#sociallyengaged

[maddieexton]

Crit Club

Delivered for the National Saturday Club at the Time & Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth.

This workshop introduced young people to art criticism through playful, accessible, and confidence‑building activities. The session explored how to democratise critical writing and open up a field traditionally dominated by upper‑class, male, and white voices.

Participants created their own “VIP Art Critic” badges and costumes to question what authority looks like and how costume can shift who feels entitled to speak about art. The group then re‑wrote real art reviews using only words added to the dictionary in 2024. Terms like nepo baby, barbiecore, girl dinner, and climate breakdown prompted discussions about contemporary language and who gets to shape cultural narratives.

Participants then wrote their own responses to objects in the museum’s collection, working individually and in conversation. The workshop emphasised that criticism can be conversational, personal, and rooted in everyday language rather than exclusive jargon.

To conclude, the teens photographed one another in their “art critic” personas. This workshop is designed to empower young people to write confidently about art, challenge traditional gatekeeping, and experiment with criticism as a creative practice.

[maddieexton]

Affirmation Mobiles

Delivered for the Camden Arts Centre Youth Collective

This workshop invited young people to reflect on how to sustain their creative practices beyond formal structures of education, employment, or community. The session centred on building resilience, self‑knowledge, and alternative definitions of artistic success.

Participants explored the idea of “future‑proofing” their practice through small, meaningful actions that can support them during periods of uncertainty or transition. Through group discussion, they considered key questions around anti‑capitalist approaches to making: Do we create to sell? How do we define productivity? What does success look like on our own terms?

The practical element of the workshop involved creating affirmation mobiles - hanging sculptural pieces designed to act as companions in studios or making spaces. Each mobile incorporated personal statements, reminders, and values chosen by the participants, functioning as both artworks and tools for self‑support. The making process emphasised care, reflection, and the importance of building environments that nurture creativity rather than pressure it.

By the end of the session, participants had produced individual mobiles that articulated their motivations and priorities as emerging artists. The workshop offered a space to rethink sustainability in creative practice, foregrounding wellbeing, autonomy, and community over traditional markers of achievement.

[maddieexton]

Is Curation Real?

Funded by The Art Fund’s Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grants Programme

This workshop was developed as part of a project funded by The Art Fund, which supported my participation in Curating: From Art to Design and Beyond at Central St Martins, followed by a dedicated knowledge‑exchange session. The aim was to consider how curating operates within wider social, structural, and economic contexts, especially in East Anglia, where no formal curatorial training is currently available.

Drawing on visits to twelve galleries and exposure to a range of organisational models, the workshop explored how different curatorial approaches shape programming, access, and sustainability.

Experiences from the course highlighted barriers such as inaccessible planning and classist assumptions. When these reflections were shared publicly, more than forty peers responded with similar accounts. These anonymised experiences formed the basis of a 30‑minute activity mapping them against the Wheel of Power, prompting discussion on what could be made explicit, supported, or changed. Participants identified needs across organisational culture, sector pathways, and workforce development, including more diverse leadership, funded entry routes, and confidence‑building opportunities for emerging and established practitioners.

[maddieexton]

Wishful Thinking, A wish tree for Norwich

commissioned by Norwich and Norfolk Festival 2023 as part of The Norwich Art Path

This site‑specific artwork introduced a contemporary Coin Tree to the University of East Anglia campus, marking the site of a modern‑day pilgrimage created for the festival by The Art Path.

Collaborating with sound healer Lola Bartlett, passers‑by were invited to experience a sound bath and to add their own wishes to the fallen tree, continuing a long‑standing tradition of communal hope‑making. 

Coin trees appear at more than forty sites across the UK. The earliest known example stands beside a holy well on Isle Maree in the Scottish Highlands, where pilgrims once left offerings in search of healing. While British coin trees use metal tokens, similar “wish trees” appear across Pagan, Hindu, and Thai traditions, where rags and fabrics are tied to branches as acts of devotion or hope.

The project began with an observation: the UEA campus is full of secluded spots that students and staff claim as “our place.” This artwork aims to create one more; a shared site of reflection and ritual.

