Blackpool Weekender 2: The Coast is Queer

Venue : Abingdon Studios, Blackpool

This Weekender took place between 22 - 25 October 2021.

UKNA’s fourth ‘Weekender’, The Coast is Queer was an invitation to artists to explore the trajectory and longevity of queer culture through collective conversations, facilitated workshops and site specific interventions as a means to animate and examine identity through a multitude of lenses and alongside a diverse coming together of artists across the UK.

The weekender was presented in partnership with Abingdon Studios and Garth Gratrix. Garth Gratrix is an internationally successful queer artist and curator and founding Director of Abingdon Studios. His work explores the junctures between sculpture, installation, architecture and space as ways to host queer conversation and visual language that explores personal, social and cultural history associated with LGBQIA+ community and lived experiences into minimal and contemplative spaces. He also runs a nomadic platform titled In Collaboration With (ICW), whereby the artist testbeds ways to collaborate across disciplines with other uk based queer artists. Abingdon Studios, recognised as one of the ‘UK's Artist led Hot 100’ spaces, developed by a-n with artist Kevin Hunt, and described as best visual arts venue in Blackpool in the Guardian 2017.

The weekender did not seek to define the term queer, in favour of welcoming artists to spend a period of work/leisure discussing and testing the ideas, concerns and potential around visual language, its ownership and its fluidity. How do artists stay open, experimental and take risks in our current climate and what is the future for queer artistic practices?

UKNA’s ‘Weekenders’ are micro residencies and an opportunity to meet other artists, collaborate and replenish thinking and possible directions for your practice thereafter. As part of the residency, there were facilitated workshops with UK based artists working with contemporary queer culture alongside founding Director of Abingdon Studios and artist, Garth Gratrix, exploring language, politics and colour. This led to a site specific intervention made in collaboration with the selected artists that travelled unapologetically from place to place.

The participating artists are:

Laolu Alatise and Yasmin Begum

A queer people of colour founded collective founded by Yasmin Begum and Laolu Alatise and based in Cardiff, Wales. They explore concepts of race, class, sexuality and gender in their work and this is heavily informed by postcolonial and decolonial theory. They use a variety of mediums, including digital art, literature, hands-on work [such as workshops] and video. They recently live-tweeted a set of race riots on their 100th anniversary to explore narratives of historiography and heritage of Black and minority ethnic people in Wales. They have both been funded to create chapbooks by Literature Wales, and have been delivering zine making workshops across Wales. They are about to embark on a residency for National Theatre Wales around the legacy of La Casa del Bernada Alba, a play by queer Catalan playwright Federico Garcia Lorca.

Maz Murray

Maz Murray is a trans masculine working class artist from Basildon, Essex. Recent work includes a sequel novel to their film Laindon, commissioned by ICA. Maz collaborated with community groups working in the half-demolished Laindon Shopping Centre to create a sci-fi-comedy-mockumentary about the town's redevelopment. They are currently working on a project 'Trans Panto (working title)' which imagines a future where trans and queer identities are not longer on trend, and former trans celebs are reduced to working the panto circuit. Last year they worked on a performance project called 'Straight Conversion Therapy' where they ad-hacked public space, and put on a workshop for straight women to learn how to be gay. Maz writes cultural and political commentary at the right lube with Hava Carvajal. They use this platform to organise fortnightly sober accessible hang outs for trans people in London.

Sarah-Joy Ford

Sarah-Joy Ford is an Artist, PGR and Associate Lecturer at Manchester School of Art. Exhibitions include Banner Culture, British Textile Biennale (Blackburn) and Weaving Europe: The World as Mediation, Shelly Residence (Paphos). Funded projects include: The Guild, Cut Cloth: Contemporary Textiles and Feminism and Hard Craft. Her work has been commissioned by The Yorkshire Year of the Textiles, Processions: a hundred years of suffrage and Beyond the Binary at The Pitt Rivers Museum. She is the recipient of a NWCDTP Award for her PhD. She is co-director of the Queer Research Network Manchester and a member of Proximity Collective. Her current work explores quilt making as an affective methodology for making visible and re-visioning lesbian archival material in British feminist archives and personal collections. Through the embodied materiality of textiles and an affinity with the domestic, the works slip between public and private moments, protest and parade, desire and loss.

Scarlett Turner

Scarlett is a non-binary artist who works across disciplines of contemporary dance, improvisation, theatre and drag. They gained a degree in dance from Brighton University and De Montfort University (Upper 2.1 Degree). Their main focal point as a director is to explore “queer ideologies” in relationship to the LGBT and under-represented communities. Expanding and challenging the “in-between” views, theories and so-political themes of human identity. Inspired by personal stories that are moulded by their interdisciplinary performance practices.

Will Hughes

Through kinetic and static sculpture predominantly, Will explores what it is to be living an existence as a queer non-binary person in the 21st Century. Through a year long studio fellowship at Spike Island (Sep 2018- Sep 2019), Will was able to realise a new body of work relating to their struggles with belonging, running away, identity and sexuality. This culminated in a solo show at the Roper Gallery in Bath. All of their works are titled with song lyrics which adds a deeper meaning to the work which the viewer can relate to and explore.

'You can be too boring, but you can never be too seductive' (Donatella Versace)