2 A conversation about care and reciprocity between Rhiannon Armstrong and Mel Evans

//[[Mel Evans->Mel bio]] and [[Rhiannon Armstrong->Rhiannon bio]] met for the first time at The Art of Care-full Practice symposium. They share a belief in the importance of acknowledging the fluidity of roles of giving and receiving in participatory performance practice. They continued their discussions for this issue of the journal in the form of some writing exchange, and a (transcribed) meeting over lunch in a pie and mash shop. By exchanging stories the two seek to form a common understanding around ideas of care, giving, receiving and holding space for others to give and receive. Through their encounters with participants and public in [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] and [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] Mel and Rhiannon reflect on the complex and profound relationships of trust at work in these performances, and attempt to be open about vulnerable questions of personal agency and what we get out of the work as artists and activists. They do this with the intention that acknowledging the fluidity between when we’re giving and when we’re receiving will lead to a better, more sustainable practice.// ''Mel writes:'' Hi Rhiannon. I hope you’re well. To start this conversation it feels to me significant to acknowledge that all our exchanges have related to moments of suffering and mutual care. We met at the symposium, befriending each other in moments when others had formed pre-existing social groups; we met in a coffee shop, you had a migraine and I was stressed; you led on the proposal writing for this while I was recovering from a serious accident; I took on the proposal writing for this while you were supporting family through a tragic loss, part of a devastating fire. All around us as we explore this subject there has been physical pain and loss. So I wonder if our responses to the questions we wanted to reflect on together can only be reached by acknowledging this time and where we’re both coming from? ''Rhiannon writes:'' Hi Mel. Thanks for this, for this beginning and for acknowledging both our pain. Pain, suffering, and anger (especially anger) are so present at the moment I am having to work hard to remember, and to pull myself back into the world of this [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] performance. //The questions Mel and Rhiannon reflected on, in writing and in person:// [[''So then, what does care mean to you in your work?''->care writing]] [[''What does vulnerability mean in your work?''->vulnerability writing]] [[''How do you understand personal agency and the exchange of care?''->agency exchange writing]] [[''How do we receive care as we give it, and vice versa, and allow the work to sustain ourselves as artists and activists?''->sustainability writing]] [[''How would you explore perceptions of activism in relation to care?''->activism writing]]

‘Birthmark’ is a performance intervention work by Liberate Tate, an art collective of which Mel is part. Liberate Tate is an art collective that takes action, and its performance interventions have involved hundreds of people. Their work shows the power of art to make real change happen. After six years making unsanctioned live art interventions in Tate galleries Liberate Tate succeeded in ending BP sponsorship of Tate. Performances include The Gift, in which over 100 people assembled a 16.5m wind turbine blade in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, Human Cost, where a naked man was covered in oil inside Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries, Time Piece, in which 75 performers transcribed a rising tide of words relating to art and climate change up the Tate Modern Turbine Hall slope during a 25 hour durational performance, and Birthmark in which performers receive a permanent tattoo of the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere in the year of their birth. As of 2017 around 150 people have Birthmarks: some of them from Liberate Tate tattoo-givers as part of interventions inside Tate (December 2015) <img src= https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/2777d8d08f93a7dbfc8d72d6e86ab3ae87381377/0_0_480_720/master/480.jpg?w=300&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=59ff9b8b2a1c7e65bdd070ab8fdcbc09 .jpg> and the National Portrait Gallery (June 2016) <img src= https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56a7fc20ab2810825e800a8d/t/58eebd51c534a56317672b69/1492858972244/ .jpg> or by commission at galleries and events. Others around the country and the world at tattoo studios, and more still as part of other groups ensuing creative interventions such as the @DivestDAL divestment group in Canada, who gave handpoke Birthmark tattoos during their protests from December 2016 onwards. As one of the tattoo-givers in the project, Mel’s stories come from this intimate moment of encounter wherein the tattoo-receiver describes their journey to this act, passing on to the tattoo-givers a oral history of art, activism and social change.