[maddieexton]

Prophecies

Prophecies is an audio work about the future created by Artist Maddie Exton, existing as an audio trail around Norwich Cathedral grounds for the duration of Young Norfolk Arts Festival 2021. Maddie ha

Prophecies

Commissioned by Young Norfolk Arts Festival 2021.

Existing as an audio trail around Norwich Cathedral grounds for the duration of Young Norfolk Arts Festival 2021. Maddie has interviewed Jane Hedges (the Very Reverend of Norwich Cathedral), Penny Francis (a psychic medium), Vonnie Spooner (a spirit guide) and a group of 7 year olds from Earl Soham Primary School to ask them what the future looks like. Harnessing a range of voices, Prophecies will invite listeners into a moment of intimacy with each speaker and open a space for reconnecting with dreaming. The past year has plunged many into survival mode and Prophecies pushes us to be curious again. Religious spaces are a place people often look to for answers and hope, and as such, being set in the Cathedral grounds, the short trail can act like a modern pilgrimage.

“In crises, we pray. Our engagement with religion continues to change, and I wondered how God can act as guidance in the modern world. In the dark days of post ww1 Britain, spiritualism became so popular it almost overtook the Anglican Church, and that same thirst for spiritual comfort has been mirrored during covid. I spoke to a spirit guide and a medium to see what messages and spiritual lessons we can take forward. Working with a group of children from Earl Soham Primary School, it was refreshing and surprising to see what the young think the world will look like in 25 years, allowing the content to be both playful and poignant, two things I always strive for.”

please follow this link to listen

[maddieexton]

Whispered Sculptures

Commissioned by The Art Station, 2020.

film, 3:20 minutes.

Whispered Sculptures follows the journey of a fictional sculpture through a game of digital ‘Chinese whispers’. Using various social medias to connect 16 people, an audio file detailing a sculpture was passed from person to person.  As it changes through circulation, we see how digital communication both helps and hinder our interactions. This film spotlights how stories are a deeply human from of connection.

[maddieexton]

All Philosophy Starts With Wonder

All Philosophy Starts With Wonder is an audio-guide of the "In The Studio" exhibition at Mall Galleries, London, created using the thoughts, critique and praise of 35 children from Southwark Food Bank who have never visited an art gallery before.

All Philosophy Starts With Wonder

All Philosophy Starts With Wonder is an audio-guide of the "In The Studio" exhibition at Mall Galleries, London, created using the thoughts, critique and praise of 35 children from Southwark Food Bank who have never visited an art gallery before.

https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/news/qa-studios-maddie-exton

[kingstonillustrationanimation]

Loads of exhibitions relevant to Image as Spectacle vs Image as Situation

Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera‘s Turbine Hall installation 10,143,210 at Tate Modern responding to the migration crisis through participation and interaction. 2 October 2018 – 24 February 2019

Mika Rottenberg exhibition at Goldsmith’s Centre for Contemporary Art (where the Justice for Cleaners action took place)  8 Sep–4 Nov 2018. ‘Rottenberg’s elaborate visual narratives draw on cinematic and sculptural traditions to forge a new language that uses cause and effect structures to explore labour and globalisation, economy and production of value, and how our own affective relationships are increasingly monetised’

Mikhail Karikis’s No Ordinary Protest commission at the Whitechapel Gallery  16 Aug 2018 – 6 Jan 2019. ‘Can sound mobilise socio-political and physical change? Working across film, sound and performance, Greek-British artist Mikhail Karikis (b. 1975) adopts the children’s science fiction novel ‘The Iron Woman’ (1993) by British writer Ted Hughes (1930–98) as an ecofeminist parable in which communal listening and noise-making become tools to transform the world’ in collaboration with East End school kids.

A Journey to the Heart of East London FRI 5 OCT - FRI 21 DEC  at Rich Mix.  Exhibition of original maps and drawings by East End artist and cartographer Adam Dant  - relevant if you’re interested in psycho-geography      

and finally, DRAG: Self-portraits and Body Politics at the Hayward Gallery  22 Aug 2018 – 14 Oct 2018. This one is also relevant for issues of representation we’ll be exploring in a few weeks, but it’s ending soon -  the exhibition ‘features the work of more than 30 artists who have used drag to explore or question identity, gender, class and politics, from the 1960s to the present day.’