Set within our current exhibition The Artist, The Community, The Council and The Philanthropist this event will bring together artists Verity-Jane Keefe, Richard Phoenix, Jo Capper, n:u (melissandre varin) and a public audience to begin an open conversation prompted by the following provocation by Verity:

"I’m mostly interested in how the workshop can be a fundamental part of artistic practice, a way to develop relationships and in turn ideas and artworks. However, what I think we too often see, especially in this hyper accelerated post-austerity-cost of living-general wild times of diminished and exhausted public funding pots, is how the workshop, participation, social practice and engagement can be manipulated as a means to get funding, in a situation where the current landscape doesn’t allow for meaningful evaluation, too often resulting in THIS WAS A HUGE SUCCESS BECAUSE 10000000 PEOPLE FROM 20000 DIFFERENT BACKGROUNDS TOOK PART AND LOVED IT AND IT CHANGED THEIR LIVES, box ticking rhetoric.

All of a sudden I find myself bang on trend, after years of galleries and formal art institutions thinking that this way of working is for the public programme or off-site. Now there’s an interest in bringing this work into the gallery, but without necessarily having the right expertise or a thorough understanding of what this work is and how long it takes.

The power dynamics at play mean there is rarely a space to meaningfully critique this context and discuss the tensions, pitfalls, ethics and responsibilities that come with working this way - the need to absorb risk and leave room for dead ends within commissions, to create space to breathe and manage whatever real life throws at the artist and the participants, the ethics of holding the residue of workshop activity in artworks and exhibitions, and the challenge of thinking about how things end, and how you leave and finish after intensive working periods with people that start as strangers and might end as friends.

So I’d like to invite you to step into this conversation, within the workshop scene of the exhibition, which is modelled on the room that housed all of the sessions that led to this show. To take time to reflect, think through these questions together and explore what happens when workshops are not just opportunities for participation, but a core element of artistic practice that can generate real agency in communities and individuals."

CONTRIBUTORSRichard Phoenix integrates painting, writing, music and facilitation, to explore themes such as rhythm, harmony and dissonance. Phoenix’s unique approach to painting and art-making has been influenced by many years of playing in D.I.Y. bands and his work as a creative support working within learning disability arts. He is an Associate Artist for Heart n Soul and his full length work of non-fiction about their young-people’s project Do Your Own Thing was published by Rough Trade Books in 2023. His work has been exhibited in solo a group shows in the UK and internationally at Alice Amati, curated by Devonshire Collective (2025), Project 78 Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea (2025); Wanigrupa Gallery, Bandung, Indonesia (2024); Flatlands Projects, Bexhill-on-Sea (2023); Walker Gallery, Liverpool (2023); Staffordshire St, London (2023); Sanford Vitrine, London (2022); Tate Exchange, London (2019), and V&A Museum, London (2019), amongst others. Verity-Jane Keefe is a visual artist working predominantly in the public realm to explore the complex relationship between people and place. She is interested in the role of the artist within urban regeneration and how experiential practice can touch upon and raise ambitions of existing and invisible communities. Since 2003 she has been developing new models of practice within municipal, collaborative contexts – following long term residency approaches that produce outcomes that explore the politics of participation, transferring agency and power along the way and making the work public in both the public realm and institutional contexts. Her practice takes many forms, but always starts with lurking, place and archives. The incidental, the overheard, the conversation, the observed. Working with text, moving image, site-based research, archive, installation, writing, print, social structures and object. Recent projects include Towner Eastbourne Public Art Commission (2023–2024), If All The Walls Could Speak, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London (2019-2023), Dagenham to Detroit, Detroit (US) and Dagenham, London (UK) (2023), Hospitalfield Residency, Scotland (2021–2022), Lived In Architecture: Becontree at 100, Royal Institute of British Architects Architecture Gallery, London (2019–2022), Living Together, Becontree Estate, London (2022), The Moorings Sociable Club, Lead Artist on the Design Team, (2016–2021), Thamesmead Artist in Residence, Thamesmead, London (2018–2019), The Mobile Museum, London (2013–2018). Jo Capper is an artist, curator, and educator with a strong desire to heal, restore, and do good in the world. She creates alternative regenerative cultural and living practices that start with simple acts of growing or sharing food – embodying the cultural specifics of human conviviality. Through building communal practices she is interested in the phenomenology of the making process and imagining new structures for communal living. Often starting with pain or conflict her work gets in between these intersections and uses trauma-informed approaches to remedy and regenerate. She develops restorative happenings and revolutions that merge ecology and humanity then entangles itself with magic and wildness. Her work materialises through human interaction, through working together “We tend, nurture and grow things”. Placing emphasis on research through practice, learning through doing, interdisciplinary and collaborative exchange. Jo has worked with Grand Union since 2018 and instigated their Collaborative Programme – The Growing Project. n:u (melissandre varin) creates spaces for freedom. Their ecologically care-full practice as an atmosphere-maker is rooted in Congolese, Guadeloupean, and Beninese heritages. Building upon (more than) human, cross-border collaboration, they unearth ancestral ceremonies to be with change. Their work manifests as liberatory infrastructures, performances, sculptures, and installations. They play with unexpected pairings between materials, bodies, and concepts, disrupting colonial binaries and dominant narratives. n:u combines intuitive, embodied-knowledge in artmaking with a political ecology approach grounded by an MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development from University College of London (UCL). Their current research, FREE(HOLD), re-composes a choreography to be together in the mud with the sticky questions pertaining to settler colonial systems, land based belief, and ancestry through a durational performance with 7 artists. Their experimental practice unfolds with emotional excavation, ancestrality and devotional use of materials (rum, oil, soil, hair) , as well as curatorial decolonial initiatives across diasporic contexts, such as les ongles noirs dirty nails (Dakar–Birmingham, 2022–24), B.O.O.K (supporting Black artists in the UK, 2020–23), Open Call (platform for artist-researchers now archived, 2020-23) and PAPAYA (afro-feminist collective, 2019–23). n:u is currently an Axis Fellow (2025-26), a CVAN WM steering group member (2025-28). They have been invited to create atmospheres by organisations such as Eastside Projects, Ban Workshop, Ikon Gallery, TaPRA, Future Ritual, Fierce Festival, Ambassade de France et l’Institut français du Bénin. Access - If you have any access needs that you would like to discuss before attending, drop us a line on info@eastsideprojects.org and we can talk them through