Distracted Actions

Distracted Actions explores distraction as a mode of knowledge, to test how “messy”, associative, and sensory modes of thinking can shape inclusive exhibition-making. The exhibition will act as both artwork and research experiment: a collaboratively curated environment where resolved works by invited artists are revisited through interactive, participatory “distracted” interventions by the artist-curators, Moyra Derby, Jenny Dunseath, Kate Squires and Claire Undy.

Distraction is often framed as the problem, as the gap to be closed. Distracted Actions explores 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. An instinctive form of attention: cluttered, adaptive, responsive to multiple viewpoints, resonant with neurodiverse modes of learning and making.

The disruptive coexistence of contributed artworks by Jo Addison, Judith Brocklehurst, Dominique Golden, Matthew de Kersaint Giraudeau, Kelly Large, Leap then Look, Flora Parrott, Mari Fuji Pratt and Tom Woolner overlap and interrupt, foregrounding the potential of distracted multiplicity of thought. This work doesn’t pretend that focus is the only route to knowledge. Distracted Actions embraces dual pulls, slight interruptions, sounds, gestures, or movements at the edge of attention that shift trajectory.

• https://aptstudios.org/20242025distracte...