John Fox, Creative Research Fellow, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University - LICA Seminar Series 2009

Seminar Title: Weather Station.

"Weather Station", located in a liminal beach space at Baycliff, on the West shore of Morecambe Bay, is a garden installation and an iconic wooden house on stilts. It is a base to research perception and performance in an ecological framework. After experimenting for years with public vernacular art forms, mainly in the North West of England, I am now considering a role for the artist as celebrant and facilitator and examining this through styles of practical "outsider" art and more private ways of making day to day living as creative as possible. In my talk, illustrated with images, poems and diary notes, I will describe the first full year of my exploration and the steps towards "Occasional Remedies", my next book of essays.

John Fox is an AHRC funded Senior Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts in LICA. His celebratory arts company Welfare State International (1968 -2006) pioneered influential prototypes of socially engaged art including site specific theatre, installations, community carnivals, lantern festivals and Lanternhouse, a 2.2 million lottery funded art centre in Ulverston. In 2006 with Sue Gill he started Dead Good Guides to create new ceremonies for contemporary rites of passage. The work is documented in "Engineers of the Imagination" by Baz Kershaw and Tony Coult, (Methuen) in his autobiographical "Eyes on Stalks" ( Methuen) and the Dead Good manuals on Funerals and other Ceremonies. He has received various Arts Council awards and University Fellowships for "outstanding and innovative contribution to the arts " and is a printmaker creating woodcuts and dry points. Also a musician in community bands.