Lexicon on Being Collective

At FORM-ica, Bath, with Helen Carnac facilitating.

The first official meeting for Warped and Wasted began with a sense of anticipation and enthusiasm as we began to consider how we can start such an ambitious project working collaboratively.

We allocated the roles of scribes, timer, photographer, video recorder and blog poster prior to the meeting to ensure the day ran smoothly. We also had a good supply of notebooks, post it notes and pens/pencils, plus a large flip chart. And most importantly ourselves, our ideas and any links to other exhibitions that we thought might be helpful?

Helen Carnac set the ball rolling with brief introductions to our broad range of practices so that we all might have a clearer understanding of the skills and attributes that each of us are bringing to the table.

Thought Audits

We began by working in pairs to complete some thought audits on the following topics:

• Common experiences of seam collective.
• What collaboration means to each of us.
• How do we want to feel when things get difficult.

A particularly enlightening conversation began with a discussion about our fears and many of us found it helpful to get these out in the open early on.

Creating a visual brain dump was another interesting exercise and illustrated that there isn’t a shortage of creative ideas in the group. Working out which ideas best represent our collective vision and narrowing down the collective vision is the challenge we’re currently facing. And we all agreed that we’re up for this challenge.

Rigorous Discussion

The conversation around sourcing recycled materials took us on an interesting path and the possibility of using abandoned tents from music festivals to create our artwork. This led into a rigorous discussion around politics, aesthetics, greenwashing and logistics. There were strong feelings from members on this topic and this highlighted the challenges we’re going to be facing in working collaboratively. How on earth are fourteen individual textile artists going to agree on one piece of work?

Each member of seam collective has a very different set of work and life circumstances as is the case with most groups. Using the exercises from this session we’re now aiming to find a way to work with these differences in a supportive way.

Going Forward

Going forward, we all agreed to complete a ‘stash audit’ to give us a clear vision of the materials we currently have available and to arrive at the next meeting with something new that we’ve made.

Helen Carnac also asked us some insightful questions for us to ponder before the next meeting, including:

• What locally sourced waste and sustainable materials could we use?
• What would be softer questions to ask about sustainability that would be easier to answer? (We asked ourselves quite difficult questions in a sustainability audit as part of the A Visible THREAD project)
• What is the role of critical dialogue?
• What do we want our audience to question?
• What is the role of the visitor? What will be their experience of the exhibition?

Angie Parker