Becky Shaw
Birmingham City University
How Deep is your Love? Social art practice as infrastructure
Panel: Community
In 2019 artist Becky Shaw made, ‘How Deep is your Love?’ for the City of Calgary. The artwork responded to a brief to ‘explore Calgarian’s emotional attachment to their water infrastructure’, following catastrophic floods in 2013. The resulting work (live art, exhibition, print and artefacts) involved working in different water processing and technical areas, with leak locators and engineers, and also with water ‘customers’ – Calgarian citizens. Rather than being in one community, the artistic process acted as if it was infrastructure, connecting supply and demand differently.
The work focuses on the water leak as moment where relationships change. The leak is an effusive, eruption where pipes succumb to a pressure that is both material (hydraulic) and social (the pressure to supply a whole city). Becky trialled ways to push individual’s chosen pop music through their water leaks- mixing hydraulic and emotional outbursts. The act of sonic water leak location, using analogue technology (used in Canada) involves an understanding of history, time, space and materials and becomes a tiny point of contact- partner to ‘the leak’.
Marina Vishmidt describes (2015), how infrastructure’s material form means it both conjures an imaginary of potential social relations while it also may reproduce and maintain inequalities of provision and care. Vishmidt proposes that alternative ways to work with infrastructure might enable ‘the reproduction of a wholly different form of social life over time’. The leak is an environmental, economic and social disaster, but it is also understood in ‘How Deep?’ as an act of ‘unedited publishing’, where the existing system and its pressures are released and made articulate. The leak, then, opens a possibility for new relationships that might puncture, bridge and enliven the usual relationships between supplier and customer, individual and society.
Becky is a Professor in Fine Art Practice at Birmingham City University. She makes live, collaborative artworks that examine the tension between individuals, environment, and social structures, in institutions of 'public good' including healthcare, education, and work. Artworks have been commissioned by City of Calgary Water Services, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Age Concern, Guys and St Thomas Hospital and exhibited with Walsall Art Gallery, Sainsbury Centre, Ar/Ge Kunst Bolzano and Rezidenta9, Bucharest. Current interdisciplinary funded research projects involve making artworks and leading teams of other artists, generating fruitful methodological exploration. This includes working energy researchers to explore heating transition and with childhood researchers to animate exhibition-making through encounters with under 3s.