Researcher blog by Penny McCarthy: The Society of Explorers

About the author

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Penny McCarthy is a Reader in Fine Art. Penny’s work is included in Site Gallery’s Material Truths exhibition which runs until 10 March 2017.

In this post, Penny McCarthy reveals her notes from her recent exchange with The Society of Explorers who were visiting her work at the Material Truths exhibition.

 

Some exhibition projects take place at a distance. You pack up your work and hand it over to a courier to be delivered and displayed in some vague elsewhere. Later the work is returned to you and as you unpack it you search for clues as to how it fared on its travels. Hopefully there will be some press or a nice email from the curator that will give you a hazy sense of its audience and their response. Other projects plead for a more passionate engagement. Last week I met with The Society of Explorers at Sheffield’s Site Gallery to discuss my work in the Material Truths exhibition.

 

The Society of Explorers, I was intrigued to learn, navigate the city by mapping its free wi-fi hotspots. Being too young and not rich enough to hang out in bars and cafes, this group of young people regularly gather at Site to discuss art and ideas.

 

They listened to me politely while I introduced them to my work and discussed some of the ideas that prompted my research.

 

The group came alive with accounts, both substantiated and otherwise of their own experiences of post-truth. The frail human attempt to bring to order what cannot be fully understood, the daily traffic of memes, tweets and newsfeeds that must be dealt with but nobody can quite agree on. Yet they are discovering new things every day. When so many libraries, galleries and museums are under threat, I’m glad to have had a chance to speak directly to young people about their experience of art and culture. I was so impressed with the group that I made some notes based on our exchange when I got home.

This is a brief glimpse of our conversation:

The Society of Explorers: Is all art an act of appropriation? Is appropriation – even sampling- a political act whether it intends to be or not?

PM: Maybe it’s to do with how you interpret it? Or use it?

The Society of Explorers: Is art always political?

The Society of Explorers: Action is political, whether or not it intends to be.

The Society of Explorers: There is a reality TV aspect to the whole world right now.

The Society of Explorers: Your drawing of Nixon’s script for a historic space disaster that never happened is like one of Trump’s statements.

The Society of Explorers: It reveals more about you than history.

The Society of Explorers: In the work, you don’t seem to be able to explain what you are afraid of.

The Society of Explorers: Did you have any regrets?

PM: Possibly not in the way you mean.

 

The Society of Explorers: What happens when things vanish from the historical record?

PM: I can’t really answer that.

The Society of Explorers: Try.

PM: I’d like to keep a huge archive… I’d like to record things through drawing…

The Society of Explorers: What’s stopping you?

PM: Funding.

 

PM: Most projects become personal and perhaps oblique to the real world. I feel a bit too much like the central character of this project. You realise you are recording your own history. Some histories lodge in your heart.

The Society of Explorers: Would we understand the work without your descriptions and stories?

PM: Would I understand it without yours?

 

 

 

 

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Please note: Views expressed are those of the Author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of SHU, C3RI or the C3RI Impact Blog.