Skip to main content

DIY: 2019 – Jenny Gaskell: Have you tried screaming your heart out and pretending to be Cher?

Creating a connection practice based on karaoke and daydreaming and oversharing and shared chips

Deadline for applications: 2pm, Thursday 20 June
This DIY is supported by Lancaster Arts

Project summary

This residency looks at all the things we do which make us feel awe for the world and the people in it – the things which make us have moments of ‘I feel so connected to everything!’ or ‘I know exactly what you mean!!’ or ‘I love you so much my chest hurts!!!’  We’ll look towards making the foundations of a personal practice to help us live in the world with connection and empathy and resilience.

Western culture is buzzing its tits off about wellbeing practice at the moment (have you tried morning power poses? Have you tried colouring in?) which is great for individual health but as the world tries to divide us up, where’s the practice which helps us remember that everyone and everything is bound together?  In a culture sceptical of religious doctrine, it feels like we’ve thrown the empathetic baby out with the dogmatic bathwater.

This residency will draw upon the everyday things we do to make ourselves feel connected and help us work out how this can be respected as something we require to make ourselves feel okay and present and alive. Instead of following pseudo health gurus (have you tried steam cleaning your vagina?) or appropriating from faith practices we don’t subscribe to, can we say ‘it’s actually quite an important part of my connection practice to scream my heart out and pretend to be Cher in sweaty karaoke hotboxes, while friends throw their arms in the air and scream back because they love me and they feel it too’. Is there spirituality in daydreaming out of bus windows and is there a bonding ritual in sharing chips. Can we consider these things sacred?

How to apply

This is a workshop for anyone who uses connection/collaboration/exchange in their practice or spends time supporting/ holding space for people.  It’s for people who bring something of themselves to their art and their life and use this to connect with others.  It’s for open hearted people who might be in danger of burnout if they don’t find space to fuel up again, and get back what they’re giving out.

Dates, times and location

Dates: Thursday 19 September – Sunday 22nd September 2019, 11am – 5pm
Location: Lancaster Arts, Lancaster

The artists

I’m Jenny Gaskell. I make projects which are a combination of performing, producing, participation and pratting about. I’m interested in connection, art that happens in everyday places and creating scenarios for people to take agency.  I’ve made projects in parks, parties, trams and cafes, and right now I’m co-designing a bedroom for Art B&B in Blackpool.  My work has been supported by Leftcoast, Contact, Lancaster Arts, People’s History Museum and MIF. I used to work extensively as a theatre producer, until two years ago when I took an 18 month sabbatical to become the leader of secular congregation which celebrates life (it wasn’t a cult). I also once became a YouTube snooker presenter with a series that got shortlisted for a BBC3 commission, so you know, it takes all sorts. I’m currently supported by a yearlong residency with Islington Mill Art Academy. jennygaskell.com

For questions about this DIY, please contact the artist.

Banner image credit:

Image credit: Layla Sailor

Part of DIY: 2019

Professional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.

DIY: 2019

DIY

Professional development projects – BY artists FOR artists – across the UK.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Adam Patterson: Green Screen Charivari

DIY

Parading for the right to be unfixed, letting surfaces slip and slide, transgressing horizons, bodies, identities and worlds

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Adriana Disman: The confusing space between

DIY

A residential workshop for multi-racial performance people on an island in the English Channel.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Ania Bas & Amy Pennington: Performance for shy people. Playwriting for dyslexics.

DIY

Two day experiment at performance production by shy people and performance writing by bad spellers.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Bean & Nicola Woodham: (de)coding performance

DIY

Learn to build and program wearable sensors for use in sound based live art.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Beverly Thomas: The Silence

DIY

A 4 day residential workshop for artists of Colour to explore silence and revitalize their creativity.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Cade and MacAskill: The Making of Pinocchio

DIY

A playfully theatrical DIY for trans, intersex, non-binary and genderqueer artists exploring notions of realness through the desires of a wooden puppet to be “a real boy”.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Call for Participants

DIY

Applications are now open for 24 national professional development workshops by artists, for artists

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Call for Proposals

DIY

Invitation to propose unusual and exciting artists’ workshops

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Charlie Ashwell & Es Morgan: ANDROGYNY!