Rhiannon’s performance ‘Can I Help You?’ <img src= https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsYpkCQWIAApD1-.jpg:small> toured to 8 UK towns as part of Battersea Arts Centre’s Collaborative Touring Network in autumn 2016. In it, Rhiannon offers free help to strangers by basing herself on the local high street wearing a t-shirt saying “free help!” <img src= https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cvr3a-QWYAAv1lm.jpg:small > and a tool belt equipped with items such as an umbrella, the Little Book of Calm, MP3 player, bin bag, change for a tenner etc.. <img src=https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CuPgULFWYAAceXU.jpg:small> The resulting interactions and encounters form the work.

''What does care mean to you in your work?'' ''Mel writes:'' For me, it means taking care of each other in a collective throughout the creative process. As Liberate Tate explores different ideas for performances, the collaborative process is - almost necessarily - fraught with disagreement and competing theories, both strategic and aesthetic. We always make each other laugh: this is caring. It softens the debate and loosens our collective grip on the shape of the thing, allowing the artwork to take its own form between us and our respective thoughts and ideas. Later, care takes on a different centrality to the work. Care means involving other artists, activists and performers in the piece: requiring questions around how to make it enriching and empowering; how to sneak into the gallery adequate amounts of food and water for people to last the duration of the performance; leaving enough space in the performance design for the creative licence of performers; and considering which decisions will need to be made by consensus on the day, for example when the intervention ends. Interventionist practice necessitates care for agency and as well as for physical and emotional needs. Oh and legal ‘care’- should it be necessary - is always ready and waiting! Tate has called the police multiple times during Liberate Tate’s performance interventions, and although no performers were ever arrested, we needed to take care around that possible eventuality. ''Rhiannon writes:'' I like how you begin your thoughts on care with a description of conflict and the collaborative process. Also, when you describe the physical and legal needs side of care with Liberate Tate - the basics - it makes me think of the phrase 'I’ll take care of it'. When you are going through something major (an operation, a bereavement perhaps) you might need people to 'just take care' of certain basic things for you like food or cleaning so that you can focus on recovery. Have the basics covered, so that you can focus on the important stuff. In peer review we were reminded of another intention that can exist in the phrase 'take care of it': when a security guard is told to "take care" of a group of street drinkers, they are supposed to move them on. So in some instances, 'take care' can mean 'get rid'. What are the basics with [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]]. There are no collaborators to negotiate with ahead of time. My preparation involves spending a whole day in the town centre I’ll be working in, looking and listening, getting to know whose space it is. The premise of the work is that I am standing around offering free help of any kind, to anyone. It is a way to meet, to begin a conversation. I scope out the location the day before, sit and observe the environment and its inhabitants, speak to anyone whose territory I might be entering into (big issue sellers, people who are street homeless, cafe and market stall owners). I consider it part of my job to explain my presence and interruption here. When I think about care and what it is in this work, in one way I am thinking about taking care over how we bring about a meeting between strangers: //<strike>To care for To take care of</strike> To take care with how we meet one another. To take care over being together. To care about what people are saying. To listen.// ''Mel writes:'' It’s interesting to me that practicing observation within the site of the performance is so important to both of us. This suggests observation is a core part of the care taken - to understand the movements and flows of people in a space, and therefore how to act or intervene in that space care-fully; to think critically about the social politics of the site in order that our entries into it are able to be transgressive and progressive; and like you say, to listen and to observe is to be respectful. [[''What does vulnerability mean in your work?''->vulnerability writing]]

