko Time for the Line, which really considers the history and the relationship between the Royal Dock and Greenwich in London and the connecting Meridian line and its relationship with Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Between the water and the earth, skin and bones, death and rebirth. These and earth histories are the lines that connect us.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Sangho time is combining two words, uh, of course, time, and then the word Sangho, which is an I can phrase meaning uh to go back and get it, particularly thinking about going back and retrieving something that is lost at a certain point in time that could be in relation to one's own identity or knowledge, especially. And so um revisit certain points that have happened within memory in order to think about what's happening within the present.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

These royal docks were previously celebrated a global center for innovation and industry. But for many, they still represent the sting of colonialism.

SPEAKER_02 20:58

The connecting thread amongst all of this is water itself. And so spending a lot of time recording water and even thinking about the relationship of travelling across water has been quite a big deal. That connecting point in the line also reveals itself to histories that perhaps are not really spoken as much about.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

I mean, what a lot of people must understand in the British colonialists. Um black. We commissioned um uh Rana Begum to create a new sculpture, which again we had to do during COVID, and then it was installed with a we did a performance with English National Ballet and a collaboration with Roxander, which it felt like it was just after one of the last lockdowns, and it was this amazing sunny day, and it just really felt like this kind of new beginning and point of connection, and that was very special and actually really exciting to see the connection between performance and sculpture. That was the first time we done that on the line.

SPEAKER_03 21:58

Now, now there were post. COVID. Is this something that you also brought into this post-COVID time, which is to devise activities around the sculptures? Because that how many sculptures are there throughout these eight kilometers?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Yeah, so we have about 24 its different works at the moment along the route. And there's a kind of plan to get to 30 by 2030. And we have, yeah, we've initiated other performative moments. It's a really brilliant way to bring people together to create a kind of connection collectively. So obviously you can walk the line at any time. It's open all to all day, every day, um, all through the year. But something about performance actually creates that momentum. And it's so we did disco sailing in 2024 with Rashid Aren, which was a water-based performance where you you wear a sense you're going to wear a top that makes you become a human sail and then you float on a disc. So it's it's not disco, it's actually the disc is the disc, you're sailing, you're sailing on the disc. And um, Rashid turned 90 this year, last year, 2025, and it was the first time he'd ever seen the work performed. Um so that was a very special moment. And again, this yeah, people experiencing their body in space kind of becoming sculptural as a moment, it's very, very exciting and something we'd love to do again on the line. Because obviously, it's also that more immediate, you know, commissioning sculptures takes a really, really long time. Uh, and that performance, I'm not saying performance is straightforward, discussing was not straightforward at all.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

I can imagine the production behind, because that's also your profile is also um being able to understand the way things are made, what is needed for the production of an artwork or a piece or an activator or you know, a performative act, and then kind of making it happen. So tell me a little bit about the pro how long does it take, for example, to organize that particular performance that you just mentioned?

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Roughly two years. And within that time, we had to fundraise, we had to secure permissions, we had to, we explored quite a few different places on the line. Each time you're exploring a location, you have to do incredible amounts of research and get people on board, and then sometimes it doesn't work in that site, so you have to rethink. So you have to kind of be a allow your mind to not be too fixed on the outcome, otherwise you'd be incredibly frustrated. And then, you know, we had planned to do two performances of disco sailing, and the second one would have to be cancelled very last minute because there was very heavy rain and there was a sewage release into the into the river in the Olympic park, and it was deemed unsafe. Um, and so that you know, those sorts of things that might come up when you're working in the public realm, you are at the mercy of partners, landowners, weather. There's so many different factors, birds, you know, there's just like so many different things that can happen. Um obviously it was really sad to cancel, but actually, weirdly, we got loads of publicity because people were quite it sort of highlighted the issue with water management in this country. And um, yeah, so that was a weird, yeah. We could never have anticipated that with the best planning in the world. So um, but yeah, I think what I just I just see it as each project, there's just so much to learn, and you have to find out who you need to get, who you need in the mix, whose expertise you need, and bringing people on that journey with you, and you have to provide a lot of reassurance to different partners because every time you do something, it's completely new. You could never say to somebody, oh, the when when we did the sculpture before with this material, or when we previously had people floating on the river wearing these things, this is what happened. We don't, you know, we we so you have to test everything and build confidence, but you also have to allow people to you have to bring people on that journey to have a kind of leap of faith, which um they then have this extraordinary experience. That's what I love is that people like in the hospital, people would be like, I never thought we'd be able to do this, and we've made this thing happen, and people now have a completely different environment. And that's um, yeah, I'm not saying it's kind of life-changing, but I think it is it's transformative.

