Conway Actants

Conway Actants is a project that aims to make Conway Hall accessible for artistic intervention via site specific installations.

Conway Actants is an artistic and curatorial collaboration between Deborah Gardner and Jane Millar. It is a unique, visual art project which directly responds to Conway Hall's spaces, ethos, activities and archive. For example, photographic collaboration revealing the more hidden spaces of Conway Hall and scenes of the library at dusk hang both inside and on the outside the building, facing out onto Red Lion Square. Hexagonal structures suspended from ceiling windows link the bee hives on the roof with the collective interior space, mixed media paintings explore spaces, mixed media paintings will explore spaces and structures propagated by human and non-human agency and a series of assemblage works respond to archive portraits of key figures in the history of Conway Hall.

Composers Cynthia Millar and Roly Porter have also collaborated on a sound work in a response to the piano auctions at Conway Hall and the itinerant nature of the objects and music.

In March 2016, the Club Critical Theory group from Southend will also be presenting a free event and discussion at Conway Hall as part of our intervention there. Club Critical Theory is invited to intervene during the project, to create a critical space for a one evening event. Giles Tofield presents CCT, Andrew Branch (UEL) presents 'Whose Space? Understanding Entitlement' and Tony D Sampson (UEL) discusses 'Assemblages, Contagion & Conway Hall'; linking to themes of space and propagation in Gardner and Millar's work, followed by an open discussion with the audience.

Deborah Gardner and Jane Millar are both artists and lecturers who have collaborated in several national and international projects.