''What does vulnerability mean in your work?'' ''Mel writes:'' Vulnerability goes to the core of what Liberate Tate does. By blending forms of live art and direct action, our vulnerable bodies become the site of the performance. In direct action, people put their bodies in the way of the harmful activity they are trying to halt. In live art, performers explore the world and ideas from the site of their individual bodies, experiences and identities. In [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]], the centre point of the performance is the tattoo-needle inking our skin. This is a bearably painful act, and the tattoo-receiver is vulnerable to this sharp object held - extremely carefully - by the tattoo-giver. I was one of four women in our collective who learned to give tattoos to make this performance ritual possible. When giving tattoos, I ask people why this piece spoke to them, why they wanted to be a part of the performance, what moments or choices in their life making this mark speaks to or emerges from. So the act itself, and the conversation held between us during it, were similarly intimate. ''Rhiannon writes: '' I am thinking of how people seem to be ready to go to a difficult place with me as we converse on the street in [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]]. I am thinking of how often I have ended up hearing from people for a long while about really personal things, listened to stories about difficult childhoods, abusive relationships, money problems, the death of a son and the missed grandchildren who now live a long way away with their mother. I have ended up crouched at a cafe table holding a woman’s hand as she wept over her loss, walking a man to a drop-in centre for alcohol recovery. I wrote this note after leaving one couple I spoke to in Rochester: '"Thanks so much, this is the least I can do": Steve giving me a piece of fudge, who spent a lot of time talking to me with his wife about life making you emotionally hardened and wanting to be more open.' The thing about seeing that note now is I am reminded that this effort to stay open and receptive, to keep soft and connected, is something I know intimately. I know that hardening, and I am reminded that this difficulty is not unique to me or even to those I am close to. Complete strangers in the street told me so! I think it can sometimes be more possible to be yourself with a stranger. Is this because there is less weight of expectation or emotional investment in who we are to one another? I put a lot of commitment into trying to be clearly and most openly myself when I do this work, and I find myself having a kind of tantrum ahead of each start time. It's like some kind of real life version of stage fright, life fright if you will. As if someone else is making me do this and it isn't a situation I am exclusively responsible for bringing about! There is a pay-off though. People are more direct with me in this performance than I've ever experienced in my life and I find that refreshing and inspiring: it is something I try to take into the rest of my dealings with the world. ''Mel writes:'' That definitely resonates. I’ve had conversations with people through this piece, people that I’ve known for years and people that I’ve only just met, that I can’t imagine us having any other way, than with our bodies so intimately connected physically as I tattoo them. During the tattooing, we’re both focused on the ink and the conversation, cocooned in our tight combined aura, blocking out all distractions. Each [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] session has held dozens of beautiful moments when people have shared defining experiences and histories. Each of us who give the tattoos have described feeling like a library of stories and personal journeys around art, activism and climate change. //They pick up the conversation in person in a pie and mash shop and: [[Rhiannon asks Mel about saying no to people who want to take part->Mel on saying NO]] [[Mel asks Rhiannon about negotiating beginnings and endings->Rhiannon on beginning and ending]] Then,// [[''How do you understand personal agency and the exchange of care?''->agency exchange writing]]

''How do you understand personal agency and the exchange of care?'' ''Mel writes:'' When centring on vulnerability in the work, it’s of course vital to consider agency and consent. It’s about allowing vulnerability to be a source of strength and power. In [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] this came down to the relationship between the tattoo-giver and tattoo-receiver, one based on mutual trust, understanding, and shared community. //[[At the pie and mash shop, Mel describes the intimacy of tattooing for 'Birthmark'->Mel on tattooing]]// ''Rhiannon writes:'' It’s funny I think in the beginning the relationship between the audience and I for [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] is one of distrust. There is always suspicion and disbelief: the suspicion that I want something from them (money or a signature) and disbelief that I won’t ask for or accept payment, that I am really here for anyone for any length of time and will go anywhere. //[[At the pie and mash shop, Rhiannon tells a story about a woman in Wigan who kept asking what the catch was->Rhiannon on the catch]]// //Then,// [[''How do we receive care as we give it, and vice versa, and allow the work to sustain ourselves as artists and activists?''->sustainability writing]]

''How do we receive care as we give it, and vice versa, and allow the work to sustain ourselves as artists and activists?'' ''Mel writes:'' In [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] the idea of exchange was central: as tattoo-givers we were holding the needles, but together with the whole group we all held the space of the performance. Keeping a site of intervention calm and quiet was part of the performance design in order to create the right conditions for people’s tattoos and the dialogue that was central to the process. Thinking about the work more broadly, there are various spheres of care at play: caring for each other in the collective, caring for performers and activists who join to take part in interventions, and caring for the public space of the gallery, protecting it from the insidious presence of oil company BP (the campaign to end BP sponsorship centred around the critique that Tate’s implicit support of the company’s harmful activities was at odds with Tate’s values). In all these modes, the work of care is fundamental to sustaining spaces of creativity and resistance, which in turn sustain each of us involved. So it’s not about ‘giving’ or ‘sacrifice’ or any of these notions that sometimes people relate to activism: it’s about creating ethical spaces and practices that sustain and empower those involved, which is a very different power dynamic, a much more healthy one, I would say. ''Rhiannon writes:'' Your references to spheres of care make remind me of the spheres of audience I think about with [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] and my other work in public space: - there are the people who don't see or interact with the work in any direct way but who hear about it and know that there is a work of art in which someone offers free help to people all day - there are the people who walk past but don't investigate, who see something different, out of the usual 'sanctioned' activity, happening in their town centre - there are those who interact with me directly I am also thinking about how the people I interact with directly and I look after each other in the time we have. Together we find a way to meet, go through something, and part from one another. //[[Meanwhile in the pie and mash shop, the conversation turns to community...->sustainability chat]]//