SPEAKER_03 26:06

Tell me a little bit about funding, because you've all throughout your career you've worked on funding. And I think this is sort of the nasty words of contemporary art in the sense that it is difficult, it is necessary, it is very different from context to context. You know, if you're at the Tate, obviously you have so many arguments for funding, but then if you are doing something completely different, um, public, so you know, there for everyone, where there's it's it's much harder to, as you were explaining before, to get feedback from the impacts in in regards to the impact of of what you do, because people are just passing and they may post something on Instagram, but they may not tag you. So it is a difficult thing to evaluate. So could you very quickly tell me about your different experiences with funding? You can vent a little bit, you're allowed to, because I think it's the most frustrating thing, funding, but also the most rewarding thing when it actually goes well.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Yeah, I think I mean I kind of work on the principle that um kind of money and support follows good ideas, and you know, I guess a bit like bringing people on the journey, you I think a lot of people are wanting to be inspired and feel connected. And yes, it's about impact, but it's also about um goodwill and people being excited about the potential of something. And so I guess I've so I'm in terms of my funding journey. I I think I mentioned I when we before we recorded, I um applied for an arts council grant when I was at university, and I remember thinking for we did we set up a little magazine um at Brighton University, and uh I was so blown away that we were given money, and I think it was through lottery funding, arts council, arts for all it was called or something. And uh I remember that feeling thinking, oh my gosh, they believe in this, and we've got money to do this, somebody actually wants to give us money, and it was just such a revelation and really exciting. And I think I've always had that zeal of like, let's find a way, you know, let's find a way to make this possible. Um, and and then I worked with Louise McKinney at the Serpentine when I just finished at the Royal College, and um learned a huge amount from her in terms of yeah, all the different ways you can source funding from corporate involvement, from cultural embassies, from trusts and foundations and um and the arts council. And then when I worked as a freelance curator, we did loads of fundraising and we ran a curator partnership for six years, completely funded through European money, arts council funding, different partners, British Council, different pots that we've, you know, we did that entirely off our own, and actually managed to give ourselves a salary. And that was a kind of amazing, again, a bit like, wow, we found a way, we found a way. Um, and a lot of it is about, you know, telling a really good, not telling a story sounds like you're not telling the truth, but telling um showing people, showing people where you need to get to and how they can help you get there. And you're absolutely right, with the line it is really hard to track feedback because we don't have any tickets, we don't have any entrance or exit. Um, but the principle of us being available and accessible within a context that's incredibly like has kind of historic structural inequality that's really significant, has major health factors. Um, you know, there's lots within that context, which is really, really challenging, and particularly like around COVID, they it was one of the hardest hit neighbourhoods in the UK. Um, and so we want to be able to show how the line is trying to what what we know about our community in our context and how the line is trying to do all it can to support people in different ways. And then we show the impact. So it's more, I guess our engagement programme has been able to collect a lot of information and feedback and knowledge, and we listen to people and we convey that to funders to say, look, we know that they enjoyed it, we know that it meant this to them, and we run well-being walks, which um you can be referred to by your local GP. And people tell us that they go to the doctor less since they come on our well-being walks because of the fact that they feel more socially connected, they've built confidence, they've found connection to nature they didn't have previously, and so those are quite compelling examples, even though we're not saying we can tell you what everybody who walked the line this weekend felt about it, um, but we can give you quite solid examples of the way in which our programming has impacted on people. And similarly, we run a youth guides program, so we employ young people every summer, and that was really set up as a program about skills and employability, and each summer we do surveys to check how they've how they've done and what they've gained, and they'll tell us about yes, they've learned more about contemporary art, they've learned more about public speaking and about their neighbourhood, but they've also been telling us outside of these normal skills questions we use that they've actually their mental health has improved because they've been outside, because they've been off their screens, uh, they've been with in nature with other young people that they wouldn't have met otherwise. And that was never the aim of the programme, but it's quite interesting that those things can start to be fed back to you. And we do have a lot of people who walk the line and then they feel they really want to see it grow and see it thrive.

