You Can’t Shake Hands With A Clenched Fist

In August 2017, this public participatory project explored a new, creative, and holistic approach to discussion and debate. The current political discourse is swamped with people shouting at and over each other, and I wanted to explore a more gentle approach, through art, to see whether it is at all possible to learn from and find common ground with each other.

It engages the community through conversation and the creation of an installation to express, in a safe and non judgemental space, their thoughts on subjects that are current within the public discourse.

Inspired by the quote from Indira Ghandi, ‘You Can’t Shake Hands With A Clenched Fist’, this project saught to reach across the barriers and divisions spanning communities, political divides, and those that are often present within our own relationships and peer networks. If we shout, we can’t hear. If we can’t hear hear, we can’t listen. If we don’t listen we don’t learn. If we don’t learn then we can’t move forward, individually, as a community and society as a whole.

Participants were invited to ‘have a conversation’ or welcome to just talk to me if they were in need to get things off their chest. This project focused on four conversation topics: Money, Diversity, The Environment and Education. The conversations were transcribed onto large sheets of wallpaper and the participants invited to select a key phrase to use in creating their own campaign poster. The final element being a symbolic hanging of ‘aired laundry’. Through each participation, the conversation builds, ideas exchanged, opinions challenged and an installation created over time. Colour is a key factor in all visual protests, for both symbolic and marketing reasons. For this pilot, red was chosen as it is an attention grabbing, visually impressive colour.

Below are images of the final installation. To view texts of conversations in full, a reflection of the process and comments from participants, please visit this blog.

The Conversation Area

The Conversation Starters

Notes from Conversations

A participant/assistant making her poster

Participant Poster

Participant Poster

Participant Poster

Participant Poster

Participant Posters

You Can’t Shake Hands With A Clenched Fist
Whole View of Installation