art and social practice Archives - loveFibre

The meaning of making

A conversation the other day about artistic identity reminded me about this piece I wrote a few years ago for UK Handmade; I noticed that it’s no longer available there when I tried to revisit it and I’d like to share it again now.

Recently I have been musing on what making means to me. I think it is very personal and yet also quite social, a way of being in a world I often find mysterious and confusing. My making is influenced by beauty and curiosity, by the magical details that catch my eye as I walk with my camera. Mostly I use wool, which is plentiful and various, together with precious fibres like silk, and worn or waste fabrics with their imagined stories.

Making is a process of transformation. As I make, the materials are changed, and I am changed also. An idea is inside me, then it is outside me, made visible yet still part of me. Making is an extension of thought, not simply an expression of thought. We grow in the making.

Making is a child at play, seeing pink and yellow castles in the landscape and constructing them with green paper and blue crayon. It is the absence of preconceptions. ‘A lack of knowledge has turned into a refreshing asset,’ writes Jessica Hemmings of Kustaa Saksi, (Natural State, Selvedge 63, p.34).

Making is beginning, and beginning again. As Thomas Merton says, ‘We do not want to be beginners, but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything else but beginners all our lives,’ (Contemplative Prayer, 1971, p.37). Making provides space for the amateur – which, by the way, means the lover. Making means always learning, and the freedom to be wrong.

And making is mastery – the assurance of long practice held in tension with the uncertainty, the vulnerability of experiment and exploration. Making is order, and channels in deep waters. The process sets boundaries on the imagination, freeing us to create. Limits hone choices.

Making is a woman whose voice is barely heard, slowly able to make herself known in another language altogether. Making is an antidote to hiding. Focused on a stitch by stitch rhythm, a profound stillness descends on a heart scattered by chaos and distraction. Making is a way of remembering, an embodiment of experience. Hands can recapture skills the mind has forgotten, and lay down new memories for the future.

Making is frustration, fear, disappointment. It is the tearing out of hair. It is sobbing and throwing things. Making is messy and mad. It is breaking and mending. Making and re-making. Making is a powerful healer.

Making is a sacrament – an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. As we make, we are made. The story that undergirds my life starts, ‘In the beginning God created…’. Imaged as one who knits, throws pots, bakes bread, the Maker calls me also to create.

Making is material. When I wonder about the value of creating more stuff in an already overcrowded world, I remind myself that the pace of the handmade opposes the excesses of mass production. Take time, make less, care more.

Making is communication and connection. It draws individuals into community and offers a nurturing place for learning to understand the other. ‘Craft brings people together, creating a social space where ideas are swapped and made sense of, quite literally with the hands.’ (Ben Cartwright, Making the cloth that binds us). Making is a metaphor for inclusion: only by respecting the unique qualities of wool, or cloth, or clay, can we create a new, true, whole.

Making is a gift. Making is for everyone.

Thoughts at the end of the course

As I’ve looked at many projects in our video-conferencing sessions, and in my own research and information sharing, there have been a few that stand out for me in terms of thinking, ‘I would love to work like that’.

Sweet Arts in Norwich who “design and develop creative and enterprising projects that empower women to make choices that improve their health, employability prospects and general wellbeing”
artist Sarah Wakeford who works collaboratively in education, healthcare and community settings
Sarah Corbett and the Craftivist Collective
Impact Arts Craft Café, a “safe, social and creative environment where [older people] can learn new skills, renew social networks and reconnect with their communities”
The Depressed Cake Shop

And someone I’ve admired for a long time since reading her book ‘Awakening Creativity’ – Lily Yeh – “We are creating an art form that comes from the heart and reflects the pain and sorrow of people’s lives. It also expresses joy, beauty, and love.” “We … learned that in crowded, deprived, and restrictive places, we could generate new nurturing spaces of freedom, openness, and abundance through creativity and imagination.”

I think these all fall into the same segment of socially engaged art: community arts (or crafts, or cooking). They’re all focused around an element of making; one could say, like David Gauntlett, ‘social making’. They have to do with the wellbeing of individuals and communities, or making small changes that accumulate into something bigger. They are empowering. Individual and collective creativity is highly valued, sometimes simply for its own sake. There are elements of dialogue and social change, embodied in physical processes. They are inclusive. One of the projects I was most drawn to of the very many that Roxane showed us during the course was these crocheted afghans on the steps of Helsinki Cathedral, which wasn’t really even conceived as an art project (though it surely is).

William Morris said, “I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few”. That inspires me.

There are challenging discussions going on about the whole area of grassroots ‘community-based art’ and its relationship with the more art world oriented ‘social practice’. Roxane pointed us to an article on ‘Artification‘ by Arlene Goldbard, who says that “one function of the term [social practice] is to erect a boundary between those who understand and feel comfortable in this language and those who don’t.” This article explores the same ground. It has been very interesting and helpful for me to study social practice these last few months and begin to see where I fit in.

One thing (among many!) that I take away from the course is that I want to keep studying and set aside time to read more deeply. This section of my blog was set up for the course and after today I won’t add any more to it. But I see this as just the beginning and I’ll still be blogging about it. So this post will be the last in ‘Art and Social Practice’, and also the first in ‘Community Arts’ :-).