SPEAKER_03 31:15

I was wondering if you have any anecdotes, little episodes that you might know in relation to the physical experience of the sculptures in the whole circuit.

SPEAKER_00 31:27

In terms of people's experiences of them, or uh yes, and actually I should do a plug from our book, which just recently launched in November, uh, was published with Fidon Monacelli. There's a brilliant essay in the book by Andrew Jones, and he explores all the ways in which the line connects with people uh through our projects and programming. He interviewed a number of people that we've worked with, so one of our youth guides, one of our well-being walk attendees, different partner organizations we work with, and that's a really beautiful reflection on the different encounters and relationships people have through the line. And one of them is Amar, who lives very near the line and has this amazing little dog that he walks every day on the line, and obviously it's useful for his dog walk, but he very much talks about how the line has kind of is kind of part of his Buddhist practice, and he um he had a really terrible car accident a few years ago, and he uses the line as part of his kind of mental and physical recovery. Um and that he loves the fact that these works kind of provoke his thoughts and stop slow him down to reflect and think about the world and himself in a different way, and that's something we do hear quite a lot in terms of that idea of kind of connecting with your surroundings and connecting with yourself, and that's what the line allows you to do, and it's sort of on your own terms, which is probably different to what happens inside a gallery or a museum, maybe. It's that feeling of being outside in the elements and it's a kind of journey of your own making.

SPEAKER_03 32:53

I will put um a link in the show's notes for people to go straight to um to the book and purchase it. Um I was also wondering about something else, which is based on this idea of the line being uh the possibility of experiencing art in a different way and to incorporate art in the fabric of the city and and day-to-day life. I was wondering what kind of exhibition or art or art experience it can be outside of um museum spaces, yeah. You'd like to see in the future or experience in the future.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

It's difficult without saying anything too specific that I've got kind of um my dream project, which is actually a real thing that I'm really hoping will happen, which is part of this thing of actually having to dream things in you just have to dream things into being, you know. Um so if I I'll say it, but I won't give too many details because um we can't really talk about it yet. But I would love the idea that we could, because this is specific to the line, develop an artwork which somehow reflects the specifics of the kind of landscape and the wildlife along the route, which is so unique and extraordinary within one of the dense, then most densely populated parts of the UK. You can find 52 species of birds, you can find seals, wildflowers, it's the sort of nature thriving against the odds. And um, I would love to kind of have an artist really capture some of that through, I don't know how exactly, or I've got an idea, but I'm not gonna say, and then to think about how we could engage different partners, like uh East Bank at the top of the line in Stratford. There's now Saddler's Wells East, the BBC choirs, for the base there and recording facilities, London College of Fashion, obviously VNA East, and what they have at these extraordinary collections and resources, but they also have these enormous buildings. And what we have is the ground level, the public realm, the kind of layers of experience you have from encountering the public realm and our community connections that we have. So I'd love to do something that would capture that wildlife, something that's a physical outcome, but maybe also some sort of extraordinary performance. We once did a procession on the line with um Sergequeklotti with school children from Newham, which was just the most extraordinary moment of them kind of claiming the space and dancing and processing along with Surge, and boats on the Thames were tooting at the children to say hello, and it was this amazing transformation, and I think the power of a procession is very exciting. So I'd love to do another, some sort of another procession on the line of some kind. So that's very much about like what I'd like to see on the line rather than in general terms. Um, so yeah, I don't know if that answers the question.

