COMMUNITY ARTS: MAKING A DIFFERENCE – IN IT FOR THE LONG TERM
Image: reimagined from Active Energy, a project with The Geezers, led by Loraine Leeson (see below)
In developing the ideas for this collection of articles on community arts, I spent much time discussing exactly what we mean by this term, both with John Phillips as the commissioner for this collection, and with a longstanding colleague and friend, Loraine Leeson.
Both of the organisations they co-led – for John, the Paddington Printshop (co-founded with Pippa Smith in 1975), and for Loraine, the Docklands Community Poster Project (co-founded with Peter Dunn in 1981) – are often seen as key players in the community arts movement. However, at the time, they did not see themselves as central, although clearly having much affinity with it. The key area of difference was around direct creative participation. The important issue for both was to make a difference in their local communities: supporting community activism through facilitating a dynamic visual presence. This did not always involve people directly in the creative process, which is often seen as a key defining characteristic of Community Arts, although the term co-creation, which is now increasingly used, does describe their approach – for example see the approaches described in Creative Communities, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research programme hosted by Northumbria University.
The Paddington Printshop created many posters supporting community action in West London. Sometimes people from the community would make their own images facilitated with technical support from the Printshop, but in other cases the posters would be made by staff members in consultation with people from community action groups rather than directly by them.
Joe Strummer, pre-Clash poster for the 101’ers,1975
The Docklands Community Poster project made large photo murals about the redevelopment of the London Docklands, displayed on purpose built hoardings, developing the ideas for the images through an intense dialogue with local activists. However, the images were designed and created by the two lead artists, Loraine and Peter. Their organisational structure, a community co-operative, involved individuals such as Ted Johns of the Association of Island Communities and Maureen Davies of the Wapping Parents Action Group. All members of the co-operative were directly involved in consulting on and signing off the images to be used.
What’s Going on Behind Our Backs?
Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, Docklands Community Poster Project, 1982-5. From the first sequence of photo-murals ‘The Changing Picture of Docklands’.
For me, the key issue is about how the creative process is used to support community development and social activism: sometimes this will come about through supporting individual creativity to nurture community confidence. At other times it will be through providing an artist led creative expression to give profile to social and political issues such as the wholesale abandonment of planning laws and community engagement in the redevelopment of the London Docklands, or the attempts of Westminster City Council to use housing policy to gerrymander votes in North Paddington.
To explore these issues, I met with Loraine and John to explore how they had addressed the issues of community collaboration, co creation and participation over their long careers.
I started by asking how they had become involved in working with communities starting with their early experience of art college:
LORAINE: I started working with Pete (Dunn) while we were both students. We wanted to find a way for our work to make a difference – we didn’t want to go down the route of making work for galleries, we were not interested in talking to the gallery going public. First of all, we did a piece of work shown in libraries about the development of two towns. It wasn’t that successful because people didn’t know what we were doing even though one of the towns was where I grew up. We realised it didn’t work because it had no basis there. We weren’t working with people; instead, we were trying to inform people.
Sometime later we were on a film fellowship funded by Greater London Arts in Bethnal Green, running film and video workshops at different places in the community. One of the opportunities that came up was to make a video for Bethnal Green hospital which was going into occupation at the time, so we held participatory workshops to produce a campaign video but realised it didn’t work either, because a campaign video has got to be effective and produced quickly. Participants new to film and video have to make mistakes. We managed to pull something together by editing out a lot but decided that it would be much more effective for us to work directly with the campaign committee to create the video. We saw there wasn’t much information for people using the hospital about the occupation and the political issues behind it, so we proposed an exhibition for the hospital foyer. What we had started to do here was to work in a collaborative rather than a participatory way as it seemed to be the most effective thing we could do.
We carried on with that approach in the next project, the East London Health Project, to communicate information about the cuts in the health service, working collaboratively with people from the health sector and the unions. The Docklands Community Poster Project had a similar model working with people in the community. They were the experts on the issues to be addressed – the activists were expert in the strategies, and we were working with them closely to represent all that.
Mental Illness is Class Conscious
Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, East London Health Project, 1980. A2 poster, offset litho. Produced and distributed in conjunction with East London Trades Councils and health workers’ unions.
I came back to participation when later on I started to work in schools – and I found that the process of working with young people was also collaborative because they were the experts about the content, about living in East London – what they brought to it was something I couldn’t bring to it, so we needed each other.
