Pub Conversation: Ruth Barker & Niall MacDonald

Self Service and Pub Conversations.

In 2006 through to 2008, Self Service initiated a programme of talks taking place at the Lamp Tavern in Birmingham.

Each Self Service member chose an artist or person of influence to their practice who was in turn invited to nominate someone they would like to have a public conversation with. Topics of conversation were held entirely open and reflected the interests and enthusiasms of the artists nominated.

Each conversation was recorded and released as a podcast, however the Pub Conversations website no longer exists so the files are re-posted here by way of an archive. All posts related to the Pub Conversations series can be found at www.npugh.co.uk/tag/pub-conversations/.

Self Service is a constantly evolving group of Birmingham based artists who originally came together in 2004, with the aim of generating projects which would create intimacy and enable the development of dialogue amongst the disparate groups and practitioners in Birmingham who made up a somewhat fragmented visual arts community.

At the time of Pub Conversations, Self Service consisted of Tom Bloor, Jo Capper, Mona Casey, Faye Claridge, Ruth Claxton, Greg Cox, John Hall, Cheryl Jones, Nikki Pugh, Liz Rowe, Charlotte Smith and Matt Westbrook

The talks were supported by Arts Council, UCE and Business Link.

Ruth Barker & Niall MacDonald, October 2006

Ruth Barker and Niall MacDonald discuss the effect of morality and ethics in their decision making as artists. Their conversation begins with an introduction to both their practices and respective contexts. This then leads into an inquiry surrounding the moral factors inherent within an artwork, as well as the perceived moral and ethical motives of an artist.

[audio:http://www.npugh.co.uk/media/pubcon/pub_conversations_32kbit%20fast%20qualit.mp3]
[Download file]