Breadfellows’ Chats, in collaboration with the Yellow Brick project of Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki, extends my Masters Research at the Piet Zwart Institute. Using clay I make ceramic objects collaboratively with artists, these are called companions. The word companion comes from the Latin “com”, meaning with and “panionem” from the French “panis”, meaning bread and so companion literally means sharing bread together, or breadfellows.
Produced during the focused intimacy of a conversation about practice, companions are transitional objects. They are functional yet also embody a didactic potential.
The aim of the Breadfellows’ Chats is to facilitate the development of co-constructive workshops between an artist and a public at the point of exhibition. We take this time in conversational co-production, to devise public workshops that are resonant with an artist’s practice and do not condescend to the public.
My process recalibrates the development of a gallery based educational project. It does not resolve itself; it embodies potential and acknowledges that exhibition-making is often just a moment of intervention at a point in a practice. I propose that an education project could be open-ended. Facilitating dialogue and production between the artist and the public could redirect the trajectory of an artwork, or even a practice.
Clare Breen in collaboration with the project Yellow Brick propose an educational project which takes form through the creation of “companions” through dialogue. The process of making the “companions” takes place at Yellow Brick in Nea Ionia. The “bodies” of the “companions” are later used in a big dinner.
In Collaboration with:
practice develops and uses methodologies, with conversation at their core, for bringing an artist’s practice to the centre of a gallery based education programm, in order to extend that practice, at the point of exhibition through co-constructive workshops with the public.
