Introducing the Culture Box Show
The Culture Box Show marks and celebrates the end of the Culture Box Research project! The Culture Box project responded to the impacts of the pandemic on care homes by providing regular postal and digital deliveries of creative and arts-based activities over 12 months. The boxes contained a diverse range of creative activities for residents and staff to complete. The study was lead by Professor Victoria Tischler, with Dr Hannah Zeilig and Dr Julian West as co-investigators. For more information about the project’s team, see this link.
The Culture Box Show is an end-of-project interactive exhibition that contains four interactive artist commissions. The research team worked with Culture&, an arts organisation, to produce the commissions for the Show. The commissions respond to the project and its findings. The Show was curated by Emma Barnard and Julian West who formed part of the selection panel for the artist commissions.
Boxes will be sent out to the care homes containing activities, prompts, materials and instructions. Some of the commissions will ask residents and staff to respond back to the artists, and they will create a piece of work based on these responses. Other artists have already created pieces of work which the residents will respond to through different mediums.
Residents and care staff involved in the project can access the activities here.
There are four commissions, most of these will be profiled in the blog in the coming weeks! The artists and their commissions are explored below:
Kate Munro: Bringing the Outside In
Kate's commission invites residents and care staff to bring nature into their inside spaces. She will be asking residents and staff to provide her with the names of their favourite flowers. These will inform her artistic practice and response.
Helena Tomlin: Fold
FOLD will take the form of a series of rice paper artworks mounted on fabric and made using paint and printed collaged elements. They will be made so that they will be easy to display in the care homes. As part of the process of making this piece I will experiment with different types of folding, working with the materials to find the best way to reflect the concept of the Deleuzian fold as described above. I am interested in developing a ‘performance’ element in the viewing the work (the possible folding and unfolding of the pieces) as this is part of my response to respecting the complexities of memory. I will make the installation in my studio with careful instructions on how to assemble and display in the care home.
Iirumva Isaac: Personal challenges of the pandemic
For the Culture Box Show contemporary artist IIrumva Isaac, will explore the challenges a few of the many narratives of his community’s mental health during yet another lockdown in Kigali, Rwanda.
Cohabitating, sharing space, and things without the habitual 9-5 or spontaneous visit to a friend. the lockdown reshapes the relationships we have with our space, our belongings and housemates. Our mental states play a key role in the progression of our relationships, and so the progression of our lives.
In his attempt to bring people closer in times of ambiguous distancing; IIrumva compiled a few of his art pieces to touch on mental health as our bodies and minds adapt to lockdown, facemasks, remote work, and PCR tests among other things that came with this global pandemic. IIrumva lives in an urban neighbourhood right in the heart of Kigali, near the Kigali Convention Centre landmark, known as mu Rugando. Here he has observed the different ways in which the residents behave, which he is convinced everyone no matter where they live or where they are from must have in common. Exploring the theme of mental health, his intent is to create pieces that build up to an unveiling of mental health issues in his nuclear community.
Polly Townsend: Mountains of the Mind
Polly's commission is based on data visualisation of social isolation and loneliness data that was recorded at the beginning of the project. She has worked on transforming the data into mountain ranges in concertina sketchbooks. These will be sent out to the care homes along with watercolour paints and materials for the residents to watercolour the images of mountains.
If you have any questions or would like to find out more, please email culturebox@exeter.ac.uk