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Project Profile
Visual Artists' News Sheet | July – August 2021
Array Collective, Pride, 2019; photograph by Laura O’Connor, courtesy Array and Tate Press Office.
Joanne Laws: We were thrilled to hear that Array has been nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, along with four other UK-based art collectives. Do you have a sense of the work that led to your nomination?
The North is Now JOANNE LAWS INTERVIEWS MEMBERS OF THE BELFASTBASED ART COLLECTIVE, ARRAY.
Emma Campbell: It still does feel very bizarre when people congratulate us! As far as we understood from the jurors this year, they were specifically trying to look at arts collectives who had in some way kept up a version of their practice during lockdown, perhaps around issues of community cohesion. They also mentioned the ‘Jerwood Collaborate!’ exhibition we did in London, but to be honest, our social media presence seems to have been a big part of it. We were also asked to do a video for A-N, because they had a special series on artists and social change, which the jurors mentioned. Clodagh Lavelle: Normally nominations are based on an exhibition that has happened previously, but because no galleries were really open last year, it focused on groups who were still visibly trying to work together in isolation. We created videos together, made online work and kept that sense of community alive through birthday nights and dress-up Zooms like the QFT screening of the DUP Opera, for example. JL: What was the rationale for originally establishing the Array collective? Did you have any founding principles, in terms of your collective identity, or how you might define a discourse or build communities for your collaborative practice? EC: It happened organically at first, because there are lots of overlaps between friendship, art practice and community practice, but also because we were all just at the same rallies and protests. It wasn’t as if we were dropping into another community to speak on behalf of anyone else; all
