Gypsy Maker 5 – Artists’ Talks at g39

Monday 24th October 2022 - 7pm to 5pm

Location: G39, Oxford Street, Cardiff, CF24 3DT

The Romani Cultural and Arts Company (RCAC) is excited to announce an evening of Artists’ Talks in association with g39 to mark the end of the RCAC’s Gypsy Maker 5 exhibition tour throughout Wales during 2022. Guest speakers include Imogen Bright Moon, Dr Jo Clement, Dr Daniel Baker and Anthony Shapland.

This exciting installation of specially commissioned works from the artists Imogen Bright Moon, Corrina Eastwood and Rosamaria Kostic Cisneros, is the latest in our ground-breaking Gypsy Maker project, an initiative that supports the development of innovatively created artistic works by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller artists. The Gypsy Maker 5 project expands the work of the RCAC by continuing to engage GRT communities with the wider public in an ongoing dialogue about the ways in which art continues to inform our lives today.

The exhibition is commissioned by the RCAC with support from the Arts Council of Wales.

The Gypsy Maker Project is an exciting opportunity for us to connect with a new audience. The project’s mission addresses one of g39’s core aims, namely to raise awareness of contemporary practice – in this instance the practice of artists with Romani heritage who often don’t have access to the many artist networks that connect with g39 and other creative communities. Anthony Shapland, Creative Director of g39.

We are so proud to continue our ground-breaking work with GRT artists, with support from the Arts Council of Wales. This project will strengthen the role of Gypsies, Roma and Travellers on the arts scene in Wales, the UK and beyond. Isaac Blake; Director of the Romani Cultural & Arts Company

The ground-breaking work of the RCAC in supporting Gypsy, Roma and Traveller artists is unparalleled. The Gypsy Maker project is unique worldwide in commissioning new bodies of work by GRT artists thus enabling the production of significant new knowledge from an underrepresented group and making a valuable contribution to international contemporary art and cultural discourse. Dr Daniel Baker.

Schedule

19.00 Croeso / Welcome RCAC/g39

19.10 Dr Daniel Baker

19.20 Imogen Bright Moon

19.45 Dr Jo Clement

20.10 Anthony Shapland, Creative Director, g39

20.20 Isaac Blake, Director, Romani Cultural & Arts Company

20.30 Q&A

21.00 Close

Biographies in alphabetical order

Dr Daniel Baker is an artist and curator. A Romani Gypsy, born in Kent in the UK, he holds a PhD on the subject of Roma aesthetics from the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been included in documenta fifteen and Manifesta 14, and has featured in several editions of the Venice Biennale, both as artist (2007, 2011, 2022) and curator (FUTUROMA, 2019). Baker’s work examines the role of artistic practice in the enactment of social agency via the reconfiguration of aspects of Gypsy visuality. His work is exhibited internationally and can be found in collections worldwide. Publications include WE ROMA: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, Ex Libris, FUTUROMA and GRT LGBTQ+ Spoken History Archive . Lives and works in London.

Isaac Blake is a proud Gay Romany Gypsy and is Executive Director of the Romani Cultural & Arts Company (RCAC), a major third sector agency which leads the field in Wales by promoting advocacy through the arts for Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. Having trained at the Trinity LABAN Conservatoire of Music & Dance, Isaac went on to study at the Martha Graham School in New York. He now teaches dance at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. Isaac was Dance Curator for the RomArchive; the international archive of Roma arts and culture. He has been instrumental in supporting LGBTQ+ Gypsy, Roma, Traveller rights in UK, Europe and beyond, recently producing the first international LGBTQ+ GRT spoken history archive.

Imogen Bright Moon is a British-Romani craftswoman, studio weaver and exhibiting artist-maker in textiles. She combines hand-weaving with storytelling, folklore and heritage crafts to create her studio textiles. Bright Moon works with hand-spun yarns on simple wooden looms to explore the ongoing story of textiles and their place in our lives today. Her work intersects the areas of therapeutic arts, maternal mental health and storytelling, to explore and give voice to hidden identities in the context of domestic folk crafts and ancestral cultural lineages.

Dr Jo Clement lectures in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. In 2012 she received a Northern Writers’ Award (New Writing North) selected by Paul Farley. Her poems have appeared on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please, Start the Week and Enchanted Isle, BBC Radio 3’s Northern Drift. Jo is the Managing Editor and Creative Director of Butcher’s Dog poetry magazine. In 2021 she edited Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology, with support from the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC). Her pamphlet Moveable Type (New Writing North, 2020) was published with support from Arts Council England. Her first book-length collection of poems, Outlandish, was published by Bloodaxe in May 2022. www.joclement.co.uk.

Anthony Shapland Creative Director of g39 (b 1971, Pontypridd, lives and works in Cardiff) is an artist, writer and curator and co-founder of g39. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include To Pay Respect To The Generosity of The Three-Minute Punk-Rock Song, CRATE, Margate, Memory Of A Hope, Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool, The painting, Supercollider, Blackpool, LISTE - The Young Art Fair, Basel, Portrait (For a Screenplay) of Beth Harmon, Limoncello, London.. He is currently working with fiction, in short form and novella, and regularly writes on the visual arts in reviews, artists monographs, exhibitions and catalogues. He has been on the judging panel for Artes Mundi 8, and has served on the Wales in Venice committee and as a board member of ARC. He currently Creative Director at g39, an artist-led community space he co-founded in Cardiff, where he lives.

We?anticipate that this exciting evening will generate great interest so please book your place early by registering on Eventbrite.