''How would you explore perceptions of activism in relation to care? Can you discuss the wearability of care?'' ''Mel writes:'' Activism is sometimes perceived as aggressive or enacted as a process of sacrificing one thing in order to care for another: a cold day in the rain holding placards and banners, or breaking the law for the greater good, or long hours organising community-run support structures around health, housing or legal support. All important activities, but they’d be unsustainable without practices of care and creativity. Throughout social movements and organising networks in the UK, mutual support, affirmation and celebration are also held up as fundamental to sustaining those involved. As far as I have seen, there’s more emphasis on sustainability and care within activist communities than within communities of artists, where the emphasis tends to be on giving everything because that’s what makes us ‘true artists’. The myth of the auteur does us a disservice in this way: the idea of a self-sustaining singular unit powered only by the muse of creativity. Yet at the same time, the creative approach of artists both to a challenge and to an action offers something activist practices sometimes lack – reflexivity, spontaneity and lateral thinking. I think artists and collectives could draw a lot from the ways in which activists work together, and activists could draw a lot from the ways in which artists collaborate, which would help both communities sustain creative resistance. ''Mel writes:'' And in what ways do your work, or this piece, intersect with ideas around activism for you? ''Rhiannon writes:'' I make my work under the lifelong series title 'Instructions for Empathetic Living' and think of all of it as intervention, in one form or another. However this is a question I try to hold myself to rather than an answer I am trying to pass on to others. There are questions in [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] and in my other work that takes place on the street; about the policing of public space and non-commercial activity, what is considered acceptable behaviour and why, about how we relate to one another, and about who makes art and what it is. I have been thinking recently about how the work I do in public space means I end up spending time with people who are based on the street more. They notice you immediately, doing something that doesn’t fit in, because they know the ecosystem there. It wasn't my intention: there wasn't a 'target audience' or 'stakeholder group'! Nevertheless people who are street homeless have been highly represented in numbers, as a proportion of people that I spend the most time with, and those with whom the relationship at the heart of the work has been the most creative. I was thinking about this: I was thinking what if I had thought 'I am going to make a piece of interactive art that will be for homeless people'? I shudder to think what I might have made with that kind of approach because it would have come from a presumptuous place, one that taps into the 'saviour complex' that is always present in the language and institutional priorities attached to all art really, but especially to performance that gets called 'participatory' and 'socially engaged'. It was the artist Selina Thompson whom I first heard use the words 'saviour complex' in relation to the arts, in her keynote address to the In Between Time symposium in Bristol in February 2017. The full text is on her blog, which I recommend. That terminology was most familiar to me from discussions of white supremacy and it has stuck with me because it speaks to the structural contexts in which I make performance, and how things like white supremacy morph in order to permeate all settings and infiltrate all relationships, not just those with an obvious racial dynamic. I think of the title and offer of [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] as being in an explicit, questioning relationship to that 'saviour complex'. We had a prompt from the editors about the 'wearability of care', literally about the things we wear and the images they make. Well... I wear a bright yellow t-shirt. It says 'Free help!' in big letters and 'How’s my helping?' at the back like a long distance truck asking for a report on the quality of the driving. I wear a tool belt. I wear a half smile. I wear no makeup. I wear my hair neat. I wear comfortable shoes. I wear my young white cis het able bodied female presentation. It gives me access to spaces and people, It gives me invisibility when I choose it and some visibility when I choose that, it gives me the veneer of approachability, it gives me a chance to impress with my capability for banter. I wear other people’s expectations that I will be kind, even-tempered, softly-spoken, emotionally intelligent. I wear an indecipherable accent which gives me relative freedom in respect to assumptions about my class. [[At the pie and mash shop, Rhiannon tells the story of how she came to possess this doorstop:->Rhiannon on doorstop]] <img src=https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/twinery/Ray's+doorstop+small.jpg>