DIY

A weekend of dance and discussion for anyone interested in thinking about gender through dancing.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Claire MacDonald: Curse Bless me Now

DIY

Daring to curse. Blessing when the world is ending.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Daniel Oliver: Scripting Unscriptable Performance

DIY

Writing down and getting someone else to perform performances that can not or should not be written down and given to someone else to perform.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Edythe Woolley: SWEAT: the sky leaks I leak

DIY

Un-straightening, leaking and oozing towards queer entanglement, through an embodied practice of sweating.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Fox Irving & Eva Peskin: Step One! Sharing

DIY

A two-day workshop on the art of sharing in collaborative encounters for artists in the North West.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Jack Tan & Annie Jael Kwan: Potluck Stories

DIY

A weekend of intercultural grocery shopping, culinary adventures and sharing stories about ingredients, journeys, migration, nationality and material culture.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson: To The Ritual Knowledge Of Remembering

DIY

3 day immersive workshop, exploring the body, ancestral memory and the land. To liberate creative actions towards a Decolonised Future.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Liat Rosenthal & Alex Eisenberg: Shiduchs, Shabbes and Shmucks

DIY

Exploring artist responses to Jewishness and antisemitism by spending Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest) together.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Oozing Gloop: COMMUCRACY NOW

DIY

Creating a revolutionary vanguard that will develop and present a new economy of government; COMMUCRACY.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Phoebe Patey-Ferguson & FK Alexander & Andre Neely: THE CULT

DIY

Are you feeling fed up and pissed off? Are you confused and overwhelmed? Are you isolated and unfulfilled? Are you ready to welcome ART into your life? THE CULT WELCOMES YOU.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Quiplash: Unsightly Drag

DIY

Bringing visually impaired queers and drag performers together to share skills and fuck shit up.

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Stacy Makishi: Proud Mary!

DIY

What’dya get when you cross: Tina Turner, Mary Wollstonecraft and The Virgin Mary? A Proud Mary! The triple-decker-mother of workshops!

Read more

DIY: 2019 – The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein: ’Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’

DIY

Reimagining Scale, Ambition and Access for Monsters in Performance, through the lens of Feminist Sci-Fi

Read more

DIY: 2019 – Tim Jeeves & Lena Simic: The Party Calls You

DIY

Between climate breakdown, austerity and Brexit, the UK is facing its greatest political crisis in decades. What place is there for artists within the UK’s political institutions?

Read more

DIY: 2019 – VORTESSA (Lady Helena Vortex and Miss Giovanna Maria Casetta): GILF Island

DIY

Pack your cases, ready to embark on a Dark Romance of the ageing self, Exploring, releasing and adoring the inner GILF

Read more

Also

DIY: 2017 – Katherina Radeva: On Otherness

DIY

Identity is a complex thing. Difference is beautiful.

Read more

DIY: 2017 – Tara Fatehi Irani: Her Eyes Under the Bridge

DIY

Entangling personal stories of leaving behind and moving ahead

Read more

DIY: 2016 – Curious (Leslie Hill & Helen Paris) ‘PRIVATE KEEP OUT!’

DIY

A weekend by the sea side exploring the very British obsession with privacy

Read more

10 Years of DIY

DIY

DIY artists talk about their experiences on video

Read more

DIY 2020: Nwando Ebizie – Lucid Kink

DIY

An intimate online pleasure LAB for disabled queers exploring Kink as an artistic tool for self-care.

Read more

DIY

DIY

Unusual professional development projects conceived and run BY artists FOR artists

Read more

DIY: 2017 – Gareth Cutter & Paul Hughes: Men From Behind

DIY

a creative enema of filthy writing, subversive image making and public interventions ‘via the back door’

Read more

Donation

£