Eloise Sweetman
As a curator, exhibition director, writer and teacher, Eloise Sweetman is committed to engender moments and spaces where intergenerational audiences can come together with art, the various ways such encounters come about, and how communities arise from such a meeting. A common thread in her practice is to deliberately engage in hospitality and reconcile the responsibility of putting exhibitions, texts, talks, events into the world.
Eloise Sweetman: “My position always comes back to art, no matter how much I try to stray from it. I try very hard to disengage from it, to not look, to not read, to not listen, but I alway return it. I do so, because art is what I do, I live within, amongst art in all its forms. I tact myself on a history and tradition of believing that art has the vitality to change the way that we think, act, and be in the world. That we must be in public with art. Perhaps art is there as a buffer so we don’t, or rather that I don’t get too close to life in case it gets too much, too dull, too difficult, too repetitive. I realise there might be a counter case: that in fact art eases me into ideas or ways of being that I wouldn’t have considered otherwise. That is how I have come upon material relations as community making in an artistic and curatorial practice which I have written, made works about, and made exhibitions about for the last two to three years.”