SPEAKER_03 35:39

It's funny because now that you're saying that, when I the last time I went, we saw these uh seashells broken on the puff. Yeah. And I don't think we would have noticed them if it wasn't the line. So we if we weren't doing this sort of art hike.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:57

And there were so many that we presumed that birds brought seashells from the water and just broke them there to eat them.

SPEAKER_00 36:04

Yeah. And it was so exciting. You see them all the way, and I can't remember the name of the bird now, but they drop them to break them open. Um, yeah, it's and there are kingfishes, there's herons, yeah, and cormorants that dry their wings on Helen Cammock's bridge. Um, so yeah, I think it's so surprising, and it's such an industrial area that to somehow have all of that sing out through a through a piece feels very exciting. And also, I guess considering how you know the climate emergency and the changes that are happening and how we have to live in cities and how we relate to nature, I think that's becoming, you know, that's something we really want to ensure is part of kind of key part of our programme.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

What is the balance between economy and the dream? So the projects. How is it measurable? Is it balanced at the moment? Is it always um is it always a problem? Because I I think that at the moment we're kind of undergoing this revision of materials. For example, you just mentioned the climate the climate emergency and toxic materials, etc. And we're also trying to leave less of a presence as humans, perhaps, or impose ourselves less. So, of course, I'm thinking about that, but I'm also thinking about the economic crisis. Everything's very expensive at the moment. Import exports have kind of broken the chain of availability in this country of materials and and then food and and lots of things. So I think that question for me was always important, but it has become more urgent in some ways. Um, how does the line um provide a vision on this on this or or some answers on this uh question?

SPEAKER_00 37:56

Uh yeah, it's a very good question. I think I think obviously within within projects, there's always a balance between an artist's ambition and aspiration, and then what's actually affordable and practical. Uh and public art commissioning is not very cheap because you need to create something that's really strong and robust, and often has to have quite complicated foundations and has to be approved by structural engineers. And um, and so often if we're working with artists and it's their first time working in the public realm, that's a bit of a journey for them to go on. We definitely assess materials from a sustainability perspective and try and ensure that anything we're using is not uh yeah uh negative for the environment or has a kind of negative, or also think about how things, the the afterlife of works as well if they're not on the line. I mean, a key principle for us is that we would we just really want to make sure people are paid to reflect the efforts and the time that they're putting into things as much as we can. We are also really lucky that we have quite a lot of pro bono support, which really helps. So things like our engineering is often provided by an extraordinary engineer at ARP who is just has a kind of wealth of knowledge and an incredible creative ability to work with artists and help them navigate working outside. So, so for instance, Rana Begum worked with him on her commission, which he created a whole support structure for, and it wouldn't really have existed in the form because she wanted any support to be kind of effectively invisible. And so Steve McKinshee came up with this system um with her, which you know allowed her to do that work outside that she'd never presented that work outside before. So um, and that would have been phenomenally expensive for us. So I think um, and that again I feel like it's part of that thing of trying to make something extraordinary and magical and take everyone on a journey. Often people are just like once they know there's an idea and a problem to solve, if you get the right minds in the room, they will go above and beyond to make that possible.

SPEAKER_03 39:49

But I think that's a really interesting point, and I think it's really important to really highlight the fact that sponsoring, you know, beyond patronage, there's also sponsoring. Because a lot of people say, Oh, I don't I don't have enough money to support, I'd love to support artistic projects, but actually you can also bring your own expertise and give a two hour a few hours during the week or during the month to a project and support an artist, and that's also a way of being a patron, and that makes your work even more admirable because you have to uh you know find all these people to support you. But thank you so much. This has been lovely. Thank you for your time, and I hope you come back to Exhibition Nistas. I hope so too. Yeah, thank you so much, it's been a real pleasure. Exhibition Nistas is an independent podcast created and hosted by me, Joanna Pierre Nevis. Because we're all both actors and spectators of art and life.