Rebekah Dean, London

I am delighted to be invited back to BKN for the 2024 artist residency ‘Radical Softness’, joined by my appointed London based multidisciplinary artist researcher from Hungary, Monika Tobel. I am a London based woman artist curator, born 1958, working with my ageing, neurodivergent body. 

September 2023, I completed a two-weeks funded artist residency with BKN, Sweden, ‘Walking as Practice’. August 2023 group show ‘Mother’s Ruin’ at 35Blumen gallery in Krefeld Germany. August 2023 I was an exhibiting artist in the ‘Artist Support Pledge 3’ exhibition, Huddersfield Art Gallery. March 2023 solo exhibition ‘Discharging Materials’ at ‘The Surgery Gallery’, London.

In March 2023, I led public Walking & Drawing wellbeingworkshops, as part of Women’s History month, at The Feminist Library. I have been leading ‘Art for Wellbeing’ a walking and drawing initiative, in partnership with Stephens House & Gardens, since 2018.

I was a funded by The Arts Council England 2020, as Artist Curator of The Sculpture Trail ‘Briefly IN-TRANSIT’; and previously in 2006, Artist Collaboration for the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture.

I am interested in how the art making process becomes therapeutic, without being or becoming therapy. My creative practice revolves around the activity of walking, which may or may not produce an artwork. It is the live and virtual spaces of the studio; gallery; theatre; classroom, that become the locations where artists and audiences connect to celebrate the live experience of creative practice, as they touch through eyes; hands; breath; cheeks, and ears.

In one of my favourite essays, an interview with philosopher psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, by critic and translator Charles Penwarden, written for the Tate exhibition catalogue ‘rites of passage: Art for the end of the Century’ (1995) Kristeva refutes a historical quote by the philosopher, Heideggar, that only religion can save us, with her own understanding: that “only an experience can save us”.

I have been working with the hand process of unpicking a man’s suit, as a way of thinking about questions on gender, capitalism, and climate change. I feel completely powerless...I am burdened by a desire to save the world, to protect everyone! In the name of social prescribing, I prescribe art...remembering the violence that is dragging us all to extinction...what can we do...play?

Studio: 15

Dates: Jan 14-Feb 29, 2024