(c) Marysa Dowling

After a supremely successful tour of the festival circuit last year, we’re delighted to share with you the details of our long awaited return to Camp Bestival. The Great British Art Debate festival team took the fields of Dorset by storm, where we were blessed with clear blue skies and the joys of team spirit.

A unique preview of the forthcoming Collection display Family Matters was shown all weekend in the East Lulworth Literary Institute and became the backdrop to a Tate discussion and art events, programmed as part of the Great British Art Debate in response to the question, “What does family mean to you?”

(c) Kylie Boyd

We also invited contemporary visual artists Marysa Dowling and Louisa Martin to devise family-focused activities to encourage a reconsideration of conventional family dynamics and to challenge prevailing notions of what constitutes home.

These activates saw Marysa Dowling roam out into the fields and invite festival goes to create their very own alternative family portraits, with some fabulously quirky results.

(c) Marysa Dowling

Simultaneously, Louisa Martin drew families into a world of performance and fancy dress by asking punters to see portholes to the imagination inside their family homes.

(c) Kylie Boyd

The Family Matters preview became the focus of a rich and revealing debate between our invited guest panellists, poet and broadcaster Lemn Sissay MBE, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art at Norwich Museums, Harriet Loffler, artists Louisa Martin and Marysa Dowling, and Tate’s Early Years and Families Curator, Katy Fitzpatrick, which yielded many surprising and emotive responses from panel and audience alike.

(c) Kylie Boyd

For a further peek at The Great British Art Debate’s revelry or to re-live your favourite moment from the festival, take a look at our festival film. It’s a little bit of the GBAD magic!