The Engage Journal Podcast

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 3, Episode 4: Gathering in Bradford

For our final episode of series 3, our co-editors Prof Sarah Perks and Dr Paul Stewart land at this year’s Engage Gathering in Bradford City of Culture. They reflect on the event live whilst talking to various participants to get their experiences including Shannen Johnson from GEM and Caitlin McHugh from Yorkshire Contemporary. We also caught up with outgoing Engage Director Jane Sillis for an extended chat about the Gathering and wider thoughts on the sector and her amazing twenty-year tenure in this role. 

Find out more about our annual Journals, and our membership by visiting our website. 

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 3, Episode 3: The Ignorant Art School

This episode travels to Scotland where Dr Paul Stewart talks to Sophia Yadong Hao at Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee about their engagement work, research methods and influences. Now reaching its culmination, The Ignorant Art School is a major five-chapter exhibition and event programme that creatively re-imagines and co-constituting radical blueprints for a socially transformative art education. 

Sophia Yadong Hao is Director & Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, Reader in Curatorial Practice at the University of Dundee, and Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland. Working internationally, Hao characterises the curatorial as a rhizomatic praxis capable of transforming exhibition making into a testing ground for radical futures. 

Hao is founding editor of What I am Reading Now…, her publications include Of Other Spaces: Where Does Gesture Become Event?(2019), Hubs and Fictions (2016), A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (2015),and NOTES on a return (2010). 

Hao was named one of The List’s Hot 100 in 2024: The Most Influential Scottish Cultural Contributors.

Find out more about our annual Journals, and our membership by visiting our website. 

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 3, Episode 2: To Shift a Stone

What constitutes power—and who gets to hold it? Across 2023 – 2025, artist-in-residence Sophie Mak-Schram’s To Shift a Stone explored how power is experienced, shared, and challenged within Amgueddfa Cymru and Chapter Arts Centre resulting in a two-part exhibition at both venues. In this special podcast edition, the team discuss and reflect on the methodologies, communities’ engagement and the impact of the project together. 

Simrath Panaser is visual art curator at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Sophie Mak Schram is an artist, educator and art historian, and Nicholas Thornton is Head of Fine and Contemporary Art and Steph Burge is Head of Engagement, both at Amgueddfa Cymru. 

Find out more about our annual Journals, and our membership by visiting our website. 

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 3, Episode 1: Everything I Do

The third series of our Engage Podcast begins with a takeover by artists Maria Ruban and John Lloyd where they work with a range of participants on a perpetual karaoke project to reinterpret the Bryan Adams’ hit song 'Everything I Do' alongside the world events that unfolded through its 16 weeks at No 1 in the charts in 1991. They discuss their methods of preserving joy in audience engagement as well as accessibility and why it is important that these elements within such work are sustained. 

Maria Ruban is an artist and lecturer of Ukrainian and Italian heritage based in Manchester, whose work focuses on reimagining personal archive and testimony through performance and film, challenging formal methods of archive interpretation. Recent work includes reinterpretation of archives at Royal Northern College of Music through ‘haunted’ performance working with local engagement. 'Through the Margins' was a decolonisation project at Portico Library Manchester that re-examined the historic collection’s influence on twenty-first-century life and society, asking ‘through whose eyes do we frame the world?’. Previous work includes film work for Manchester Art Gallery, Imperial War Museum and Whittaker Gallery. 

John Lloyd is an artist and lecturer, as a member of D∀RK his work is primarily concerned with exploring hauntological perspectives within contemporary media and playful explorations into the paranoia surrounding emerging generative technologies and their relationship to mysticism.

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 2, Episode 4: The New Art Gallery Walsall

The fourth and final in our new series goes to The New Art Gallery Walsall in the West Midlands where we meet the Collections Curator, Julie Macfarlane Brown, and Kiran Billing, HLF Embedding Diversity Project Assistant.

We delve into the history of the collection and how they have created some groundbreaking work with their Collections Community Panel. We also hear from members of the Collections Community Panel directly: Toyin Oshaniwa, Neil McNaught, Crow Dillon-Parkin, Zarida Kayani and Corinne.

This is a companion piece for the Journal 47 article by Julie Macfarlane Brown ‘Made to break: museums, objects, people, and belonging’ accessible to members here.

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 2, Episode 3: Seonaid Murray in Edenderry

The third in our new series is fully set in Edenderry in the Republic of Ireland and joins the community there to talk about the impact of the Creative Places project. Our host Seonaid Murray is a community musician who joined the lead organisation, Creative Lives, in December 2022, previously Outreach Officer at The Black Box, Belfast. 

The journey meets a wide range of people involved and covers timelines for place-based projects, a creativity bus, the role of imagination in communities and much more. This is a companion piece for the Journal 47 article by Seonaid Murray titled ‘Bringing us out of our living rooms: limitless imagination in Edenderry, Republic of Ireland’ accessible to members here.

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 2, Episode 2: Léa Guzzo in Plymouth

For the second podcast of our new series,  Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Consultant Léa Guzzo interviews people on the streets of Plymouth to gather opinions on art as a way of thinking through issues of class, social mobility and representation in the sector.

Léa runs an Impactful and Inclusive Leadership programme and draws on her own lived experience as a white LGBTQ+ woman from a multicultural and working-class background.

This is a companion piece for the Journal 47 article by Léa titled ‘The unspoken divide: class and the cultural sector’ accessible to Engage members here.

The Engage Journal Podcast - Series 2, Episode 1: Rising Arts Agency

For the first outing of our new series, we have a special conversation between the co-directors of Rising Arts Agency Jess Bunyan and Euella Jackson. Rising Arts is a not-for-profit creative agency based in Bristol led by young underrepresented creative thinkers aged 18-30. Their mission is to use their distinctive ways of working and facilitating, years of production experience and their intersectional community to do things differently, this conversation highlights how this approach leads to meaningful change and what it means for those they partner and collaborate with.