Intercult Webinar “Arts as a force for social change” - Dr t s Beall

Dr t s Beall is the Lead Artist for ‘Woven in Govan’, and was the lead Scottish artist for ‘Woven Network’ (2020), spanning five countries and led by Platform TU (Ukraine). Beall is a socially-engaged artist and researcher based in Dumfries and Glasgow, working with communities on durational projects to recover marginalised histories. Her work spans a variety of media including performative events, printed matter, and creative interventions in the public realm.

She is also one of ten commissioned artists on the Stove Network’s ‘Atlas Pandemica’, working with Travelling Showpeople to recover elements of Dumfries’ fairground histories (2020-21) and considering post-Covid positioning of creative projects in the public realm. Ongoing projects in Scotland include ‘Fair Scotland’ (with Showpeople, co-devised with Dr Mitch Miller), and ‘Protests and Suffragettes’ (recovering and highlighting women’s activism in Govan), both 2013-present. Beall was the lead Scottish artist for ‘Memory of Water’ (2018-2021), a project examining post-industrial waterfronts in six European cities, funded by Creative Europe. Her PhD with University of Glasgow (2017), collaborated with the Riverside Museum/Glasgow Museums, where her practice-led research developed engagement strategies for heritage institutions through co-curated events and participatory performance.

In this webinar Dr t s Beall, presented her methodology of helping communities to regain a sense of belonging while challenging dominant narratives of place. The timeframe was one of the main issues. When does the project start and end? We need to find ways to extend to both directions and capture the knowledge. As Tara mentioned ” Curator Paul O’neill writes about this really usefully, I think — the idea that project timelines shld be conceptualised as beginning and ending ‘before’ and ‘after’ the point we currently consider them. This strains against / offers and alternative visioning to the current / more normal ‘mushrooming’ of projects — where they disappear with no real impact.”