HOTP!
Hot off the Press!
NEWS:
CONVERSATIONS OVER A BREW: SEASON 2, EPISODE 7 June 2022
In this episode, we hear from Amina Atiq and Fox Irving
Amina is a Yemini-Scouse poet and performance artist whose work explores the identity and experience of the Yemini diaspora living in Liverpool. Amina is also an award-winning community activist and anti-racism campaigner and they are a current Humboldt Residency Fellow.
Fox is a Queer, Working-Class artist, and through their work they investigate how art can be used as a tool of empowerment by their own marginalised communities. They ask: what keeps people in place, what affords fluidity, and what kinds of assembly can be transformative?
Amina and Fox met during Women Working Class North West – a working group led by Fox for Women artists and producers from Working Class or Benefit Class backgrounds in the North West. Amina was one of the artists who took part.
EVENTS:
Women Working Class Podcast and Resources Launch 6th Apr 2022
Heart of Glass is delighted to host the launch of the Women Working Class Podcast and the latest set of resources for female working class artists and art practitioners.
Please join us on Wednesday 20th April at 6pm – 8pm for this special celebration where the North West iteration of Women Working Class will be in conversation with Fox Irving, to showcase and discuss the launch of the free podcasts and online resources. This is the first phase of the new Women Working Class podcast series, each episode has been created as a partnership between one member from our founding project — the South East Women Working Class Group — and one member of the more recently established North West Group.
Some podcasts feature invited guests and some are simply the two artists having a conversation, as they respond to the work ‘Feeling Class’ by academic writer Beverley Skeggs as a provocation, and share their personal experiences of surviving and thriving as working class artists. Supported by Arts Council England and Heart of Glass, these podcasts form the third phase of the Women Working Class project, which focuses on the lived experience of female working-class artists in the UK, and investigates how art, space, and class interact to reinforce or subvert dominant values.
Join Fox Irving and Women Working Class NW for chat, wisdom and newness as they launch the latest WWC podcast and resources.
On Thursday 8th April 2021 we held this special celebration where the founding members of Women Working Class were in conversation with Dr Katie Beswick, to showcase and discuss the free online resource.
This coincides with Fox Irving’s current open call for the second iteration of Women Working Class Group for Women Artists and Producers based in the North West. The North West group follows on from the work founding the South East group, which was supported by Arts Council England and the Live Art Development Agency.
You can find the Women Working Class resource over at womenworkingclass.com – check it out!
OPEN CALLS:
The Working Group will meet online, between 6:00-8:00pm on the following Thursday evenings: 6th, 13th, 20th & 27th May 2021.
Heart of Glass is delighted to be hosting Women Working Class (WWC), four weekly Working Group gatherings led by Fox Irving with women artists or producers working in Live Art, Performing or Visual Arts of lower-class origins to investigate how art/space/class interact to reinforce or subvert dominant values.
Hearkening back to the feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s, this group will host an ongoing conversation among artists and producers to deconstruct hierarchies of space in the landscape of art by sharing our experiences and strategies, dreams and schemes, theories and knowhow.
The idea is not for a group to come together to talk about class, but to imagine/practice ways for art spaces to better serve class diverse artists doing groundbreaking, world-changing work; discuss how issues of class influence what we make; and explore what our relationships are to just being and surviving in the art world and how it can liberate us to do the radical.
In these gatherings the group will consider ways that we “drag up” to navigate art spaces, and operational ways to make art spaces more accessible to lower class people. The group will also look to break down the language of the, often inaccessible, art world and instead give space for women of these classes to be heard in the arena.
This group will be the North-West iteration of the Group, following on from the launch of the South-East group hosted by Arts Council England and the Live Art Development Agency in 2020.
Fox Irving’s art is shaped by the precarious identity they inhabit as queer/femme/working class. They ask: what keeps people in place, what affords fluidity, and what kinds of assembly can be transformative? With a playful, D.I.Y approach informed by activist strategies and centering collaboration, Fox investigates how art can be used by marginalised communities that they are part of as a tool of empowerment. Fox was born and raised in the North West and now lives in the South East.