Ey Up with Harry Meadley

Harold tells me about discovering that conceptual art is funny, how art could be an investigatory process, the value of a good educational experience, house parties as an approach to performativity, and for him, why success is just someone figuring out what it is he even does.

Mick chats to me about his almost four decades working in social care, ending up as the Deputy Director of Adults and Health for Leeds City Council, as well as making Leeds United dementia friendly, commissioning a room dedicated to his mother and the Riverside Mission at the Art Hostel, and the potential for art as liberation.

Bryony shares her background in photography, newspapers, and why it wasn’t for her, visiting galleries on her own as a teenager, curating as piggybacking, and why artists should choose their practice carefully; whilst I reflect on doing the podcast, utilising artistic license, genuineness as subversion, and trying not to worry so much.

Mei runs the oldest store in New York’s Chinatown and tells me about her decision to take on the family business, facing the threat of gentrification (of which galleries are a big part), setting up the W.O.W Project in response, and the significance of her doing so as a young woman.

After having taken her Improv 101 course at UCB, Chelsea gives me my feedback and some extra lessons as well. She also tells me about originally intending to be a painter but instead finding improv, her approaches to teaching, how it differs to coaching, and how improv helped with her social anxiety.

Carolina speaks about growing up in “very rural” Sweden, leaving home at the age of sixteen, her early beginnings as a graffiti artist, becoming a mother, reawakening her New York alias, Swedish humour, and the story behind that particular painting on the side of a building in lower Manhattan.

Ken and Julia tell me about their journey into becoming an artist duo, playing John and Yoko, how living in beautiful places increases your environmental concerns, and the experience of starting a farm in rural Japan. Then I discuss with Raul our shared love of benches, the most beautiful bench in the world, his literal allergy to painting, and much more we seem to have in common.

David shares with me his experience of being seen as too bohemian to continue his duty to the Israeli army, defining himself as an Arab Jew, being Mizrahi in a mainly Ashkenazi high school, his early sense of taste, his love of art, of teaching art, and the value of being generous.

Knut talks to me about touring a video work around in a lorry, the usefulness of ambivalence, his most recent film made on either side of the Norwegian / Russian border, filming in military zones, and trying to establish new possibilities for people to be able to make artist produced films.