AIC Mentoring Award Information Session with John Conway

The information session is about answering any questions you might have about making an application to the AIC Mentoring Award. Mentor John Conway will speak about their own practice and journey as a collaborative socially engaged artists and explore some of the principles of collaborative socially engaged arts practice. The session will be followed with a Q&A.

Some of the areas that will be explored include:

• Conceptualising durational collaborative socially engaged methodologies beyond ‘traditional’ models such as arts facilitation / workshops / teaching classes
• Building and sustaining relationships with participants / communities and stakeholders
• Ethics around collaborative practice and establishing ethical frameworks
• Inclusion and access in collaborative and socially engaged practice

• Establishing a community outside of a formal, registered organization

About the Mentoring Award

The Mentoring Award sits within a suite of offerings under the Artist in the Community Scheme (AIC). It aims to offer capacity building and arts practice development for collaborative socially engaged artists. Through the Mentoring Award, artists from the Artist Mentor Panel will be available as mentors to emerging practitioners, artists with a strong interested in/transitioning into collaborative socially engaged arts, artists who find themselves on the margins and feel they are underrepresented in the field of collaborative socially engaged arts, for example due to displacement or migration, and artists facing particular challenges in developing their collaborative socially engaged arts practice. There will be five artist mentors and five artist mentees.

This opportunity is for collaborative socially engaged artists at any career stage who identify with the above and are seeking support from a critical friend/guide as they develop their projects. For the five selected artists, the award offers an eight-month period of capacity building and arts practice development through dialogue with an experienced collaborative socially engaged artist mentor.

We strongly advise potential applicants to attend this session.

John Conway is one of Ireland’s foremost socially engaged visual artists. His work is characterised by innovative multi-disciplinary projects produced in response to sensitive and challenging community contexts.

His projects occur across art forms including sculpture, installation, moving image, audio, theatre, virtual reality, publication, and curation. His prolific working process is characterized by experimentation with sculptural and artistic forms, acute listening, sensitivity to context and a robust interrogation of artistic processes across collaborative contextual work and formalised gallery output.

Image: The New Normal, John Conway with breast cancer survivors. A previous AIC Scheme funded project.