Luca Rutherford Guest Blog: I Like It. What is It?
Photo Credit: Camilla Greenwell
I Like It. What is It?, supported by Jerwood Developing Artist Fund, is a two year residency programme that gives artists the space to explore ‘boomerang’ ideas; the ones that they believe in but haven’t had the chance to find their form yet. Ideas that are wild and beautiful.
Instead of the typical headshot and bio, we wanted to give the artists freedom to announce their idea and residency in a way that is special to them. Below is a blogpost written by Luca Rutherford, one of our I Like It. What is It? residents.
My name is Luca and I’m a Newcastle based artist, making new socially engaged work that sparks conversations inside and outside of theatre spaces. I’m an associate artist of ARC Stockton, Cambridge Junction and a movement practitioner with Frantic Assembly.
I am a writer, performer and dramaturg that asks big questions with playfulness. My artistic vision is to create work that is softly fierce and fiercely soft. In process and final design, my practice revolves around the creation of community, holding space for conversation, humour and play. I make work that is accessibly experimental in form; and in content explores, plays with, and questions the messy, confusing bits of being alive. My work is rooted in intersectional feminism. It is for the adventurous, and also the shy. It is for those who are curious and who want a safe space to explore what feels messy.
I also make public art, dance theatre, short film and sound art. My processes are rooted in spaces of listening where collaborators, participants and audiences are willing to be changed by what they hear.
SOFT will be a body of work that I will play with for the next two years over the course of I Like It. What is It? residency. This will involve live performance, installation and a long integrated process of engagement with the public.
Experimenting with how we are hardlined about being soft; how we are serious about playing; how quickly we can connect to the power of slowness. All in search of connecting to our joy for the natural world.
Softness as an act of non-violence. A philosophy of interaction towards others. A reclaiming of what the patriarchy has claimed as weak, unambitious, timid, unpowerful.
Slowness as a way of making change, disrupting and resisting capitalism. Inviting chaos into the slow. Pleasure in the slow. Capitalism is the destruction of our planet. The concept of Slow is a disruption of that - I believe it holds the potential space for change, but it needs to happen quickly.
Play as a way of imagining what we need but haven’t yet conjured into being. I am curious about creating a large scale piece of work that is a political architecture capturing the play in the audience's hearts and minds. A choir of images. A bath of sounds. A slow dance of change. Huge wild visuals and animation.
I will be collaborating with a collection of artists through this process involving Ira Brand, Jo Fong and many more brilliant beings soon to be announced.
See a collection of visual references here.