Professor Alan Dunn will present a new lecture reflecting on thirty years of working with older people and the importance of forgetting.

Sailing, dementia, tongue twisters & forgetting: a new talk on some old subjects.

Professor Alan Dunn will present a new talk that reflects on thirty years of creative work with older people, from the Pensioners’ Action Group in Glasgow through to his current work with dementia care homes via the award-winning ‘tenantspin’ project in Liverpool. The talk will be based around some key photographic moments, including some never-before-seen images from a private archive, some exercises and some original props.

Dunn will propose the importance of forgetting as a creative act and draw a line from George Wyllie to Carl Jung to Paul Young, taking in a shipbuilding tradition, small record shops, Mary in Crewe, elephants, the significance of January and tongue twisters.

In relation to the talk, Dunn asks that if anyone has a copy of Paul Young’s 1983 LP ‘No Parlez’, please bring it along to the lecture.

Professor Alan Dunn (b. 1967, Glasgow) studied community art at Glasgow School of Art and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1985-1991. His ‘Bellgrove Station Billboard Project’ (Glasgow 1990-91) attained international art press coverage and was recently recreated by a current GSA student.

Since 1993 he has worked with elderly groups, from Castlemilk Pensioners’ Action Group in Glasgow through to the internationally-acclaimed ‘tenantspin’ Internet TV project with FACT (Liverpool) and city-wide high-rise tenants. He was one of the ‘Where the Arts Belong’ artists working with Bluecoat and Belong where he explored the use of tongue twisters within dementia care settings, with the exciting results contributing to the Markel Third Sector Care Award in 2022 and publication of ‘The Jingle Book’ in 2024. He completed his PhD at Leeds Beckett University in 2014 on the relationship between sound art and the everyday and has developed projects with Tate Britain, Liverpool Art Prize, Channel 4, BBC Radio, the Anthony Burgess Foundation and has exhibited internationally including USA, New Zealand, Brazil and across Europe. He has published articles and edited journals with MIT Press and Intellect Publishing and developed content for billboards, broadcasts, webcasts, records and AR aps with and by Einstürzende Neubauten, The Great North Run, Bikini Kill, Hillsborough Justice Campaign, Big Issue in the North, Jayne Casey, Andy Warhol Foundation, Singh Twins, the Raffles housing estate, Chris Watson, Philip Jeck and Yoko Ono.

Dunn currently lives and works in Liverpool City Region, is co-founder of Alternator Studio & Project Space in Birkenhead and in 2024 he won the inaugural Liverpool Sculpture Prize with a ‘RAY + JULIE’ related work. Dunn recently completed a four-year AHRC-funded project on the Isle of Man recording underwater sounds and he is creator of the growing ‘ZERO PLAN’ project that involves acquiring multiple copies of ‘No Parlez’.

See www.alandunn67.co.uk and @alandunn67

Description supplied by the event organiser.