Davina and I, at our Arrivals + Departures event at Artsadmin, Sept 2018.
Us in Portland, taking our kids on our British Council Fellowship.
I'm half artist duo YARA + DAVINA. At the heart of our practice is a focus on making work that responds to site, context and audience. We use formats from popular culture to make works that are playful and accessible from maypoles, to football matches, whistles, to jokes, gospel choirs, to teaching syllabus, writing quizzes, making mini golf, or subverting games.
We are currently working on an exciting commission with the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in 2023 &24, and earlier in the year worked with South London Gallery on a commission called Goals.
We had a very busy 3 years touring Arrivals + Departures, in the UK and internationally with Artsadmin as our producers. You can see us talk about this large scale public artwork work with Jonathon Reekie, the director of Somerset House, where it premiered in Sep-Nov 2020. In 2021, it has toured to BAM, in New York Theater Spektakal in Zurich, Brighton Festival, Norwich & Norfolk Festival, and Freedom Festival in Hull. It will be touring to a number of other locations in 2022.
We recently finished 3 large scale commissions including Kick Off, with the National Trust, What’s Your Cup Of Tea? with Museum of the Home, London, Slow Down, with Liberty UK Festivals.
We began collaborating over the last 12 years, when we both became mothers, and felt a sense of urgency to address some of the issues we ourselves were going through, as artists and mothers, with limited time but still the same ambition. In 2016 we were joint British Council Fellows at Portland State University exploring issues around Motherhood, and sustaining an arts practice. Our work was part of the article Contemporary Mamactivist Artists: A Forum on Maternal Activist Art for the Studies in the Maternal Special Issue on The Everyday Maternal Practice: Activist Structures in Creative Work, Summer written by Natalie Loveless, published in 2016, and were commissioned to create Quiz: Which Vacuum Cleaner suits your personality type? for Idle Women, as part of "The Grand Domestic Revolution" .