Practising Creativity: Experimentation, Mistakes andSuccesses in Art-Archaeology, Conference Session

Description

This was a session delivered as part of the Theoretical Archaeology Group Annual Conference in December 2018. Christopher McHugh co-chaired this with Dr James Dixon, Wood PLC, and Dr Seren Griffiths, UCLan. This session, comprising 11 papers from national and international scholars and practitioners, aimed to produce a critical and playful dialogue about the development of individual and collaborative practices in art-archaeology.

Call for papers:

Archaeological materials, recording techniques and methods have influenced diverse work by artists across a range of media, and archaeology has been, practically and theoretically, equally influenced by art, as many a conference session over the years has demonstrated. In this session we want to examine experimentation in art-archaeology and how we turn that initial inspiration to think or work in new ways into things to talk about or show people. Rather than automatically portraying all collaborations as successful and complete acts, we want to discuss the pitfalls and problems in doing creative practice.
Does it matter that many of us who want to bring artistic inspiration to our archaeology are not good artists? Does it matter whether artists do good archaeology? Do notions of the art-archaeologist as conventionally talented or technically proficient obscure the benefits of more naïve experimentation? When an art-archaeologist makes something that could be considered good art, is it? What do notions of good or bad art do to art-archaeology in theory and practice?
This session aims to produce a critical and playful dialogue about the development of individual and collaborative practices in art-archaeology. We welcome papers from anyone currently involved in art-archaeology in any way, those who have tried and moved on, and those thinking about getting involved for the first time. We want to hear about people’s outputs, but also about how they got there. We want to hear about experiments, mistakes, successes, all of the practising that leads to a practice.

Period	17 Dec 2018
Event type	Conference
Location	Chester, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	National