" " is a series of conversations published by NERO editions. Editors Adam Gibbons and Eva Wilson are interested in how art production puts meaning and information into motion – through strategies such as “dispersion, spamming, print, data, sound, language, infection, fashion, networks, disturbance, myth, parasitizing, or infiltration.” The series investigates the political and social scope of networks established via dissemination and feedback. How does one constitute or address a community? How does content transform through the process of its mediation?

#3 Becky Beasley in conversation with Claire Scanlon follows on Beasley’s seventeen-year unrequited correspondence with her former tutor Scanlon. The publication documents their reunion, now as friends, as they share details about their lives and practices, linked by the exchange of letters and inherently by their roles as women and mothers. The artists discuss strategies for maintaining presence through periods of happiness or adversity, making note of methods and ‘superpowers’ that have allowed them to pursue their practices despite familial needs, material limitations, or personal struggles (Beasley describes her battle with depression). They share references, methodologies, experiences and lessons of survival, care and resistance, ultimately pondering the role of the artist and her ‘response-ability’ to societal issues.

Finally, touching upon the academic framework for practice-based research, Beasley and Scanlon advocate for methods to navigate such institutional conditioning. If art practices can be forms of reasoning, artists who are required to write within an academic context should work in consonance with their own work, resisting at all costs the injunction to produce pure commentary about their own practice. The book itself avoids this trope and instead opens the conversation to readers and practitioners who also face these mundane yet existential questions.

Becky Beasley lives and works in St. Leonards on Sea, East Sussex, UK

Claire Scanlon lives and works in Lewes, East Sussex, UK

Adam Gibbons and Eva Wilson live and work in London, UK. They are currently developing a research project with la Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland. Quote from Gibbons/Wilson on NERO editions.

Images Courtesy " "/NERO