Panel Discussion – Declarative Language x Art Working Parents

£5 (or pay what you can), booking required

Taking place within the exhibition Declarative Language, this panel brings together the show’s curators, Alexis Soul-Gray and Kelly Jessiman, alongside writer and curator Hettie Judah for a conversation shaped by the conditions the exhibition itself sets out to explore.

Both Soul-Gray and Jessiman are included in the exhibition as artists as well as curators, bringing their own practices into direct dialogue with the wider presentation. The panel extends this approach into a shared discussion around artistic practice and parenthood, considering how these roles intersect, inform one another, and are negotiated in real time.

The conversation draws on the work of the Art Working Parents Alliance, co-founded by Judah, which advocates for greater structural support and visibility for parents working in the arts. Together, the speakers will reflect on how caregiving reshapes the practical and conceptual frameworks of making work, from questions of time, access and sustainability to shifts in language, authorship and collaboration.

Situated inside the exhibition, the discussion asks how curatorial and artistic practices, and wider art-world structures can respond more directly to these lived realities. What does it mean to build a professional and creative practice from within these conditions, rather than around them? And how might projects like Declarative Language begin to model alternative ways of working?

This will be an open and discursive session, inviting contributions from the audience and creating space for shared experiences, questions and collective reflection.