A commissioned piece of writing for Artlink’s 2014 Annual Review focusing on their radical work with artists and individuals with profound learning disabilities.
The full text is available here.
‘Kelly Dobson is figuring out how to build time machines. Coming from a family of mechanics and machinists she has a long-standing interest in technology and its impact upon everyday life. Her own career as an artist/engineer has paralleled the dramatic rise of personal devices that promise users special powers ranging from constant connectivity to a quick and easy memory boost. But even back in the late 1990s Kelly was quick to recognise that mobile phones and portable computers were usually geared towards a particular set of goals: devising innovative ways to harness individuals’ productivity and generating high-performance employees. In the belief that exciting things can happen between people and machines that aren’t driven by profit she adopts a different approach, designing personalised appliances that address everyday human needs. And so, though her time machines will probably take the form of vehicles, they won’t have flux capacitors. Rather their interiors will be designed to manipulate and queer time; speeding it up, slowing it down or even attempting to bend it. Understanding that people with profound learning disabilities can experience temporality very differently, Kelly will carefully engineer the spaces to respond to the specific rhythms and modes of particular individuals. She hopes that inside these machines more meaningful ‘meetings’ can be facilitated – in the sense of ‘a meeting of minds’, or ‘meeting half-way’ – by helping to create a common ground between their inhabitants.
This work encapsulates themes that kept recurring in my recent discussions with Artlink’s team of artists, namely the shape of time and the shape of relationships. What follows is an attempt to understand how the creative process is calibrated inside each project and how engagement with Artlink’s programme of sensory work has impacted on the artists’ own practices. I want to consider their diverse responses through these interlocking themes of time and relationships, subjects that push to the fore ideas like care, exchange and attention. From the start it has been clear that a different framework is required in order to understand the approaches of these artists. Not only are conventional art objects in short supply, but our usual conceptions of chronological or linear time simply don’t fit in this context. This raises a crucial question: what other frameworks of analysis are available? One answer could be that, rather than thinking about ‘production’ in the way that it is usually applied in industrial societies and the artworld (put simply, the making of ‘things’), it’s perhaps more useful to think in terms of ‘reproduction’, meaning the making of relationships and social fabrics…..’