If you have been an audience member or participant in my work, do consider sending some thoughts and reflections to Rebecca French, who's putting together a piece for the forthcoming book on my work, 'Kira O'Reilly: Untitled (Bodies)'.
Co/editor Harriet Curtis explains, 'we're aiming to get a broad range of responses from audience members across the globe - share this post widely! Please send contributions to Rebecca (details below) - the deadline now extended until 1st August.'
Needless to say this book project is a significant and extraordinary project that I am very delighted to see come about.
Rebecca French writes:
'As you may know, the forthcoming monograph on Kira O’Reilly’s work, co-edited by Harriet Curtis and Martin Hargreaves, will be published in 2017 by Intellect Live, together with the Live Art Development Agency.
Kira has asked me to write a text for her book. Kira and I were at art school together in the mid-1990s and we have a 20-year friendship and relationship with each other’s work.
With my ongoing interest in participation and engagement, I have proposed inviting contributions from people who have had direct experience of Kira’s work – as viewer and/or participant – and editing these audience responses into a fabric of words, which complicate, compliment, interrogate, critique, laud and unpick Kira’s distinctive practice. A key characteristic of this text will be its deliberate aim to combine diverse responses from a great many audience members, who have experienced Kira’s work over the last 20 years.
I am inviting contributions to this text. You could contribute a word, several words, a sentence, a paragraph, an anecdote, a snapshot, a feeling, a response, from you as an audience/participant in Kira’s artwork. It could have been written at the time or just now, previously published or not.
I intend to credit all contributors to the text in the footnotes, away from the main text, which means that your name will be printed, but not linked to the actual text you contribute, so please feel free to write whatever you feel will add to a diverse viewpoint of Kira’s work. (It is also possible to not print your name at all if you prefer – so please let me know if you would like to contribute anonymously.)
Please email your words to me at info@frenchmottershead.com, with KIRA BOOK as the subject heading. Please include how you would like to be credited – your full name, anonymously etc.'