What if you were in charge? What if this space were yours to play with? In Laure Prouvost’s If It Was (2015), the artist imagines how she would remake a famous German institution if it were her own art museum. Exploding our expectations of what a gallery can be, she proposes to introduce sleeping cats, singing staff, a giant surfable wave, raspberries on demand and art that can be touched, “improved”... and even licked.

 

As part of their two-year 'community takeover', John Hansard Gallery invited me to collaborate with poet and researcher Sarah Hayden to design a workshop, inviting visitors to imagine and record—in audio and as a zine—their visions of the ideal gallery. Using recordings gathered at this and two other Voices in the Gallery events that took place at John Hansard Gallery in May 2019, I produced a four part audio collage made from the voices of people in Southampton's community. This work, titled Our Voices, Our Visions, was installed at John Hansard Gallery from 30 August 2019 to 17 October 2019.