''Rhiannon says:'' Has there ever been a thing with the tattoos where you’ve thought 'I’m not sure this is what you need'? I am conscious that you get a lot of different people coming along to things, especially activism where people come for a lot of different reasons. Have you ever thought 'I don’t think you should be doing this?'. Is there such a thing as the wrong reason? Would you say anything if you thought there was? ''Mel says:'' Um, yes! With this piece we’re hyper-cautious about readiness and consent as part of the caring process. That’s primarily part of the learned culture of tattooing that we’ve embraced by immersing ourselves in sub-cultural tattooing spheres as far as possible. Sometimes it’s really obvious - we wouldn’t give a tattoo to someone who had been drinking alcohol or taking anything stronger, just like a tattoo studio wouldn’t. We also look out for the time people are willing to allow themselves for the ritual/performance. If someone’s in a rush or wants a clear deadline on ‘when we’ll be finished’, we take that as an indication that the moment isn’t right for them to do this, and that we can be more attentive with them if there’s no imminent deadline to work towards. So on these kinds of grounds we have indeed suggested that people look for another time to do the piece with us, and that’s exactly what’s happened. Every time we’ve given tattoos it has been pre-arranged. We wouldn’t give someone a tattoo on the same day they’d expressed interest in the piece, we’d only give these tattoos to people who had taken time to make the decision, and expressed a clear confidence that they were making an informed, thought-through choice. ''Rhiannon says:'' So no one walks up and says 'I’ve been inspired by your piece and I want to get a tattoo'? ''Mel says:'' If they do we say, 'Let’s be in touch about a future date'. Overall there were as many people who reached out to us about the project as we directly invited, but for the initial performance interventions at Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery, which were planned in secret, we contacted people already with the network of artists, activists and performers that makes up Liberate Tate. This gives people a few months in advance to consider whether or not they want to be part of a performance, before which time people come to a couple of sessions to talk about it first, and closer to the time a well-being, creative and rehearsal process we go on together. For the [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] events that we did by commission or in gallery spaces, we had put together reading material online and communicated with people one-to-one running up to the day itself. In both cases, there was always space for people to share among each other why they’re doing it, by speaking in small groups or speaking in a large group saying 'This is why I’m doing it' or ‘This is what it connects with for me’. Birthmark always takes place within a group, and that’s part of the community-building aspect to the work. In all these ways it was clear there was a lot of thoughtfulness from everyone involved around questions of 'Why this, why now, what meaning does it carry for you?' ''Rhiannon says:'' - and being heard, it sounds like. Because I imagine it would be easy to feel like you’re part of a giant thing where you’re serving something else, and your own story is being lost - ''Mel says:'' Yeah. In a way that tension is what we’re exploring, because there are these numbers that mean so much for our lives and yet are so alien or soulless. Carbon emissions feel like abstract data to most people, but that have these very visceral implications. So we ask, how can we find a way into those numbers that makes them more personal? A sense of it relating to your own lifetime makes it more personal. And then also you have the groupings of people that emerge - I know who has the same number as me, we have been alive the same amount of time as these changes have been happening. To people whose Birthmark was 313< were very excited to meet each other and linked up on Twitter because they shared this low, safe amount. It makes a community out of the coldness of the numbers, and offers this sense that the levels could return to something safer. It takes them from being these abstractions and makes them into something more personal. //[[Mel asks Rhiannon about negotiating beginnings and endings->Rhiannon on beginning and ending]]//

