Celia Burbush

Originally trained as a painter, Celia Burbush has made a 20-year career in community art. She received critical appraisal in Joshua Sofaer’s book Performance, Objects, Participation’ (eds. Mock, R & Paterson, M, 2020, Intellect Live). In 2024, she hosted 'Deeply Thinking and Creative Practice: A Symposium' focusing on the work of Patricia Paolozzi Cain, neuro-divergency and visual arts, and she co-created The Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art’s first remote outdoor art trail, Art in Action and hosted their first online symposium, Waiting/Weighting in 2021. She was Director of New Arts North 2009-2019, receiving many funding awards for her art projects, and working with the major cultural venues. She specialises in co-researching with communities and is interested in the politics of co-creation.

I am exploring how the myth of Katabasis - the descent into the underworld - might act as a productive metaphor for collaborative art-making and community art practice. It aims to address the politics of fluency and consider how sensory and psychological immersion in shadows rather than certainty might help improve the understanding and evaluation of these practices and processes. Resisting tidy frameworks, this emerging tool for engagement and growth is transferrable to community, pedagogical and academic domains where sensitivity to different cultural linguistic systems is essential, for reasons of justice, democracy and inclusion. It draws from art history, DIY culture, community theatre and performance, while also applying democratising cognitive research findings concerning aesthetics.  Building on previous collaborative cross-disciplinary manifestations of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking, projects will be experiential and reflective. They will be designed with a view to testing the hypothesis that arts-based research with communities requires the building of fluency on the part of both practitioner and participants, in new and existing languages and cultures, and this can be experienced through collective katabasis, guided co-immersion in the mythic geography of the unknown.

2020/22 MFA Fine Art (BxNU Institute  - Northumbria University/Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art)
2001/4 BA Hons Fine Art (University of Central Lancashire, Carlisle site)
1993/7 BA Jt Hons Management Studies and Spanish (University of Leeds, El Complutense, Madrid)
1992/3 Btec Nat Dip Foundation Studies in Art & Design (Bournville College of Art and Design, University of Central England)