NO ONE IS AN ARTIST 2026

Performance & art exhibition with Ros Bason & Charlotte Searle

based at the Old School House at Krowji, Redruth

The title bends John Donne’s poem No man is an Island. The bell tolls for each of us, we are all answerable to one another. If No One is an Artist, the word stops being a wall and becomes a doorway. No one is an artist. Which means everyone might be.

We came together to find what we have in common – not to agree, but to test whether three artistic practices and an audience reveal an affinity that was always there and simply lacked a frame. Start with a question and the world starts answering: parallels surface, works and people speak across the room. No person or object in the room is author of the meaning alone.

We don’t claim that connections are inevitable. We claim they’re worth looking for. Perhaps an artwork is not something we bring into the room, but something we discover by being there together.

HEVEL

Performance  

Materials: Bell hat, Henry hoover & lamps

Cleaning and art have had a synchronous relationship, synonomous with godliness. There is a history of the sublime. However the ‘rough work’ – as one of Agatha Christie’s lady murderers’ calls it – puts the making; the process of art and cleanliness as beneath our attention.

I have always been fascinated with hierarchy, especially since practising and failing in the spiritual world. The idea of superiority, better, cleverer, never quite agreed with me.

However it all as dust in the wind. Hevel is a Hebrew word that translates as ‘breath’ – an ephemeral, vapour, invisible and yet absolutely fundamental to our being.  My performance plays with these themes in a humorous/disconcerting way.

**written without the use of Chat or ECO Gpt in the name of sustainability and conservation