We were never funded by the community arts panel of the Arts Council or the Regional Arts Association. Aside from the film and video workshops, the other health work wasn’t paid, though the health workers’ unions and the campaigns covered the printing costs. With the Docklands project, we initially got a small amount of money from local authorities and the rest came from the Greater London Council. I was on the Greater London Arts Association’s (GLAA) film and video panel, and I didn’t have much to do with the community arts panel. This is rather ironic because our work is always being used to represent community arts, but it was never seen as that at the time. For example, an exhibition coming up in Germany on the history of participatory arts wanted to use images from the Docklands Community Poster Project, even though it was only participatory in terms of ideas rather than in its creative process.
JOHN: I went to art school in the late 1960s when there was much discussion about what art education should be. A small group of us set up our own fine art course. We had friends at the university, with whom we had an agitprop/situationist theatre group making films and street events.
I left art school as an entirely unemployable person looking for a means of survival. Pippa and I moved to West London and I started working as a graphic designer for law and neighborhood centres, designing information about people’s rights, which led to making posters.
By the time the Arts Council announced support for Community Arts we’d been printing on the kitchen table for about a year and had moved to a community centre and started making posters with local people.
David Medalla, an activist artist in the early 70s was a strong influence. I remember an exhibition by him that consisted of an enormous white banner, with all kinds of colourful cotton bobbins and needles hanging from it. People were invited to embroider slogans on it, so the gallery experience was of the audience participating in making the artwork.
This was an introduction to a participatory / collaborative approach to art. Pippa and I took part in an Artists for Democracy exhibition at the Royal College on the anniversary of the coup in Chile where we set up a workshop inviting members of the public to make posters against the Pinochet regime. Immediately afterwards we set up Paddington Printshop.
Edward Wright, 1974
At the time I thought of community arts as a bureaucratic umbrella that enabled the Arts Council to support a wide range of disparate activities that were otherwise excluded from their model– it included Black Arts and non-Western European art alongside inflatables and fun fests.
I had always found the idea of a separation between an artist and a community problematic. Back then, I was an unemployed ex-art school graduate, living in, and making stuff within a community. I didn’t feel that I was an outsider visiting a community that, despite being economically poor, was culturally rich.
LORAINE: It was much the same for us. We were working with people to make things happen. They had expertise in the issues, and we had expertise in visual representation. We were always working as part of a community, and that relationship was made outside of anything to do with the arts. The notion of an artist going into a community felt very alien.
JOHN: For me, there’s never been a problem with having a skill. I come from a working-class background in Sheffield populated by highly skilled people who made tools and were not thought of as anything other than part of that community.
LORAINE: It was a bit different for some of the schools’ projects I did later because then it wasn’t a situation of being ‘an artist’ with a wider group. The most interesting ones nevertheless grew up organically. For example, when my children were at primary school, I was a parent and a governor at the time the National Grid for Learning was being introduced. As a governor, I was invited to see the classes where pupils learned how to move a turtle around a screen, and I thought that if I had been a child learning that I would never touch a computer again! Through being in that community, knowing the teachers, knowing the governors, I came to recognise that there was a project waiting to happen. It felt very risky however, because if it had gone wrong my children would be ostracized, I would lose all my friends amongst the parents and the school would kick me out from being a governor! On the other hand it was also the ideal starting point – it would either work very well, or be a disaster, so it felt scary.
Two projects came out of this: The Infinity Story in collaboration with artist Camille Dorney, which was an interactive story written by all the children in the school, and VOLCO, a planet in cyberspace invented by children where they could be anything they wanted to be so long as it was co-operative – a Virtual Online Co-Operative environment. In the end over 1,000 children in four countries participated and it lasted ten years. It was both fantastic and a nightmare! It was being embedded in the community where it started however that both enabled it to happen and what made it make sense.
The Infinity Story
Loraine Leeson and Camille Dorney, 1997. First page of an interactive illustrated story produced with input from three hundred junior school children.
VOLCO
Loraine Leeson, 1999-2009. Entry page to the VOLCO evolving virtual planet in cyberspace constructed by young people interacting online with others in different locations.
JOHN: I am very struck by that description, because the kind of vulnerability you describe is only possible if you are a member of a community. The consequences for you if the project went wrong wouldn’t be there if you weren’t a member of the community. That’s a huge difference between a professional moving in and writing a report saying we must do this, and someone embedded in a group saying I want to explore this.
BELINDA: What happened next for you both?
