community art

MUCH MORE THAN MAKING DO

I wrote this article for Super Slow Way, the Creative People and Places programme in Pennine Lancashire. I’m their critical friend. This is a reflection on where Super Slow Way are now and where I think they’re going.

Let’s Create An Artist in Every Community (and let’s create it now)…

I had a conversation with fellow artist Martin Daws back in 2016. He had a great idea. imagine if artists were employed, full-time to work in communities? We worked on it. Martin then wrote a guest blog here in 2017.

This article sets out how we could easily and relatively cheaply employ artists in everyday community and how such a simple, yet radical system would create just the sort of transformative cultural change that is at the heart of Arts Council England’s new 10-year strategy, Let’s Create.

Community artists as free labour: Why Wiltshire Council’s “volunteer community artist” is an exploitative example of job substitution

This article is my response to the shocking “artist brief” recently published by Wiltshire Council asking for a “volunteer community artist” to do what is clearly a paid piece of work. It’s an example of the increasingly commonplace substitution of properly paid work for artists with free labour dressed up as volunteering. As such it undermines both the fragile arts economy and the reputation of volunteering.

Dandelions & dissent: A review of ‘Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: The British Community Arts Movement’ edited by Alison Jeffers & Gerri Moriarty

This review was first published in November 2017 for Artworks Alliance. It was the first review of the book which is published by Bloomsbury and can be purchased here. I am publishing it on my blog in the hope of stimulating new discussion around cultural democracy, community arts and everyday art and creativity - an area I'm working on quite a lot at the moment.

Participating without power: The limits of instrumentalised engagement with people & place

I believe that there is not enough emphasis placed upon understanding the theoretical and historical perspectives and contexts of 'participation' that are, for me, crucially important to both practice and research that engages with people, place, power and politics.  Similarly, I also believe that, whilst this field is situated within 'the social', there is not enough emphasis on how practice and research may fit with broader understandings of art and society, nor, for that matter, with wider theoretical from other interrelated disciplines.  Too often I attend conferences or read articles about socially engaged art, participatory art and Creative People and Places only to find an often insular, narrow discussion of practice which often is positioned within existing frameworks of practice and research which themselves are often ultimately defined by the state.

This article therefore attempts to open up new ways of thinking about community development and social engagement in art programmes like Creative People and Places.

GREAT Art for THEM, #everydaycreativity for everyone else!

A provocation for the Everyday Creativity Session at University of Warwick 6th April 2016 This is the paper I presented.  I have included some of the slide images in the text below.  If you would like to view the presentation, please click here and remember to view the slideshow with notes enabled (bottom right).  …Read more GREAT Art for THEM, #everydaycreativity for everyone else!

Arise street-crack Buddleias–why socially engaged artists must attempt to storm the citadels

I was invited to attend Storming the Citadels? Changing attitudes and frameworks to arts practices and research in community settings by Sophie Hope. As an admirer of Sophie’s research and a believer in many of the demands made in Owen Kelly’s classic 1984 text Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, I travelled to…Read more Arise street-crack Buddleias–why socially engaged artists must attempt to storm the citadels

Arise street-crack Buddleias–why socially engaged artists must attempt to storm the citadels

I was invited to attend Storming the Citadels? Changing attitudes and frameworks to arts practices and research in community settings by Sophie Hope. As an admirer of Sophie’s research and a believer in many of the demands made in Owen Kelly’s classic 1984 text Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, I travelled to…Read more Arise street-crack Buddleias–why socially engaged artists must attempt to storm the citadels

My life as research: tracing the edges of socially engaged & participatory arts practice

I was asked to present a brief précis of my current research at Northumbria University last week.  I thought it might be of interested to some people.  So here it is.  It’s an edited version of the presentation.  The images are a mix of my own, from my case studies and old film stills. It…Read more My life as research: tracing the edges of socially engaged & participatory arts practice

‘Pilots to Practice’–reflections about an ArtWorks PHF participatory arts conference

Yesterday, 9th September 2014, I attended Pilots to Practice at BALTIC – a ArtWorks North East conference about participatory arts.  I presented a PechaKucha entitled above ground level: old as new, new as old – social practice in a post-industrial port (see my previous post below for the presentation).  I also wrote a review of…Read more ‘Pilots to Practice’–reflections about an ArtWorks PHF participatory arts conference

‘Pilots to Practice’–reflections about an ArtWorks PHF participatory arts conference

Yesterday, 9th September 2014, I attended Pilots to Practice at BALTIC – a ArtWorks North East conference about participatory arts.  I presented a PechaKucha entitled above ground level: old as new, new as old – social practice in a post-industrial port (see my previous post below for the presentation).  I also wrote a review of…Read more ‘Pilots to Practice’–reflections about an ArtWorks PHF participatory arts conference