The Monthly interviews artist, Joy Gerrard – Part 3 – The Arab Spring and “Precarious Freedom”

An additional element to the main conversation

When I started my Masters I was in the Printmaking Department but it was always very free and very open. The work shifted very quickly to making architectural models, which were to do with urban space and mapping and ideas around events in urban spaces.
I made these models, then photographed them and the end result was the production of very large photographs and this was a huge shift in my practice during the MA.

My work was heavily influenced by the architectural department in the Royal College of Art, and access to large format photography. That work was very well received and a lot of opportunities came out of that.

I went back to the Royal College of Art to do a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) after having had a certain amount of time in practice, lecturing full-time and making a lot of public art works, and I left the Royal College of Art in 2008 with a Masters in Philosophy. I worked on a research project looking at the city as a site of fear. I was thinking about things like 9/11 and the 7/7 bombings in London, and how people reacted to this atmosphere of fear.

There were conceptualisations around the question of terrorism, and that was what lead me to start collecting the photos around crowds and protests. It was looking at a way of thinking about how people react to these situations or events.

All of those elements combined, especially my Masters and my MPhil at the Royal College, were quite pivotal in me moving towards creating Precarious Freedom.

What moves you to produce Precarious Freedom?

The really intense work engaging with protests and crowds started with the rise of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement which was around 2011.

At that stage I had three children, that limited me in many ways, and I had an adjunct career to the studio work at that time which was working on about 15 different public art projects.

Tahrir Square, Arab Spring

There was a very large work for the London School of Economics, and other works for Chelsea and Westminster Hospitals, so I was juggling between working on these very large abstract projects, doing a lot of project management, farming things out to other producers, and a lot of very positive collaborations with people.

The work that became Precarious Freedom came out of this time, because eventually I just wanted to sit at my desk and make something by myself. The Arab Spring had burst on to our screens with all of the debates around protest and freedom, and what we in the West thought about the situation in the Middle East. It was a challenge to western perceptions of the east.

I started making a whole series of works, which were very small, very detailed ink drawings which used media sources as the starting point and that was the genesis of the later work.

How does the process develop from there?

I had a very important show in 2015 which you have probably seen somewhere online which was where I introduced the first large scale paintings.

I wanted to make protest images which had a different physical impact on the viewer because these weren’t just tiny drawings, these were very large paintings that had to be created in a different way and engaged with differently.

Joy Gerrard – Arab Spring

The combination of my background in public art, and this quite singular practice which related to protest, interested in visualising these pivotal moments, with people reacting to their situations by coming on to the streets trying to change something. All of that coming together, lead to the creation of the body of work which became Precarious Freedom.

To see more of Joy Gerrard’s work click on the links below

www.instagram.com/joygerrard/

cristearoberts.com/artists/131-joy-gerrard/

weekly-logo
artist forms link
New Belfast Community Arts Initiative trading as Community Arts Partnership is a registered charity (XR 36570) and a company limited by guarantee (Northern Ireland NI 37645).Registered with The Charity Commission as New Belfast Community Arts Initiative - NIC105169.