Distracted Actions

Distracted Actions is an interactive, curatorial experiment by Moyra Derby, Jenny Dunseath, Kate Squires and Claire Undy with additional artwork by Jo Addison, Judith Brockelhurst, Dominique Golden, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Kelly Large, Leap Then Look, Flora Parrott, Mari Fujii-Pratt and Tom Woolner.
The exhibtion explored the creative potential of work that takes place in the overlap between studio practice and everyday life. The curators were interested in distraction: attention as it disperses, slips, doubles back, forgets and finds something else.
Distraction is often framed as the problem, as the gap to be closed. Distracted Actions was interested in what happens when it isn’t - when the peripheral tugs, when the body collaborates with the material before the mind finishes its sentence, when practice scatters, loops, leans, wanders. In that unravelling, new connections spark; multi-sensory, associative, not-yet-verbal. It’s the kind of attention that art school pedagogy recognizes instinctively: cluttered, adaptive, responsive to multiple viewpoints, resonant with neurodiverse modes of learning and making.