Bad Spirits is a curatorial project / a performance / an artistic collaboration between Dawn Bothwell & Paul Stewart.

Bad Spirits is an artistic project of Dawn Bothwell and Paul 🤴 Stewart beginning as a residency and exhibition space in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.

Bad Spirits hosted its first exhibition and residency on Guy Fawkes' Night, a British festival based on a historical incident on the 5th of November 2018. An exhibition and performance was given by the Cambridge/Leeds based artist Harold Offeh. Since then, Bad Spirits has hosted artists Rachael MacArthur (Edinburgh), School of the Damned (across UK), Gayle Meikle, Susie Green (both Newcastle) and Mark Kusimovic (Ontario/Middlesbrough).

BS were invited to produce a project at the B39 Experimental Studio in June 2019, working with art theorist Andrea Phillips and the Incidental Futures working group who are revisiting the work of the Artists’ Placement Group.

From this sparsely supported burst of activity, Bad Spirits aims to develop a sustainable future and practice, building on recently made relationships with arts professionals and artists who have requested to work with BS. The project also looks to proactively pursue new relationships through a programme of collaborations and new commissions.

Bad Spirits wish to question what it does mean to ask artists into a domestic environment and to play ‘host’ supporting artists to make artworks in a domestic context. Not necessarily responding with outcomes only concerned topically with ‘domesticity’ but instead enquiring into hospitality, care, labour and rest, the ownership of space, sites and methods for learning and making, co-habitation models , collaborative working models and the ambiguous crossover points between these areas.

This project re-examines site-related practice and institutional critique, offering not a scathing retort but looking at a more complete picture, not offering an alternative but an additional way of working and the new possibilities this will generate. The aim of Bad Spirits is to realise commissions inside and outside of the current premises in Gateshead, which deal with these ideas.

These questions are particularly important in the current context of the widespread discontinuation of the art & design in high schools across the UK, the subsequent shift of this responsibility to large arts institutions, to the detriment of their role in supporting health and wellbeing through the arts. The struggle to sustain these larger, established, high capacity institutions with high running costs has had the consequence of a reduction in funding for small-scale arts organisations.

As BS, Bothwell and Stewart have acted opportunistically, using their own professional practices and working with artists that they have standing relationships with. These relationships originally formed through their work independently as practicing artists, curators, academics and writers over the last decade. (They have both produced projects regularly as independent curators and as core contributors to CIRCA Projects, MiMA School of Art, The Northern Charter, Middlesbrough Art Weekender, Workplace Gallery, Satellite Gallery, Tate Learning Team, Hen Ogledd and the Alternative Art College.

Under these auspices Bothwell and Stewart have worked with a high number of organisations and artists both regionally, nationally and internationally. Taking opportunities arising through their current and past roles in the arts they pursued the initial 12 months of the Bad Spirits programme. An example of this way of working includes time-banks, accommodation and labour swaps. Stewart met Offeh when working at Tate Education Team in 2015, he invited him as a paid guest-lecturer in Stewart’s role as lecturer at MiMA School of Art, in return for giving him free accommodation, Offeh offered to show a new work at BS.

Both Bothwell and Stewart have invited artists from their extended professional networks who are at a pivotal moment in their career and have had a real need to show work in the North East, due to lack of or under-representation, or due to their need to test an idea out which could be developed in a supportive environment.

BS have, to date, worked with both artists and art-writers and wish to develop a supportive environment and programme for artists and writers in equal measure.