''Mel says:'' With the interactions that you were having with people in [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]], how did you negotiate that sense of beginning and end, and the expectations of the relationship? Did you stop and say, 'Bye, I’m off duty now'? ''Rhiannon says:'' Once we’re past the assumptions where people think I’m selling something, when they know that my proposition is this weird thing that I am just a normal human being and I’m offering free help in whatever way one human can offer another, the thing that characterises people’s reactions is their concern with taking up too much of my time. You might assume that if you stand around on the street offering up attention someone would be bound to come up and want it all, but that just doesn’t happen. So much of it is actually about reassuring people that they are not taking up too much of your time. For many people, after 30 seconds they think that they should leave me alone. A lot of the work I am doing is really about prolonging it to get past the three minute mark, where then it can become half an hour and something really great can happen. So most of that stuff that you might think would be about saying 'I’m off now' is actually more about saying //I’m still here, I’m still here, I’m still here.// and finding another mode to be together. Because this is how it goes: I have this tool belt, I stand there with a yellow t-shirt that says 'FREE HELP!', and I’m standing tall and a bit expectantly and I'm sort of on the lookout but not really approaching anyone. And then people do double-takes, and we catch each other's eye, and often they want to know what I’m doing. So the tool belt is often a way to start a conversation: it’ll be like 'oh I’m here for a few hours offering people free help, I don’t have any particular skills I’m just a person so it’s whatever one person could offer another person for example I have some chewing gum here' or 'I have some tic tacs' or 'I've got change for a tenner'. The tool belt facilitates the first few minutes with 'have that, do that' and then people get into asking questions about what I’ve done before, or they might say they know someone who could use help and tell you about them, or you just keep doing things and talking together and eventually you get to where you realise what it is going to be for the two of you. You get to a new way of being together, but it remains unnamed. [[''How do you understand personal agency and the exchange of care?''->agency exchange writing]]

''Rhiannon says:'' I wanted to ask you about conversation and intimacy in [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]]: about physical contact, and about conversations that happen when something else is happening with your hands. I’m thinking about it because I've been hosting a craft table every week at a migrant support centre where people come for emergency assistance. It's there as a place you can be while you wait to be seen, which can be a very tense time. It's about conversation and companionship, about talking about really difficult stuff to people you don't know in a language you maybe don't know very well, but meanwhile there are things being made and we've all got our eyes focussed on those. The idea that that can be easier somehow. ''Mel says:'' That’s so true about [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]]. Definitely both physical contact and a focussed task was a way in which the rhythm of the conversation in [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] got set up. Because we’re giving these tattoos in a range of different spaces, having carried all the kit we need to do a tattoo, but without all the apparatus found in a tattoo studio like a bed where you can position your body exactly for the right angle. It’s important for the person who’s having the tattoo to be relaxed and their muscles loose, so that you can stretch the skin in all the right ways. At Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery we had tables and stools that we sneaked into the gallery in these enormous bags, explain to security staff that we were just tourists on our way in or out of the city. To give a tattoo you need to be sitting on a chair, there’s no way you can hold your own body in the right way unless you’re sitting in a chair, so that’s why we had to bring the stools in. And similarly with the tables, for the ink and hygiene around assembling the disposable parts of the tattoo machine kit, tables were essential. For each tattoo, we would do twenty minutes of set-up and take-down of our equipment, including sterilisation of the area, so that was part of the activity the conversation happens around. Plus, some of the positions that you can end up in with people to give them a tattoo in that kind of situation, without a bed, can be unusual: either you’ve got their foot on your lap, or your head near the nape of their neck, or one person wanted his Birthmark on the inside of his upper arm so I had my leg around his back for his arm to rest on and my face in his armpit! ''Rhiannon says:'' Wow ''Mel says:'' You definitely get into some intimate positions, and by doing that you’ve already stripped away a lot of the 'what might we talk about?' Also, you don’t have any awkward or somehow audience-like 'I’m staring into your eyes as I’m listening to you talk', and that can free up the conversation to happen more loosely. Plus there’s a bit more space for quiet performance than a private one-to-one conversation would bring, both because of others in the space, and because the person receiving the tattoo really has the stage, the tattoo givers act more as prompt. We’re not going to be looking at the person speaking except for the occasional checking glance, and when we’re talking to them there’ll be lots of pauses while we focus on something fiddly. There might be more questions to the person getting the tattoo or there might be moments where you say, 'I’m just going to pause now', because you’re focussed on giving them the tattoo and you’re listening. Also, talking is a helpful way of staying calm while you’re receiving a tattoo. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a tattoo but you know it’s not extreme pain but it is sore, there’s a recognised painfulness to it, and talking through it is an established convention! ''Rhiannon says:'' How long does it take? ''Mel says:'' Arrival in the tattooing area, the conversation starting, checking the position of the transfer (the carbon paper mark on skin used as a guide for the actual tattoo), doing the transfer, doing it again if it’s not right, final bits of set-up, giving the tattoo, washing the skin, wrapping it, all these things - all in all you’d expect that to take about an hour. The actual tattoo only takes about ten minutes, but there’s so much else you do as part of the process, which gives a lot of space for the dialogue to happen. So I definitely agree about that thing of doing something with your hands, the quality of time and connections that brings. //[[At the pie and mash shop, Rhiannon tells a story about a woman in Wigan who kept asking what the catch was->Rhiannon on the catch]]//

