In curating this collection of articles on community arts, I have inevitably drawn much on my own experience.

One of the happiest and most productive periods in my working life was spent in Liverpool from 2007–10, running a programme of action research, training and organisational development for LARC (Liverpool Arts & Regeneration Consortium), bringing together eight of the major cultural organisations in Liverpool.  They had come together in the run up to Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, in order to make the most of the opportunity and make sure that it came off well. 

Much of the energy in the consortium came from the education and community teams within each organisation. We worked together on various initiatives in North Liverpool and also ran a two year evaluation training programme for cultural organisations working in socially engaged practice, with François Matarasso.

One of the projects I became particularly aware of was tenantspin, a community broadcasting project delivered by FACT in partnership with Arena housing association. tenantspin’s first co-ordinator was Patrick Fox, who in time went on to run FACT’s overall community programme, before leaving for Create Ireland and eventually returning to the Northwest to set up Heart of Glass in St Helen’s in 2014.

In thinking about how to draw on my time in Liverpool I decided to focus on Patrick’s work, particularly after reading the series of articles on community arts he has recently written for Arts Professional, to celebrate the first ten years of Heart of Glass. I was interested in how his commitment to community arts had developed, and to learn more about his current thinking.

We met on a cold day in late January, at the Friends Meeting House, next door to The Bluecoat in central Liverpool.  We had an intense conversation over an hour and a half, which I have made into two articles – this first one of which describes his early experiences and his work with tenantspin in Liverpool and Create Ireland. The second focuses on Heart of Glass, the organisation he set up in St Helens, Merseyside in 2014.

It was fascinating to hear him talk eloquently about what he called the emotional labour of community arts and the need for really long-term commitment.

I started by asking how he came to be involved in community arts at the start of his career, and what drew him to socially engaged practice. 

Growing up in Dublin

“For me the work is deeply personal.

I grew up in North Dublin, a working class background, youngest of 6 kids with quite an age gap. I was the first person in my family to complete second level education, let alone third level. I was interested in the arts in the sense that I really enjoyed writing and music, I enjoyed different art forms as a kind of personal passion.  At the time in Ireland, there was free third level education for people of different backgrounds, so I was fortunate to be able to avail of that.

I decided to do an arts degree, and my mother burst into tears! She said please be a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer – we had no frame of reference for jobs in the arts. I studied really hard and applied myself and then took a massive risk in this world that me or my family  didn’t really understand and had no connection to.  I didn’t go to museums and galleries growing up, I didn’t know anyone who had a job in the arts, or even what the possibilities might be, but I guess I was brave enough to use the opportunity for further education to explore something I had a passion for. 

The only times I had ever encountered an artist was in the context of community projects in my neighbourhood.”

Moving to Liverpool: tenantspin

“After I finished my degree and saved up some money, I decided I was going to move abroad…

by chance a friend and I decided on Liverpool, my first ever time in the UK and we got a one way ticket and moved into a hostel at first.

I knew I wanted to get into the arts, but I needed paid work. I got to chat with the CEO of Arena Housing where I was working on reception. He asked about my interests and said they were about to work with FACT which was moving into its building at that time. The housing association was taking over some housing stock – tower blocks – and doing some joint projects with them and he suggested I should apply for the Co-ordinator job on an arts engagement collaboration they were exploring. It was a lucky break but the interview process was the most rigorous one I have ever gone through! There was the interview with the housing association, another with the  arts organisation and a third with a community panel of 15 people from a high rise tenants’ group.

I’m in a new city, for the first time in England, living over here (my friend moved back to Dublin after a year), and I was on my own doing this job. It was such a privilege to be with these groups of tenants from tower blocks dotted across the city that were all being demolished so people were being rehoused into new build two up two downs sold to them as aspirational living.   They were dismantling communities. The community groups were really organised, all from trade union backgrounds, some of them had been involved – the women – in running factories during the war. People mostly didn’t want to leave the tower blocks as they had made a vibrant community – it was their home. Buildings were literally being blown up and people were being scattered around.

tenantspin participant Josie interviews Will Self for a tenantspin broadcast. Photo credit: FACT commission. 

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At the time FACT was working with a Danish artists’ collective called SuperFlex who worked with new media technology – this is 2002-2003 so very early days of online culture. They started to work with FACT and this high rise tenants’ group and the housing action group. Somewhere along the line an amazing community development officer called Paul Kelly from the Housing Action Trust and his team and the team at FACT – led by Eddie Berg and with lead artist Alan Dunn and many other amazing creatives – connected the dots and the artists came in to work with this group, from which tenantspin emerged.¹

tenantspin participant interviews an Elvis impersonator as part of a community broadcast. Photo credit: FACT commission.

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The premise was to set up an internet channel, to broadcast from the tower blocks and tell the real story of this community change agenda and what was happening, and show it on the internet – before YouTube, before Twitter, before social media as we know it today. The crucial point was that it was being broadcast so we gave a level of accountability that none of us really understood but it generated power – what happened in those community rooms had the potential of a global audience, even if in reality we never reached it. I remember really early on in the broadcasts one of the housing officers had talked about the removal of asbestos from one of the buildings. 

Directly afterwards they tried to say they didn’t say it, but it had been captured on the recording.”

A Move Back to Ireland

“I left Liverpool in 2011 to run Create Ireland, the national agency for collaborative arts in Ireland.

I left to go back home. When you look at different migration experiences, there is quite often a pull home after a certain amount of time – to go back and make sense of what you’ve learned in a home context. When I applied for the job at Create, I was 29 and so it was quite a leap to take on the role of leading a national organisation with a 40 year history. Create, in terms of the history of community arts in Ireland, is really at the top, it is an important organisation. It was founded in 1983 by community practitioners convening  and feeling that “we need a home for this practice”. When I was there, it was a resource organisation to support the field of practice – and it remains a vital part of the arts and community ecology in Ireland.

So that was a lot of policy work, creating opportunities for artists, creating conditions through which work could happen.”

For the next steps, moving back to Merseyside to set up Heart of Glass in St. Helen’s see the following article.

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NOTE
1. In common with so much past community arts practice, it’s hard to find much online about tenantspin.

The authors from The Double Negative, an online magazine, note that: “When you search for tenantspin on FACT’s website now, only two results come up. Google it and there are plenty of broken links. It is only tenantspin’s former team of producers that have managed to archive any of its videos and images as proof of its existence. Digital archiving, and how we preserve collaborative projects, is a bigger conversation, but for a project that was meant to be about using the internet to give voice, their lack of an online footprint seems a sad silencing.”

Ironically, they then give the web address of tenantspin.org for more information – but that link is now broken. Other links to tenantspin can be found here and here.