#24:
Project Artworks
7 – 27 October 2022
Online
Mascara Film Club presents an online screening of two films by Project Artworks, No Church in the Wild (2015) and Meet me at the Station (2016).
No Church in the Wild is edited from recordings made while in the company of four young men with autism as they travel through the Sussex countryside. The protagonists finally arrive at Ivy Church in Romney, a building which dates back to the 14th century and is one of the last operational churches in England without electricity. The film explores the concepts of congregation and sanctuary through the sensitive and diverse investigations of the open countryside and the church by the four young men. While it reveals the often unconventional and intimate interactions between the participants as they negotiate their journey, the film questions more widely what it means to be a group and to feel safe.
In 2016 Project Art Works conducted several innovative and investigative projects that focused on how people with complex support needs experience built space and other environments. Each survey resulted in beautifully constructed sound and film documents of the experience. This practice aligns with the psychogeographic practice of investigation, the dérive or drift, and refers to unplanned journeys through urban landscapes and the way in which the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct the travellers. Meet me at the Station was one of these surveys. This was a Super 8 film transferred to digital film with sound.
About Project Art Works
Project Art Works collaborates with people with complex support needs, families and circles of support. Our practice intersects art and care, responding to neurodivergence, its gifts and impacts. Challenging paradigms of inclusion, it spans direct practical and holistic support, film, events, projects and exhibitions.
Our studios provide the conditions for a broad range of autonomous and collaborative practices with neurodivergent artists, who take part on their own terms. Alongside the studios, the Support Collective brings together people who care for people with complex support needs where we share our experience and protect our rights through training, resources and advocacy.
Human connection and what it reveals about identity and how we view each other are explored within our work. Our practice continues to respond to the functional and ethical structures of diligence and care, respecting self-determination and privacy whilst working towards greater visibility and understanding of neurodiversity in culture.
Project Art Works is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation. Alongside neurodiverse artists and makers, the collective includes paid and unpaid caregivers who help each other to navigate through the complexities of health and social care systems.