Participatory Art

Making participatory art usually means I go into places (like art galleries, swimming pools, schools, parks, libraries, cafes and museums) and try to get people to make art with me.

The following questions are important to this practice: If you make participatory art then where is the actual artwork located? Is it possible to help somebody have a good idea? How do you build a world within a world? What's the best way to make somebody think about the way they think? Will you play along?

I work with writing and drawing a lot. Games and playfulness inform my work very much. I often collaborate with other artists.

Projects I've worked on recently include:
Developing and running a workshop for The Briitsh Library in which participants create pieces of experimental writing about an exhibition and present them on a page using Letraset and rubber ink-stamps. The pages are then collated, copied and bound into a zine; each participant gets a copy and one copy is accessioned by the library.
Creating an artwork about size and scale for the Wellcome Collection in which I used overhead projectors, acetate and felt-tip pens to draw small portraits which I then printed onto balloons. The balloons were then inflated with helium so that the drawing was the size of a real face and strung so they floated at the height of the sitters head. Over the course of an evening we created a crowd of ghostly bobbing faces which people then took home with them at the end of the night.
Creating an artwork called The Mis-Guided Tour for Paesi delle Meraviglie (a collective event in Brescia, Italy) in which I had 24 hours to discover the city for myself, plan a route and make a map showing my chosen points of interest, which included unusual shadows, unexplained white dots and a railway which doesn't exist. I then conducted the tour on bicycles, showing people who lived in the city my way of seeing their home town.

Here are some external links that may be useful if you'd like a better idea of who I've worked for and where my work has been shown:

Brockwell Lido
The British Library
The Wellcome Collection
Hide and Seek
The Whitechapel Gallery
The ICA
Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination
Tate Britain

All text and images © Gethan Dick unless otherwise stated.