Making Care is a research project, exhibition and programme showcasing work by artists whose practice explores care and access provision. In the context of Covid-19 and the inequalities it highlights, this project imagines fairer worlds. Making Care asks how arts organisations can collaborate with, and care for, artists whose work explores care. It suggests that access needs are opportunities for creative exchange, rather than problems to solve. With artists, audiences and organisations, it explores the transformative potential of DIY community care and access provision. 

Artists Josephine Chime, Kyla Harris & Lou Macnamara, Evan Ifekoya, Keith Hennessy and Carmen Papalia & Heather Kai Smith explore care and access in radical and varied ways. This is their co-curated exhibition and programme.

The Making Care group exhibition has been co-facilitated by Nadia Buyse and Lydia Heath at ONCA in a collaborative process with the artists.

Many thanks to Arts Council England for its generous support, and to Rachael Parker BSL Courses.

Image credit: still image from ‘It’s Personal’, 2020, by Kyla Harris and Lou Macnamara.

Image description: At the entrance of Kyla’s house, weighed down by bags and fresh from her journey, Lou and Kyla’s arms are wrapped around each other as they hug tightly.

Josephine Chime

Josephine Chime is an East London-based mixed media artist transgressing ideas of accepted beauty through deconstruction of images of the body. Running through her work is a visual analysis of the onslaught of female homogeneous images and how technology shapes the vision and ideals of what is desirable. 

Kyla Harris & Lou Macnamara

Kyla Harris is a filmmaker and writer who is co-creator and co-writer of a comedy series in development with Roughcut TV and Channel 4. Kyla founded The Other Screen – provocative film events committed to nuanced, fresh representation of disabled people on screen.

Lou Macnamara works as a cinematographer and camera assistant. They co-directed and shot the critically acclaimed Keenie Meenie (2020), a documentary described by Ken Loach as: “Important, dangerous and must be screened.”

Keith Hennessy

Keith Hennessy is a dancer, writer, choreographer, activist, witch, and teacher. He has lived on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone territory in San Francisco since 1982, and he tours internationally. Hennessy’s work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer-feminist, and decolonial movements. He engages practices of improvisation, ritual, collaboration, play, and protest to respond to political crises and intense feelings. 

Read Keith’s essay here.

Provocation x Care (Final 2021)

Evan Ifekoya

Evan Ifekoya is a London based artist, educator and energy worker who through sound, text, video and performance places demands on existing systems and institutions of power to recentre and prioritise the experience and voice of those previously marginalised. Their ongoing investigation considers the somatic experience of listening, the healing potential of sound and spiritual ecologies. They established the collectively run, QTIBPOC (queer, trans*, intersex, black and people of colour) led Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) in 2018. 

Read the transcript of Evan’s audio piece ‘B L I S S F U L Encounter’ here.

Carmen Papalia & Heather Kai Smith

Carmen Papalia is a Vancouver-based non-visual social practice artist with severe chronic and episodic pain. He co-founded the Open Access Foundation for Arts & Culture. This encourages cultural organisations to develop creative and justice-oriented practices around accessibility. Carmen’s work ranges from collaborative performance to public intervention. It responds to the harms of the Medical Model of Disability, a framework that erases disability experience by reinforcing ableist concepts of normalcy.

Heather Kai Smith is a visual artist and educator living in Chicago and Vancouver Island. She uses observation and drawing to explore the messages and potential in archival images of protest, collectivity and intentional communities. She also works in animation, printmaking and installation.