''Mel says:'' There’s something about the way that in [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] there’s an openness of the amount of time you spend with people. It’s not fixed which allows people to find their own ways to shape it and give it closure. What’s really nice about a gift is that it was kind of giving closure to it, in a way that is important for a ritual, and for these brief but intense, caring relationships you’ve had with people. ''Rhiannon says:'' There was this guy in Paignton, Devon. When I met him he was carrying some wood in a trolley, and he had this little dog that was also with him. I offered to carry the wood which he wouldn’t let me do, but he said you can hold my dog while we walk. <img src=https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/twinery/Cranky+small.jpg> He was one of the people that after 30 seconds say 'ok thank you I mustn't use any more of your time', but he also said repeatedly how much he valued being listened to so I just kept reassuring him saying 'I can carry on walking with you, I have nowhere else to be' and we ended up walking back to where he lived. It was a 20min walk, and then I walked back into town with him again, so I was with him for probably around an hour. He told me he was getting the wood from a shop that was being refitted, and that he was going to use it to build a kennel for his dog. He was talking about his flat and the kennel, and he ended up telling me about his childhood and his life. As a kid he’d lived in rural Devon in a train station, one that was in the middle of nowhere and not attached to a town. Then they shut the train station and the council housed them in Paignton, in the town. He was 14 at the time and he felt that this had been where things had gone wrong for him, because they didn't have space to run around in anymore. He became a long distance lorry driver and then he became ill and couldn’t work and was homeless, and then the council had given him this flat, but it was unfurnished and he had nothing and couldn’t furnish it. I think he hadn’t been long in this flat when I met him. I didn’t go in. I knew I wouldn’t go in partly because you don’t really go into a stranger’s flat when you’re on your own but also I didn’t think he wanted me to. That's the thing about boundaries in this piece, we are all working out a way to be together. I was definitely going to help him all the way to his home, but we both knew I wouldn't go in. He was taking the wood up to the flat and I had agreed to wait outside with Snowy, Scottee, Scrappy...I can’t remember the name of the dog...Scamp? Something like that. I’ve got it in the notebook somewhere. //The dog was called Cranky.// So I said I’d wait outside with Cranky. He went into the flat, and when he came out he was carrying this doorstop and he was like 'you must take this doorstop' He had painted it, it looked like Robin Hood to me. On our journey we had talked about how people sometimes feel like they need to tip me, and that I don’t like to accept those things. So he was really insistent saying 'This is not that thing where people feel they need to pay you. On any other day I would have nothing. I just happen to have made this last night so I have something for once and I want to give it to you, for you to know that I appreciate what you’re doing.' <img src=https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/twinery/Ray's+doorstop+small.jpg> And then he was asking who my boss was, he wanted to know who he could report to - he had been quite moved a number of times about being listened to - and so I said 'I guess there’s the Arts Council, they’re not my boss but you can write to them if you like.' And he wrote this: <img src=https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/twinery/notebook+small.jpg>

''Rhiannon says:'' What I really reject in how I am often required to talk about participatory performance is the idea that what you will get out of your engagement with a work is predefined, that your relationship to it is going to be of a certain type or quality. With [['Can I Help You?'->Can I Help You? description]] the thing that I feel so energised by when I do it is that people make their own relationship to it. The opener is this helping thing, but then what people get from it, how it transpires, what happens, is up to us to determine together. There was a conversation with a woman in Wigan in autumn 2016 that I really loved. It was quite sunny and actually quite hot, and I had suncream on me, and a fan and plant mister, and I was offering people suncream and 'free breeze'. And this woman was like: 'What’s this then are you doing samples for beauty products?' and I said 'No no no I’m offering free help to people for a few hours' and she said 'So who...what...is the shop paying for this (there was a discount shop nearby)?' We talked more and eventually I told her that The Wigan Arts Festival was happening and that it was part of that. And she had been saying 'What’s the catch?' so when I told her about the festival I said 'Well it’s part of an arts festival so I guess the catch is that it’s art - I’m not trying to sell you any tickets to anything else, it’s just that this is art' and she went 'Oh all right - in that case yes please!' I really liked her reaction and afterwards I started using that as a way to speak to people: //'The catch is, it’s art.'// [[''How do we receive care as we give it, and vice versa, and allow the work to sustain ourselves as artists and activists?''->sustainability writing]]

