The Panel

Claire Bishop is Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London. She is author of Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate 2005), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (October, 2004) and contributes regularly to Artforum.

Will Bradley is writer and curator living in Glasgow. He co-founded The Modern Institute in 1998 and is currently researching contemporary artists’ projects in the area of social practice and experimental economies at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Artists Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane have been collaborating for many years and have, since 1999, been working on the Folk Archive, an attempt to to explore and document the significant creative culture which exists outside the art world mainstream of the British Isles. Their Folk Archive exhibition is currently touring the UK and they are developing a proposal to return the Greasy Pole of Egremont as a public sculpture.

Chair: Alistair Hudson

Alistair Hudson is Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts, an international art organisation, based on the Cumbrian hill farm of Lawson Park. He previously curated projects for the Government Art Collection, where he developed a public art strategy with Liam Gillick for the new Home Office building in Westminster. He has also worked at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, London and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

The event was followed by the free local film premiere of the documentary ‘Face Off’ by Bryan Dixon on Egremont’s ‘gurning’ (face-pulling) tradition.