By Kelly Carmichael

Robert Rauschenberg could not have put it more succinctly – "the artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history”. This idea of artist as witness is not a new one. Historically and across all art forms the role of artists to observe, announce, document and translate is central to our knowledge of the past. From Japanese floating world prints to hieroglyphics in Egyptian tombs, James Joyce’s Dubliners to Picasso’s Guernica, artists have contributed strongly to recording the existence of and providing evidence for our understanding of historical events and social circumstance. The artist, however, is more than a passive witness of events – whether monumental or everyday. They are an active participant in the unfolding of their own particular time in history.

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