THE POWER AND EXCELLENCE OF COMMUNITY ARTS. PART TWO, HEART OF GLASS, ST HELEN’S, MERSEYSIDE
Image: Launch of Strong Women of St Helens – Carrie Reichardt and St Helens communities 2023. Photo: Radka Dolinska.
This article contains the second part of my interview with Patrick Fox. For his earlier work with tenantspin in Liverpool and with Creative Ireland, please see part 1.
Creating Heart of Glass in St Helen’s – the Think and Do Tank
Patrick Fox recounts his return to Merseyside:
“When I had the opportunity to come back to Merseyside to set something up, I thought about merging the theory, practice, policy, influence and the doing.
What does it look like if these things exist in one organisational form? And then that became Heart of Glass, a new organisation set up in 2014, with funding from Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme (2014 – present) and latterly a National Portfolio organisation (2018 to present).
The community development sector has been dismantled over the last ten to fifteen years: where are those spaces where we convene as a community? Where are the spaces where we get to share our experiences and question if this is how we want to exist together, is this what prosperity feels or looks like, is this what dignity of life looks like? Arts, art spaces and creative practices are probably one of the last few spaces where we can imagine the world differently – to rehearse a different future. For example, it’s not about art and the making of art driving economic development or looking at value through the lens of the capitalist framework – it’s about humanity (and the more than human) and how we experience the world we share. It can just be about being together in a space and valuing each other, and the knowledge and experience we all have and recognising that it all has value – that we are important. If we share our knowledge and experience and create around and with that, something amazing happens and something beautiful and/or challenging can emerge.
Keep Growing Keep Going Follow the Light. Nomad Clan and Parr communities. Photo: Radka Dolinska.
I’m really interested in the history of community arts and community engaged practice and the shoulders that we stand on. And I’m interested in how we can explore the idea of art as an enactment of the public sphere, and different methodologies in this space of an emerging new world.
The history of making and doing is embedded in the DNA of St Helens which is where Heart of Glass emerged. It’s post-industrial – coal mining, glass industry, pharmaceuticals – on the fringes of Liverpool and Manchester and with a very unique set of identities and social histories. When we started we were clear we wanted to make something here together, supporting artists and communities. We don’t want to just be a space on the touring network, we want something to grow here – barnraise together. That meant engaging with the civic life of the place and not just the arts life.
So that became the invitation, and the name Heart of Glass came from the Werner Herzog film, about a Bavarian glass blowing town which is famous for making this particular kind of red ruby glass. The master glass blower dies, and the town goes into this state of hypnotism because the thing that it did, that it coalesced around, that put it on the map, was no longer with it.
This place was the birthplace of the glass industry globally and the name is a play on the fragility of the material and preciousness of human spirit – and yes it’s also a Blondie song that gets played at the Christmas party every year! We have kind of grown into the name. There’s something about that kind of fragility and the risk it takes to make this work, to make something beautiful and of meaning that now more than ever feels fitting as a name.
The glass metaphor and the story of glass in this town is very pertinent. At the beginning there were the rich sand deposits that allowed the glass industry to be born. Up to 40,000 people were employed in the industry at one time but by the time we started in 2014, the numbers were more in the hundreds. It was primarily automated production, so the making aspect was stripped out, you didn’t even know what you were making necessarily, you were just part of the chain – making something that’s part of the carburetor in a car – you didn’t get the satisfaction of completion – that kind of touch and agency was stripped away. This is now a hauntingly familiar tale, it changes a person and a community.
I try to understand the St Helens’ experience. This was a family run industry. It wasn’t just about the labour in the town.
It was about the summer picnics, the childcare, going to the opticians, the plays that were staged, the collection of artwork that the workers had access to, the silver service restaurant with amazing chefs – all of that collapsed at the same time, it created a polycrisis.”
Growing Antlers installation at Knowsley Safari Park – Lou Chapelle and families from Knowsley. Photo: Radka Dolinska.
Emotional Labour – the invisibility and the “socially engaged heartbreak” of community art
“A lot of this work is invisible. It takes time and trust and relationships.
That can be difficult to sustain and maintain in a funding landscape that values the explosion at the end. What does community arts practice look like? It usually looks like lots of people around a table with cups of tea. That’s the aesthetic of this work, which is quite often a hard sell to maintain support. It’s durational. We are ten years into this work now, and it feels like we have only scratched the surface. Every bit that we get to dig just reveals another layer.
The operating context we’re working in shifts and changes all the time, which can be tricky. That might be changing staff at the local council or the person who was running a local community programme who’s just reached burnout. There are so many different interlocking things – it is that kind of fine delicate balance – always moving, always changing. There is no constant.
