Step Right Up is an ongoing participatory artwork that I install in a residential area or on a public exhibition site. By inviting passersby and local residents to take part in a temporary ‘speaker’s corner,’ I explore the interwoven realities of public discourse – with all its heady promises, cheap pageantry and moments of genuine interpersonal dialogue and progress. My work both represents and restages these ‘realities’.

While the speaker’s corner carries its associations with political speech, rabble rousing and sophistry, Step Right Up also engages the parallel and sometimes intersecting traditions of the travelling medicine man, the salesman and the mountebank. By incorporating the often ad hoc aesthetics of these colourful archetypes into a public performance, I seek both to embody these modalities and to invite the public to do the same.

The operative question posed by the work becomes whether or not – amid the many competing interests and power relations (both existing and developing) between the participants in this artificial/constructed scenario – an authentic moment of dialogue can occur.