JOHN: Over time many things changed. Under Thatcher words like ‘community’ were erased from the discourse, but we remained wedded to the goal of working to improve the quality of life of anyone living in the neighborhood. The scale of the operation also changed. One major project involved working with other local groups to create a development trust for the neighbourhood, (Paddington Development Trust), which eventually brought in millions of pounds of funding which was then dispersed democratically through community organisations deciding where that money should be directed.
John Phillips, for walterton and Elgin Community Action Group, 1986
The Trust grew from conflicts with Westminster Council’s gerrymandering policy to strategically sell council houses to potential conservative voting home owners. We worked with a residents’ association that fought off the council’s plans and eventually gained ownership of a large social housing estate. That in turn created a massive capital asset within community ownership.
LORAINE: There was a disjuncture at the end of the 80s that marked the end of support for arts in the community,.After the Greater London Council had been abolished in 1985 there was less interest in community arts.
However, we carried on and established The Art of Change, using the same organisational structure as the Poster Project. We took commissions and found new sources of income. Lottery funding came in around then and was used for public art. Initially it attracted a lot of bad press however due to public art being imposed on communities without consultation so the funders realised that community involvement was necessary, and that provided a way in for us. At that time the idea of ‘social practice’ started to develop in the USA, (referred to as socially engaged art practice in the UK). It eventually became quite fashionable in the art world – as it still is – though this led to many short term, top down commissions through institutions. Nevertheless, it was another stepping stone that allowed our practice to continue.
The Catch
10m high public artwork by Loraine Leeson in collaboration with Anne Thorne Architects. A book and exhibition by children from Northbury Primary School working with students from Newvic College and University of East London accompanied its launch in 2002. Voted an Olympic London Landmark in 2009. Photo © Doug Atfield.
JOHN: My experience was very similar. By the beginning of the 80s the arts were being ‘politically cleansed’ and in some respects the community sector became more defensive and orthodox. I remember, for example, one prominent community artist proposing that hand-held cameras were inherently anti-democratic because only an individual eye had access to the viewfinder. We subsequently poked fun at this idea in a poster advertising photographic workshops.
Simon Fell, Pinhole Productions, 1982
At Paddington Printshop we began to make fine art prints with artists outside the traditional marketplace and created a national touring exhibition on the theme of Carnival (J’Ouvert).
Aldo Menendez, Cuba Magic Realism, 1988
Following that project, I spent time in Central America, and subsequently Aldo Menendez, the head of the Rene Portocarrero screenprint studio in Havana, visited London. We put on an exhibition of Cuban prints, which among other things provided a pretext to talk to funders about a different type of print studio, based on the Havana model, with one foot in the local community and the other in the traditional art market. This was the origin of the change to londonprintstudio.
IN IT FOR THE LONG TERM – A LIFETIME’S WORK
The conversation continued, covering issues such as the development of community murals, which seemed initially to be a long-lasting approach but turned out not to be – subject to demolition, lack of upkeep and so on – and posters, which seemed ephemeral but in some cases are now in national art collections. We touched on the need for good quality presentation, making sure people are facilitated to give their best in making creative work. We also discussed how commissioned work that hasn’t developed organically can still result in profound and moving projects if managed in the right way, i.e. seeing the participants as collaborators rather than as people who need to have culture brought to them.
Active Energy
Loraine Leeson, 2007-2020. This twelve-year project commenced as a response to a short-term commission following research into older people’s experience failing to inform development of new technologies. Through this Loraine met The Geezers, a men’s group at AgeUK Bow, who wished to work with tidal power. With the help of engineers and further fundraising they developed and tested a prototype turbine for the Thames, held exhibitions in the UK and US, worked with young people to produce a wind turbine for an AgeUK roof, contributed to three university research projects, conducted numerous joint presentations, collaborated with a seniors’ group in Pittsburgh, and installed floating water wheels to provide aeration for rivers at the Three Mills Heritage site and the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The project was recognised through an Arts and Green Energy award from RegenSW and the Times Higher Education award for Knowledge Exchange.
There was too much to include in this article but the abiding impression I came away with was of long-term resilience and commitment to the principle of working with and for communities to achieve social and political change.
As Loraine said:
“I don’t care about names – our work has been called so many different things – community art, political art, socially engaged art, social practice- it doesn’t matter because I still do what I do to make a difference, which is what I tell my students.”
John added:
“I set out to be an artist on the high street akin to the grocer or the baker. I imagined londonprintstudio to be like a public park, where people could choose to follow different paths ranging from making art, to falling in love or planning a revolution.”