Abstract

This article considers ways in which art practices can provide a way of recontouring the physical and cultural landscape of North Wales and serve as a catalyst for social resilience. The article will contextualize iterations of art practices focusing particularly on varying aspects of gesture as a spatial practice. Citing projects that reimagine sites to rediscover a cultural identity and artistic potential through imaginative transformations, the article will discuss aspects of art and gesture, together with the various means of encounter and speculative inquiry that artists adopt to relate or bring art to everyday encounters. The article will outline the notion of artistic activity as a more socially engaged practice and how this seeks to occupy the field of distribution. The article will seek to establish how such projects are part of a broader tendency highlighting the potential of creative indeterminacy to push away from “art” and to restore an embodied relationship to the world. The article examines ways in which “art’s gesture” within a public space can help to disclose potential breaches in the cultural infrastructure and engage the public with selected issues within society.