Open Discussion: The Workshop in Artistic Practice

Recent shifts in the political context and funding landscape have resulted in a plethora of arts projects with workshops as an add on, box ticking exercises to secure increasingly scarce cash.

Set within Verity-Jane Keefe’s exhibition The Artist, The Community, The Council and The Philanthropist this critical conversation will ask what it means for workshops to be an integral part of an artist’s practice? What happens when they are more than opportunities for participation, instead generating real agency in communities? And what are the ethics of holding the residue of workshop activity in artworks and exhibitions?

CONTRIBUTORS

Richard Phoenix integrates painting, writing, music and facilitation, to explore themes such as rhythm, harmony and dissonance. Phoenix’s unique approach to painting and art-making has been influenced by many years of playing in D.I.Y. bands and his work as a creative support working within learning disability arts. He is an Associate Artist for Heart n Soul and his full length work of non-fiction about their young-people’s project Do Your Own Thing was published by Rough Trade Books in 2023.

His work has been exhibited in solo a group shows in the UK and internationally at Alice Amati, curated by Devonshire Collective (2025), Project 78 Gallery, St Leonards-on-Sea (2025); Wanigrupa Gallery, Bandung, Indonesia (2024); Flatlands Projects, Bexhill-on-Sea (2023); Walker Gallery, Liverpool (2023); Staffordshire St, London (2023); Sanford Vitrine, London (2022); Tate Exchange, London (2019), and V&A Museum, London (2019), amongst others.

Verity-Jane Keefe is a visual artist working predominantly in the public realm to explore the complex relationship between people and place. She is interested in the role of the artist within urban regeneration and how experiential practice can touch upon and raise ambitions of existing and invisible communities. Since 2003 she has been developing new models of practice within municipal, collaborative contexts – following long term residency approaches that produce outcomes that explore the politics of participation, transferring agency and power along the way and making the work public in both the public realm and institutional contexts.

Her practice takes many forms, but always starts with lurking, place and archives. The incidental, the overheard, the conversation, the observed. Working with text, moving image, site-based research, archive, installation, writing, print, social structures and object. Recent projects include Towner Eastbourne Public Art Commission (2023–2024), If All The Walls Could Speak, St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London (2019-2023), Dagenham to Detroit, Detroit (US) and Dagenham, London (UK) (2023), Hospitalfield Residency, Scotland (2021–2022), Lived In Architecture: Becontree at 100, Royal Institute of British Architects Architecture Gallery, London (2019–2022), Living Together, Becontree Estate, London (2022), The Moorings Sociable Club, Lead Artist on the Design Team, (2016–2021), Thamesmead Artist in Residence, Thamesmead, London (2018–2019), The Mobile Museum, London (2013–2018).

Jo Capper is an artist, curator, and educator with a strong desire to heal, restore, and do good in the world. She creates alternative regenerative cultural and living practices that start with simple acts of growing or sharing food – embodying the cultural specifics of human conviviality. Through building communal practices she is interested in the phenomenology of the making process and imagining new structures for communal living. Often starting with pain or conflict her work gets in between these intersections and uses trauma-informed approaches to remedy and regenerate.

She develops restorative happenings and revolutions that merge ecology and humanity then entangles itself with magic and wildness. Her work materialises through human interaction, through working together “We tend, nurture and grow things”. Placing emphasis on research through practice, learning through doing, interdisciplinary and collaborative exchange. Jo has worked with Grand Union since 2018 and instigated their Collaborative Programme – The Growing Project.

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