Artists, curators and writers each move through the world differently, and working relationships between them can be tricky at times. So what’s it like when one man is all three? Welcome to the North-East centred world of Aidan Moesby.
Two consistent threads that bind together his multifaceted practice are research and conversation. How fortunate therefore to have the opportunity of a wide-ranging chat with him as part of the preparation for these few paragraphs.
Greetings often begin with observations on the weather. In Moesby’s case this could continue all day, as the subject and all its connotations (planetary to personal, material and conceptual) are an enduring core of his productivity. The weather theme, and its larger climate context, is invoked across a practice that embraces visual artforms, performance, installations, text-based works, technology, social engagement, debate and advocacy. Broader themes open out to civic planning, climate change, loneliness, mental health, equity and inclusion, and the global march of digitisation. Languages (in the broadest sense), and codes of communication and understanding, are a strong component.
He works in a responsive way – listening, waiting, researching and absorbing what places and situations may reveal. There is a deep humanity and compassion in this method, borne along by a persistent and quietly ferocious caring about things that matter. Collaboration is often key to Moesby’s practice, and includes partnerships with scientists, philosophers and local communities. The liminal threshold between the physical world and the emotional world is his special expert zone.
Art was not always going to be the vehicle for Moesby’s missions. Initial career steps included environmental science, conservation and child psychotherapy, until the traumas of the latter were overtaken by his own mental health journey.
Postgraduate studies on the role of art in therapy, and in curating digital media, launched him into the artist/curator/advocate role in which he flourishes today.
Moesby has had exhibitions, residencies and curating engagements in a range of countries, including a special affinity for Scandinavia. In the UK he has worked with MIMA, DASH, Dundee Contemporary Arts, The Tetley, Unlimited, Watershed Bristol and many others, and has been an active Associate Artist with Disability Arts Online and a Disability Associate with the Salisbury International Arts Festival.
On a residency at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in 2022 he investigated the Bard’s many references to the weather, and he compared the climate anomalies of the Elizabethan era with those of today. The outdoor sculpture, ‘Breathing Space’, is literally a space enclosed by brackets, alluding to Shakespeare’s use of parentheses as a textual device for emphasis. This simple and elegant work deftly follows Moesby’s frequent use of text in other projects, while here modestly refraining from proffering any actual words in the home of the master. It is rich in metaphor.
It is metaphor that interests Moesby most in his studies of weather. He has created a multidisciplinary body of work that charts a meteorology of the psyche, our individual emotional complexities and our societal crises of disconnection and mental ill-health. The links between external and internal are tangible too, not only the weather’s influence on mood, but the bigger psycho-social distress occasioned by impacts of climate change.
A project developed through Disability Arts Online and residencies at Kulttuuri Kauppia, Finland and The Art House, Wakefield saw Moesby as both artist and curator creating the ‘Emotional Weather Bureau’ (2019) as a platform for creative collaborations in galleries, non-arts spaces, at festival events and online.
Northern festivals were also the venue for ‘Between Stillness and Storm’ (2017, with Tim Shaw). This outdoor sculptural installation re-purposed weather balloons, anemometers and other meteorological instruments to generate data-driven words, solar-powered sounds and lights at night, reflecting on the climatic conditioning of our cultural states.
Moesby’s most ingenious foray into digital possibilities is perhaps ‘Sagacity – The Periodic Table of Emotions’, commissioned initially by Dundee Contemporary Arts and New Media Scotland in 2015, and versioned subsequently at different scales for occasions such as the Lumiere festival in Durham in 2017 and the COP26 UN climate talks in Glasgow in 2021. Mimicking the periodic table of the elements, it organises a classification of emotions, which are individually illuminated with prevalence and intensity determined by live, location-specific frequency analysis of terms being used on Twitter (now X). A real-time barometer of the mix of feelings in a city or at an event is thus presented, with more nuanced distinctions between states than our normal reductive summaries such as “optimistic” or “depressed” allow. The piece subtly folds a message about attitudes to mental health into an inventive public engagement digital artwork.
Some works connect best when the artist’s creative jeopardy and personal vulnerabilities are part of the focus. A visceral honesty and uncynical compassion mark Moesby’s practice in particular, and he navigates expertly between aesthetic enthralment and outrage at injustices. A synthesis of many strands is offered in the installation and multi-format performance ‘I was Naked, Smelling of Rain’, which was developed in 2018 with Daniel Bye, has appeared in several venues including the Edinburgh Fringe, and was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2021. It is a warm and poignant storytelling of connectedness and isolation, intersections between climate change, wellbeing and culture, and the nature of presence and absence in modern life.
To many, Aidan Moesby will be known above all as a dogged champion of agendas on disability arts, particularly in relation to equity and access in psychological (not just visible physical) ways, for better embracing of neurodiversity.
He has chaired or contributed to numerous panels examining what can be done to address the barriers that cause people with disabilities to be significantly less represented in the arts sector than in the population at large. This is despite the importance of the arts themselves in helping to create the visibility and understanding that is needed.
The issues go beyond adapting venues and policies for commissioning, says Moesby. Heavily ‘ableist’ norms of art-world critique and the power structures of institutions (for visual and object-based artforms in particular) need to shift, and assumptions about the supposed inclusiveness of the online realm need to be challenged. He cites exceptions where things are more positive – most notably MIMA in Middlesbrough, where he was an Associate Curator in 2020 and where he is now curating a new programme to open this summer.
Similar issues attend Moesby’s focus on climate change, given the inequalities in where the impacts fall most heavily, and in people’s different abilities to adapt. Here again he promotes the special role of the arts, and diverse perspectives in general, in navigating the societal shifts involved. As it becomes increasingly apparent that we cannot solve these problems with the same machinery that caused them in the first place, this voice must be heard.
Moesby curates and makes art not as an end in itself, but as a catalyst for conversations towards positive social change. It can be tricky to avoid issue-based work being instrumentalised for ulterior ‘activist’ purposes, but in this case the meanings unfold in ways that advance agendas while maintaining artistic integrity.
We return then, in our conversation, to the curator’s gatekeeper role in our cultural values, the artist’s power to unlock enriched understandings through metaphor, and the ‘synecdoche’ singular perspective that can resonate more powerfully than a whole library of data. Oh, and reasons why the North East is the place to look for some of Britain’s best talent in all this. Thankfully we have Aidan Moesby showing us the way.
Dave Pritchard is an independent consultant based in Northumberland.
Corridor8 have partnered with Axis on three newly-commissioned pieces of writing, engaging with the work of Axis artists. Similar to Corridor 8, Axis champions and supports contemporary visual arts in the UK. As an organisation, they provide artists with resources, opportunities, and platforms to support and showcase their work. Their aim is to democratise access to contemporary art. To learn more about Axis, or to become a member, please visit www.axisweb.org
Published 29.05.2024 by Lesley Guy in Explorations
1,388 words
