A short piece made with Paola Alessandro at my ‘In Disguise’ residency at The Hive Arts Centre, Shrewsbury – part of an exploration of identity – 2005
Sue Challis
I’m a video artist and self-employed community arts worker: currently I’m also researching the evaluation of the impact of participatory arts on communities for a PhD at Coventry University. As a film maker I want to challenge the way we watch media and to question our relationship to the film’s subject and the role of the artist. As a community arts project manager and worker, I bring decades of reliability, experience and reflective practice towards developing creativity through rich, empowering, effective and fun processes.
My short film ‘Reading Agatha Christie’ was submitted to the Max Mara Prize for Women Artists 2008 by British artist Cornelia Parker. It was made with a group of Iraqi Kurds in Birmingham and records a struggle to control their readings of Christie’s ‘They Came to Baghdad’ in Arabic. The film won the Ikon Gallery Student Prize and has been shown in the US and Cairo; I was awarded the Birmingham City University ‘Overall Best Student’ in the Arts in 2008 & my MA Fine Arts in 2010.
Professional Development
I’m continually learning new ways of working and taking on new ideas through my work and I’m always looking for training. It’s been invaluable to be part of a reflective Action Learning Set in Birmingham and I’ve recently started a PhD at Coventry, investigating the evaluation of community arts interventions, supported by the Economic & Social Research Council and the Coventry-based public arts organisation Imagineer Productions.
I attend as many national conferences on evaluation in the arts as seem useful – the latest was organised by Third Sector & New Philanthropy Capital on Impact Measurement & Analysis and was really valuable !
Latest work
Digital Content Development – the fossil brain
Shropshire Museums April 2011
Working with digital artist Martin Sumner we produced a series of delicate and beautiful pieces, using projected text, video and images onto a 430million year old brain coral fossil, found in Shropshire, creating digital content for smart phones in the re-launched Shrewsbury Museum (Sept 2011): inspired by working with such an ancient artefact, almost beyond human imagination. I made video of local people’s imaginative flights of fancy about the past and a sound piece (linked by Martin to audio-responsive colour) of a reading of the Poem which won the first ever Much Wenlock Olympics in 1842 (read by Much Wenlock Olympic archivist Chris Cannon); played against Martin’s time-lapse dawn to dusk on Wenlock Edge, and other images we produced.
- 430million year old brain coral fossil found in Shropshire
Impact Arts !
Following two years of documentary video-making with the Changes Consultancy’s Home Office project ‘Active Citizenship’ I was asked to help a group of ten South Asian and Black Country women write a successful £23,000 Arts Council bid for a 12 month arts project. As coordinating artist I was privileged to be part of the whirlwind of creativity which followed as the women developed individual artworks using photography, video installation, textile printing and sculpture, to ‘tell their journey’ in a stunning exhibition at Wolverhmpton Art Gallery’s Bantock House Gallery, professionally curated by established Irish artist Mona Casey.
This was probably the most satisfying project I’ve ever been involved with: maybe because I had known the group and they had known each other for two years previously; we were well funded and met fortnightly for a whole year, with several weekend residentials and a trip to London galleries; we could afford excellent professional artists (including Shaheen Ahmed, Adrienne Frances, Mona Casey) and had a quality venue to exhibit in – with marketing support from WMAG.
Extract from video and installation By Pauline Callaghan
Posted in Community arts projects
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Reading Agatha Christie (2007)
Reading Agatha Christie (2007) was made with a group of Iraqi Kurdish refugees in Birmingham. It shows a number of ‘Middle Eastern’ people trying to read from Christie’s ‘They Came to Baghdad’ in Arabic in a film clearly made for ‘the record’ rather than aesthetic reasons. While the artist and Iraqi cameraman constantly interrupt, giving conflicting instructions, the readers’ expressions subvert the implicit control. This tense and funny film explores the interactions between cultures and emerged from the disquiet I felt about sources of knowledges about the Middle East – I read a lot of of Agatha Christie, who, despite her casual colonial racism, is widely read in the region (and apparently much requested at the internment camp Guantanamo Bay). The film has shown in Birmingham and London, and at the Cairo Film and Video Festival, and the Festival of Time Based Media in Vermont, USA. This is a short extract from a longer film.
Reading Agatha Christie 2007 Extract
Posted in Videomaker
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Ahmet’s Bricks (2010) – exploring place, displacement and nostalgia for home
Posted in Artwork & exhibitions
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The Aman Arts Project 2010
Working closely with Shahida Choudhry (Women’s Networking Hub) and the Muslim Women’s Network, I coordinated and delivered two projects at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Birmingham. The project aims to give a voice to unheard voices: ‘hard-to-reach’ women previously inexperienced in creative projects were given financial support for transport and childcare, skills tuition and encouragement to develop their ideas. It’s hoped their work will go on display at the MAC in 2011. One is an ongoing year-long videomaking project with 15 Muslim women of various ages, who were offered videocameras and support to make films on any topic. The other was a four-day workshop, delivered with Adrienne Francis and Dilwara Begum, to make ‘story boxes’ using a rich range of materials, about their lives and ideas. Feedback was enthusiastic and highly positive. The video project continues as an unfinanced group activity since MWN’s funding was cut…with films made on the mean streets of Brum, in the heat of Morocco, with refugees, with family members…
- Each session began with relaxation and meditation exercises focussed on womens' strengths
- Each storybox was unique, and although themes of family and faith emerged in many, the final pieces were as varied as the individual makers
- Participants used newspapers, books, the artist's stock images to make collages relating to concerns about racism, women's rights, Islam and war
- Women were encouraged to use new techniques and skills to express themselves through art
- Workshops included printmaking, textiles, painting & drawing in various media
(Images by Adrienne Francis)
Posted in Community arts projects
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