I can remember being so ill equipped in tenantspin as a young adult. Say we were working on a project, and someone was at the extreme end of alcoholism, and someone else was in the grips of a mental health crisis, or someone else had had a falling out with their family. All of these emotions are in this space with you. I was 22 at the time – just feeling my way through it all and relying on human instinct. There is a lot more support and awareness generally now, but it’s not something we fully discuss or provide for in the practice – we all know it and feel it, but a policy or safeguarding can often feel like a blunt instrument. We talked at our conference last year about socially engaged heartbreak and those stories that we all tell about these ruptures in projects. It’s very real and can be really challenging personally.
Launch of Strong Women of Knowsley – Carrie Reichardt and Knowsley communities 2024. Photo: Anna Levin.
The stories that we can all recount about what happens within this practice will never not surprise you. That’s part of the draw of this work. Every day is unique and full of possibilities. That’s why I am always really cautious about what I call the “toolkitification” of this work – let’s roll it out! Let’s do this here and we’ll all do a version of this thing! There is not a magic formula. There’s a place and time for approaches and strategies but if you’re talking about really long term work that is community led, it’s going to be very bespoke and unique and the conditions are going to be different every time, even every day.
I think that’s where the potential of the work exists, but it’s also where the emotional labour is, which is a challenge in trying to be able to sustain and protect those spaces of creativity.
My job nowadays running an organisation is to get out of the way sometimes, be a buffer from the realities of the world (funders etc) and make sure we’re putting the right support in place so that whatever needs to happen can happen.”
Queer Eutopia. Emma Colbert with Leo Soph Welton and young people from the Lee Cooper Foundation 2023. Photo: Steve Samosa.
Baa Baa Baric: Have you Any Pull?
I asked Patrick to tell me about a particular project to demonstrate how Heart of Glass works. He focused on a long-term project which evolved from an approach by a group of men in St Helens, at a very early stage in the organisation’s development.
“This is a project we’ve been working on since the start of Heart of Glass, with artist Mark Storor. I invited him to come to St Helens in the early days and to meet with different groups.
Quite quickly and quite naturally he met this group of men, a similar age to him. They came into our office at the time, in the rugby club. He said we’ve all just discovered that people in parts of St Helen’s will die 10 years before people in other parts of the country based on mortality rates statistically. If we’re going to make work together, this is what it’s going to be about. We’re going to have to do this project for at least 12 years, because we’re going to have to go beyond the statistics, to give a voice ‘from beyond the grave’.
This was weeks into our existence as a project, we weren’t even a constituted organisation at the time, the grant was being drawn down by the rugby club who were the host partner at the very beginning. We said ok, 12 years, let’s do it.
Now we are ten years into that commitment. That project, called Baa Baa Baric: Have you Any Pull? asks the question “is the most brutal act of barbarism civilisation?” and has evolved in lots of different ways.”
The Council of Wisdom and the Army of Beauty
“The original group of men renamed themselves the ‘Council of Wisdom’ at the outset of the project and one of the earliest projects we did with them was a series of beautiful self-portraits.
These were installed in St Helens as a public art installation in order to re-introduce the men back into the town as sources of wisdom and knowledge. The installation declared that this is a group of men who statistically were not meant to be here, who have wisdom and knowledge.
Army of Wisdom, part of Baa Baa Baric: Have you Any Pull? Mark Storor and communities in St Helens. Photo: Stephen King.
They began to work with a group of young people from across the school network in St Helens and together they declared a new Children’s Charter for the town. Hundreds of students from these schools became the Army of Beauty who worked with the Council of Wisdom. One morning they went around the town as people were going to work or on their commute, giving out flowers and inviting people to march to the town hall with them that day. The march was flanked by police horses, all decorated with flower crowns, and led them to the Town Hall where they delivered a piece of creative writing sharing their Charter – their experiences and hopes for the future – which was received by members of the local council.
Young people deliver a statement to St Helens Council and St Helens Youth Council as part of the Army of Beauty, part of Baa Baa Baric: Have you Any Pull? Mark Storor and communities in St Helens. Photo: Stephen King.
On that day we worked with Merseyside Police who were experiencing the impact food poverty was having on their community policing work. The police took over some chip shops for the day giving out food for free because they found that when they went to talk to someone, often the first thing they had to do was make sure they had food with them, so they could actually have a conversation when people were not hungry.
Those two days in St Helens saw the town shift slightly. It was something out of the ordinary, and the people whose voices were most marginalised, on the fringes were able to initiate a conversation.
