Array collective (2021 Turner prize winners): in conversation

Jane Morrow (born Derry, Northern Ireland, 1983) is a visual art curator, writer, PhD researcher, educator, and advocate now based in Belfast. She is an independent visual art curator and PhD researcher with a specialism in artist and organisational development. Jane is interested in infrastructure for artists, working across network and production contexts, and through creating formal and informal developmental platforms for practitioners. Resourcing, nurturing, and profiling others’ practices has been a longstanding facet of her approach. Her practice-led PhD research focuses on the precarity of artists’ studios and workspaces; labour and practice, collective and co-operative models, and permanence and peripateticism. She has held numerous strategic, programming, and fundraising roles for galleries, initiatives and individuals around the UK and Ireland, and also develops independent and collaborative projects. Her writing is regularly commissioned by arts press and featured in peer-reviewed journals. Jane also occasionally teaches on undergraduate courses at Belfast School of Art, and on the postgraduate course in Arts Management at Queen’sUniversity.

Array Collective are a group of individual artists rooted in Belfast, who join together to create collaborative actions in response to the socio-political issues affecting Northern Ireland. In December 2021, they won the Turner Prize, an annual award made to artists born, living, or working in the UK, for an outstanding exhibition or public presentation of their work anywhere in the world in the previous year. In 2021, and for the first time, the Turner Prize shortlist1consisted entirely of artist collectives, representative of the solidarity and community demonstrated by artists in response to the pandemic. Array Collective are the first winners from Northern Ireland.

This conversation took place in Belfast on 14 September 2022.