The Gathering Series 3, Episode 4 – Lancashire Arts Exchange Special: In conversation with Chantal Oakes
Welcome to The Gathering, a podcast for artists and creatives from Arts Lancashire.
This is one of two episodes commissioned especially for the Lancashire Arts Exchange 2021and features a conversation with Lancashire based artist, Chantal Oakes.
Chantal is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses a collaborative arts practice to produce text and moving image.
Her piece, Still Lives, a series of digital abstract fine art animations, will feature at The Harris in Preston on 29th & 30th September as part of the Lancashire Arts Exchange Augmented Creativity programme.
A transcript of this episode will be available soon here
Links mentioned in this episode:
In this episode, Chantal talks to Alex O’Toole about how her career as a graphic designer developed in parallel to her artistic career and enabled her understanding of how to use technology to make artistic work.
She speaks about how becoming a founding member of a group for black artists in Preston (which became Kitchen Sink), helped Chantal to develop her artistic practice and became a stepping-stone to working on commission as a paid artist on both contemporary and community arts projects.
We learn about how she found her own voice through working with communities and how she has sought to use language in all its forms (sound, voice, visual, HTML) in her work to encourage understanding and equal exchange; and to create a ‘meeting point’.
She talks about knowing where and when to stop working on a piece as a contemporary artist, how to consider where you feel safe enough to go with your work as an artist, and how technology has helped Chantal to platform and contain her own voice.
We chat about the role of audiences, their expectations of art post Covid, and how technology both augments and prevents audience access. We also touch on Non-Fungbile Tokens (NFTs) as a new route for artists to develop digital art and make money to support their practice.