David Gauntlett, Making is Connecting, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
William Morris, ‘The Lesser Arts’, in William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, London: Penguin, 2004, p253.

Shetland Learning Lab

One of the exciting things about being on the first Art & Social Practice course was that there was funding for students to go to a Learning Lab in Shetland at the end of the course. The weekend turned out to be very snowy so some of us were delayed getting to Shetland and some couldn’t travel between the islands, but we made the best of it and most of us got to meet each other. Frances and I arrived about 24 hours late so this was a welcome sight on the Friday evening, it’s in Shetland airport.

Because of the travel delays we didn’t have much time to sight-see but we had a flying visit to the Shetland Museum for lunch where there was knitting displayed in the tabletop …

… and I managed to get a copy of this lovely book.

Academically there was so much to absorb during the weekend. As well as learning from Roxane Permar, our tutor, and each other (we did our presentations over the weekend), we were lucky enough to have Loraine Leeson with us. She gave a presentation about her work, and feedback on some of our presentations, as well as a mini-tutorial each.

It’s hard to pick a few things out of such a stimulating weekend but these are some of the things Loraine said about working in participatory, community-based arts that especially caught my attention:

Nearly every project worth doing has a sticky moment in the middle where you just don’t know how to do it. Stay with the process. Trust the process.
Use your knowledge and then participants can be more certain of their knowledge.
All the arts can do is to draw attention to issues, but with a purpose of something happening.
Learn from conflict resolution practices.
Artists bring passion, long term vision, “fire” to a project.
You’re an artist and not an anthropologist.
Try to find out what’s motivating people.
Learning objectives and artistic objectives can co-exist.
It’s OK to be strategic about things.
Art is about the creation of meaning, resonance that others will engage with.
An artist brings a framework to contain the imagination of participants, to create something together that may have constituent parts but is also a whole. Aesthetics are essential, the end product isn’t just everything stuck together, you can be directive about that, the thing produced will be really powerful.
Don’t shy away from leadership. Leadership isn’t the same as power.
For the next project you need a sense of what mattered to you in the last one.
Don’t think of your work as an extension of you but as something outside you (like any art object).

And I think it was Roxane who said:

Participants want to be part of something that has aesthetic power, and developing your design and visual skills will feed into that.

On the Sunday we had a trip to visit Andrew Ross at GlobalYell, which was so exciting for me, and I think is maybe a blog post in itself.

This image is Shetland lace knitting projected by light onto the floor at Mareel, the Arts Centre in Lerwick. It’s part of MirrieDancers, by Shetland lace knitters working with Nayan Kulkarni and Roxane Permar.

quality and participatory arts

Since starting the Art and Social Practice course I’ve been subscribing to the free Mailout newsletter, which is full of useful information. The most recent issue mentions a paper by Francois Matarasso, ‘Creative Progression: Reflections on quality in participatory arts‘, which is based based on a case study of this project by Helix Arts.

We are the stage of reflecting critically on our course projects (effective deadline Thursday lunchtime when we set off for Shetland!), and there is lots of relevant food for thought here.

“Change, like quality, is an neutral term. The extent of its desirability depends on the nature of a change … an artistic experience may change someone’s experience of living for the worse” p.4

“The use of phrases such as ‘high quality art’ is dangerous because it makes it harder to discuss and determine the value of arts practice, while also tending to exclude those who believe themselves less able than professionals to recognise quality in art.” p.4

“We may not be able to define excellence, but we can certainly identify good and less good, admirable and acceptable.” p.5

Matarasso identifies “five stages of a process: conception, contracting, working, creation and completion”. p.5

Conception

He contrasts the personal transformative purpose of the arts in general with the “concepts of social change, whether at an individual or group level, associated with participatory arts in the minds of many funding bodies” and questions whether artists should or even can act as agents of “social instruction”. p.6

“Uncertainty of outcome is a characteristic of art practice. An artist cannot guarantee the success of an idea, a task or even a project, although, if working with others, they might be expected to guarantee the standard of their processes.” p.6

He notes that, in medicine, “complexity makes individual health outcomes unpredictable, so medicine uses probability” for forecasting and decisionmaking, and argues that such methods would be “more appropriate and more useful than those currently employed in British arts policy and management”. p.6

He stresses the importance of including theoretical questions in the “conception and planning of a project”, to have any chance of testing the “quality or value” of activities, and use time scale as an example. In a long programme, some people may gain most from a short segment like a workshop – “Six hours of energy, excitement, focus and limited commitment”. Whereas adult education may transform cumulatively, participation in art can be intensely and almost instantly transformative.

A “clear articulation of how and why specific arts interventions are expected to result in change is an essential theoretical basis” to participatory arts practice and evaluation.

I’ll come back to this in a second post – Matarasso goes on to say some very interesting things about success, ‘good failure’ and ‘bad failure’, and about empowerment.

Matarasso, F (2013), Creative Progression: Reflections on quality in participatory arts, UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Journal in the Arts, 3:3.

« Previous