We’ll be returning to that origin of the project in some form in the coming years to round out the 12 years.”
The Suicide Chronicles
“Since 2018 Mark has focused his effort into a strand of work called The Suicide Chronicles.
St Helens has had one of the highest rates of suicide nationally on and off for a number of years. This project started here but now works with partners in Ireland and all round the country as well as continuing locally in St Helens.
A woodland screening of ‘The Suicide Chronicles – Chronicle Two: Stand Firm Compassion.’ Mark Storor and communities impacted by suicide. Photo: Stephen King.
We work with groups heavily impacted by suicide – for example first responders, people bereaved by suicide, people who have made a suicide attempt, or communities who are disproportionately affected like the farming community. This project has created a series of chronicles to date, each one exploring a different facet of this experience, and reflecting back the failure of civil society to create spaces where we can hold one another. The idea is that it will be presented as a series of chronicles in mixed art forms as a final presentation – in an attempt to create a language for us to share our experiences. To create the work with communities and individuals impacted we have worked with circus performers, musicians, singers, film makers, photographers, campaigners, trainers, public health practitioners and community leaders. Each chronicle has been presented back to the communities we’ve worked with and to selected audiences. The space has to be sensitively considered and held. Again, this could only work as a long-term commitment, this is what the project demanded. It’s really complex, sensitive, beautiful and extraordinary work. It gives us a way to talk about something that sadly a lot of us have personal experiences of or a connection to.
‘The Suicide Chronicles – Chronicle Five: My Truth and Yours.’ Mark Storor and communities impact by suicide. Photo: Stephen King
Reflecting on the wider project, I’m most proud that we said yes. We didn’t have the right to say yes because we didn’t even exist at the outset of the project beyond a three-year term.
But sometimes you just have to make the commitment to try your best, to create the conditions for this to succeed or to be a viable option. The project continues today.”
Community Arts: “We are Community Arts, and that work is powerful and excellent”
I asked Patrick for his thoughts on what the term community arts means today.
“In our recent development plan, Building Blocks, we have stated clearly that we are a community arts organisation, after a long conversation with board and community members.
What we do is community arts and it’s ok for us to reframe that term and be unapologetic about it… we are community arts, the work is generated by community effort – it is not a singular pursuit. It’s meaningful, it’s urgent, it’s made with integrity, and it’s made by communities (and artists are part of that community, as are we).
The missing part of the conversation in the art world is around class. The thing that can be in the byline is that this is about liberating a certain group of people who might not have an understanding of the benefit that art can have. This is not my experience at all. What we are doing is foregrounding and creating space for voices who have been marginalised, and underrepresented for a whole host of different reasons. And shame on us for allowing that to happen. That’s why the work is so unique.
I will advocate for traditional arts organisations every day of the week, but I also believe that the work we do holds a unique value. The arts are an ecosystem. Artistic excellence exists within community arts projects that are informed by social justice or demanding / supporting change just as much as work that occupies a white cube or a national theatre stage.
The binary argument that is often presented is a false one – the term excellence feels like an unhelpful and loaded term quite often in these debates.”
Mutual support
“We do an annual gathering called With, For, About.
The challenge is in the title, about the kind of tension and potential in making work together (artists and communities) for audiences about the politics of our times, and what it is that we need to talk about right now as a field of practice – the fierce and urgent conversations. This year we talked about how hard it is for us to be in spaces together because there is so much tension in the world, whether that be linked to culture wars or political polarisation. It’s difficult to be vulnerable or on a learning curve in a landscape of absolutes. So, we talked about socially engaged heartbreak – a concept developed by the artist Kate O’Shea – and the things that are challenging in this practice, and the ruptures in personal relationships that can occur. It’s not an experience that naturally fits within limiting evaluation frameworks, but something those involved in this work know to be something that can be tough to carry.
With For About 2023: Care and the Commons gathering. Photo: Radka Dolinska.
Based on our own experience of being part of communities of making, we ask what are the issues we are experiencing and how to invite conversation around themes. It’s the Thinking and Doing aspect of our work. It’s not about showcasing our work as a conference format. It’s about gathering around the particular subject and widening that experience in the hope we can move through it together, or even just understand it better. We’ve done this since year 1. It’s been an essential moment of community for us.
My experience of this practice is that people (workers) can be isolated and so moments of connection are really important. In our work we have a producer model where we are always part of the creative process with the community and the artists. I know a lot of artists who are working alone on commissions – they are asked to “work with this group and let us know how it goes”.
They are being required to be social workers or wear a number of different hats. They may not be qualified to do this, or it may not be safe. This moment of convening is really important for us to support each other.”