''Rhiannon says:'' Thinking about what you described as the ethical and sustaining spaces of [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]], I am reminded of a conversation I had with Adrian Howells backstage at a festival of one-to-one performance in London in 2010. We were bemoaning the lack of care over audience members who were opening themselves up in challenging works. He was doing the piece where he would bathe you - 'The Pleasure of Being: washing, feeding, holding', and I was doing a piece I made for Coney called 'The Loveliness Principle'. We were united in our suspicion and irritation with the festival which was marketed with a message like 'do you dare to get intimate', seemed to have an attitude approaching titillation, and didn't have much in place to support audiences who might be deeply affected. We talked about a duty of care to the audience: that if you are getting people to do something challenging then you need to have thought about what support might be needed. On the one hand we were just bitching about the festival in the green room, but on the other it gave me the assurance to stand up for the experience I want to create for an audience, which I have done rigorously ever since. ''Mel says:'' Yeah, because you don’t know what’s going to come up. ''Rhiannon says:'' The whole conversation was about the audience not being cared for by the holding pattern of this festival, but we were in the green room and I wonder if we were also talking about ourselves as artists. ''Mel says:'' Were you kind of looking after each other? ''Rhiannon says:'' I think so. Because doing these intense things with audiences is amazing and also very draining. So when we felt like the context of the festival wasn’t caring for those audiences enough after they left us, we took on that responsibility. You can take on all those layers of responsibility, but then you find yourself left alone at the end. I think it helped to talk about it: we were shoring each other up. ''Mel says:'' Then I guess the difference is, some of the experiences you’re talking about, and the great thing in [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]], is finding ways to build community through these interactions and through these moments. So how do these intimate moments lead to something beyond the one-to-one relationship? If I try to remember specific conversations, I think of those ones where I was having a conversation with someone about why they’d chosen to have this tattoo, what it meant to them, what points in their life that were steering them towards this moment. Those kind of questions I think we all sometimes ask ourselves like why am I here, why am I doing this now, what led to me doing this? With one person we found similar experiences really shaped us, we were like, 'No way, you were at the G8 protests in Stirling in 2005 - I was there too, we were there together, we weren’t friends then, oh and then you did this action, yeah we would have both been there on the same day' and then you end up building up ten or fifteen year parallel histories and being like 'Oh, we’ve always been part of this broader community' and having this moment of intimacy to tighten it and almost commemorate or celebrate it in some way. This continued after the performance intervention. We held a [['Birthmark'->Birthmark description]] anniversary day towards the end of 2016 where people got together from ten different events: the two interventions, eight different gallery commissions, and also had some people on video call from Canada who’d done their own interpretation of the project as a protest there. Having everybody together for an afternoon to share experiences and reflections on what it means now and what’s changed was really profound. By having community building as a really asserted part of the work helped avoid that thing in the arts where there can be a slant towards ticketed, compacted, consumable experience. And yet so much of the arts is about that community, is about how – especially in terms of your relationship with Adrian and so many people’s – is that actually the arts are sustained by communities. The Art of Care-full Practice symposium where we met was just one of those moments: a community event, a space to recognise and celebrate and exist as a community. //[[''Some final thoughts on activism in relation to care, and a story about a man, a dog, and a doorstop.''->activism writing]]//

Rhiannon Armstrong makes works under the lifelong series title ‘Instructions for Empathetic Living’. She puts empathy, dialogue and interaction at the core of her works, and brings the audience-focus of a theatre background to interdisciplinary work that has included intimate performances, interactive digital works, textile, music, and collaborative theatre projects. She is perhaps best known for her performance and web project ‘The International Archive of Things Left Unsaid’, and ‘Public Selfcare System’.

Mel Evans is an artist and campaigner part of Liberate Tate. Her book ‘Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts’ was published by Pluto Press in 2015. Her play ‘Oil City’ was produced by Platform and presented as part of the Two Degrees Festival in 2013. Mel is interested in blending art and activism to create new political possibilities, and sees planned participatory performance as a radical alternative to traditional protest.