Talks and things

2022

• Contributor alongside artists Graeme Miller, John Smith and Cornelia Parker at Miller’s SoundTable discussion event at Re-Link “For 48 hours at the end of September, Graeme Miller’s seminal radio installation, LINKED was live again. “Arguably the largest sculptural entity in the capital, it is comprised of 20 analogue radio transmitters that stretch for 3 miles along the edges of the M11 Link Road in East London marking and re-building the 500 houses demolished for the road. It opened in 2003 as a semi-permanent installation and part of the collection of the Museum of London”. https://www.artsadmin.co.uk/events/re-link/

2021

• Online artist talks & launch of ‘In Conversation with…’ - a sound project with the Royal Conservatoire of Drama in Glasgow

• Interview at Hastings Rocks Film Festival at screening of ‘Excluded’

2019

• ‘Drawing Lines to the Bigger Picture’ keynote - Human Rights Communicators' Workshop, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights

2017

• Chair at event to launch ‘Fight Hate With Rights’ - successfully crowdfunded film with launch event at Reed Smith in London

• Introduction to 20th anniversary screening of The Castle - Prince Charles Cinema, London

• Collaborate 2017 Keynote

2016

• It Bears Repeating - Catch-phrasing connection and care in The Castle’ - Screening Australia seminar series at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College London

2015

• Linked An Immemorial Research Seminar Graeme Miller & Sarah Wishart, Middlesex University

2014

• "Animation & the RSA" - Keynote at Bradford Animation Festival

• "Animation at the RSA" - Keynote at Anibiz, Viborg, Denmark

2013

• "Being together and being apart – How Graeme Miller’s Linked disrupts the audience" Friday Salon: Lifting the Curtain – On Audience and Authorship ICA, London

2012

• “Rank Amateurism: Re-enactment, Radicalism and Reaction”- Performance, Culture, Industry – Performance Studies International - PSi 18 conference – Leeds, UK

2009

• GHost, Hosting II: "Ghost Voices" Sarah Wishart, ‘Something’s coming through – art and the spectre’s voice’, talk and audiovisual 17 November 2009, 6.30pm
  Court Room, Senate House (South Block)University of London, Malet Street, WC1 7HU

2008

• “Contested sight – the 2012 Olympics and the politics of vision”- Interregnum – Performance Studies International -PSi 14 conference – Copenhagen, Denmark

• ‘Lost frequencies: performance, memory and the recharging of site’ – ADSA Conference – Turangawaewae – A Sense of Place – Otaga University, Dunedin, New Zealand

2006

• “Scrambling to remember: in the wake of the changing city’ – Annual Conference of Theatre Research, Toronto

PhD research - completed 2018

A Provenance of Performance: Excavating new art histories through a consideration of re-enactment and the perspectives of the audience.

The full thesis can be accessed here.

The research began as an investigation into public art, site and performance but moved on into a more considered focus on the historical context of my two case studies: Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave and Graeme Miller’s Linked along with the processes and procedures undertaken in the course of making them. This undertaking revealed the multiplicity of narratives and collaborators involved in the work.  By using a specific kind of historical perspective, that of the provenance of the work, a term most often used in art history or archaeology to look at the detail of how each work was created, I was more fully able to think about the importance of re-enactment and different spaces of documentation in the work’s context.

I looked at how documentation of an event might expand and enable the revisiting and new understandings of the work in different ways.  In addition, I looked at the role of audiences and why their memories of the event are an often under-used resource.  In order to address this, both in relation to the investigation into how a provenance of performance might operate and as a method to raise the presence of the expansion of history through the transfer of knowledge through bodies, I use the opportunity to talk to audiences through qualitative methods.  I also consider how a provenance of performance might engage practically with live art documentation. Using over 90k words of interviews from one-to-one discussions, focus groups and group screenings and tours,  I’ve positioned the multiplicity of voices and stories as central to the way I’ve unpacked the work.

Image from archive of photos by Nicholas Middleton on the demolition of over 350 houses in Leyton and Wanstead as part of the building of the A12 link road extension.

Publications

2009
Something’s coming through – art and the spectre’s voice, article published in limited edition catalogue to accompany the GHost performance and art installation show in December