C110 article

Art / People • The role of the artist in art education, at a community level

The visual arts and community arts projects: do they work together, and do they make a difference? Heather Floyd looks at recent practice and evidence.

Throughout the past twenty years in Northern Ireland, increasing numbers of community groups are embracing the arts as a means of achieving their aims and thus building the capacity of the local community. Increasingly, community organisations are recognising the power of the arts to transform local communities, to make a crucial contribution to rural and urban regeneration and on an individual level, to improve self-confidence and self-esteem. This is demonstrated by a report exploring community arts activity in Belfast entitled Vital Signs, published in 1998:

88% of respondents report having developed new friendships;

74% of participants felt happier;

93% of respondents said that they felt more confident about what they could do since being involved in a community arts project

from Community Arts Forum Photo Album 2000 - 2001; courtesy the author / CAF

Artists are central to the community arts process and to these astounding results. Within the community arts sector in Northern Ireland, the use of visual arts has increased dramatically. At the beginning of the community arts movement in the north, the focus was mostly on drama. This focus has changed enormously since Francois Matarasso wrote, of visual arts, in 1995:

With the significant exceptions of murals and photography, the visual arts are not well developed at community level in Belfast. Despite the existence of a number of studio groups and organisations, relatively few community-based projects have centred on the visual arts, and experienced workers in the field are rare. Facilities (print workshops etc.) are scarce and poorly equipped... Access to photography at community level is more organised thanks to Belfast Exposed, a fine community photography resource the potential of whose work is restricted by limited funding and inappropriate resources. ¹

Since these inactive days, there has been much development, with groups such as WheelWorks or New Belfast Community Arts Initiative using visual arts in a creative, often multimedia way. There are also a lot more resources, with the development of studio spaces in community-led venues in Belfast such as Conway Mill and the recently opened Cotton Court, providing affordable studio space to artists in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter.

Many sterling examples abound across the north of visual-arts projects which visibly enhance the local community. From murals to mosaic projects, almost all of these projects reflect the life of the local community in some way. The impact murals have had on northern Irish society has been well documented ². As illustrated in the Matarasso quote above, murals were, for a long time, the most visible and tangible evidence of marginalised communities engaging with the visual arts.

from Community Arts Forum Photo Album 2000 - 2001; courtesy the author / CAF

Over the years, these murals have moved from paramilitary through to social archiving through to a lively and animated Bart Simpson brightening up The Square in Ballybeen. What they all have in common is that they reflect in some way external realities (cultural icons, historical icons or political violence). Work is currently ongoing across the north to reclaim the paramilitary murals, particularly in loyalist areas. Obviously, this raises issues about sanitising and, to a certain extent, re-writing, local history. However, attention must be given to people who live in these communities, many of whom feel deeply uncomfortable every time they pass paramilitary murals and say they do not want to have to walk past them every day. The nationalist / republican community on the whole gave up overtly militaristic murals some time ago and these have been replaced with murals of a more political, cultural or historical nature - e.g. .the haunting An Gorta Mór (the great hunger) mural in Ardoyne. These reflect a society and community adapting to a changing external environment. Murals have always been, in Northern Ireland, a window with a clear view to what was happening in that community.

There are many good examples of the development of visual arts in a community context over the past ten years. The northern disability arts group Open Arts, for example, played a critically acclaimed, key role in the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in Dublin which took place on the summer solstice of 2003. This was the first time that this international sporting event had taken place in Ireland. The Open Arts project involved 180 participants with learning disabilities from around the country attending a series of visual-arts and dance workshops. The visual-arts workshops facilitated participants in making props for the impressive opening carnival - the group practised collage, stencilling and sequencing to produce a series of swirling, circular celtic discs which added to the spectacle of costumes and props created by professional carnival artists and gave ownership to the disabled people involved. This visual-arts project received global recognition and placed the organisation and community visual arts in (Northern) Ireland on an international stage. Throughout, the artists worked collaboratively within a community-arts process of access, participation, authorship and ownership.

In terms of artists working within a community context, if an artist wishes to engage in art education with a community group, several factors must be in place:

• A collaborative, participative approach;

• An original piece of work must be produced;

• The piece of work belongs to the group, not the artist;

• The piece of work is designed collaboratively by the group and artist.

from Community Arts Forum Photo Album 2000 - 2001; courtesy the author / CAF

In addition, the art work produced will usually reflect in some way the lives of the people who have participated in it. Community-arts projects can often leave a skills legacy in a community which can last for years after a project has completed. The community-arts process is a clear way of working, a clear process. The process is the production of an original piece of art work and the process contains significant elements of access, participation, authorship and ownership.

There are different types of engagement available for an artist rather than purely working collaboratively with a group - Rita Duffy recently undertook a project painting the window blinds of the Divis flats in Belfast. The aim was to reflect the daily lives of people living within the flats and was part of Belfast Festival at Queen's. She approached residents and asked what they would like to paint, depicting something about their lives. One resident asked, "can you paint my soul." This illustrates how deep an arts project can run.

Communities often engage with an artist to raise issues relevant to their communities; this can be on a local, national or global scale. Examples abound. In 2003, the Community Arts Forum's (CAF) bulletin, the Wee Can, explored community arts as a form of protest. It looked at both global and local examples. Local examples include a mural produced by a group in west Belfast addressing the huge issue of joy riding / death driving in that area. The community worker involved in this project said at the time:

The overall project had many positive outcomes and, very importantly, the young people felt that they had ownership of the programme. The practical experience gained by the participants was excellent, which in turn created a huge interest in their local community. Another positive aspect...was the experience that the young people developed, such as being part of a team, using their own ideas and imagination, improving their self confidence and raising their self esteem.

... the mural (also) succeeded in raising the issue of car crime. It provided an uncompromising attack on "joy-riding" and a stark reminder that such activity was putting lives at risk within the community... The project exceeded all our expectations. The wall mural and the issues which we tackled brought the death driver crisis to the entire Beechmount community and wider audience through extensive media coverage. ³

Issues raised by an artist working in a community context can run very deep - whose voice is being heard? Whose story is being told? Who is 'leading' or directing the group? Whose ideas carry most weight? Who is recording the work - participants or artists or community workers and if it is not participants, what input do they have? How many artists come from the communities in which they are working? How is the work displayed or exhibited? What access does the work have to mainstream cultural institutions such as IMMA or the Ulster Museum? What recognition does the work receive from mainstream and the wider artistic society? What happens to the multitude of evaluations produced from community-arts projects?

from Community Arts Forum Photo Album 2000 - 2001; courtesy the author / CAF

The all-Ireland community-arts reader, An Outburst of Frankness, grapples with many of these issues. This reader has been published by CAF in Belfast, the City Arts Centre and CREATE (formerly CAFE) in Dublin. One of the reasons that the reader has been developed is to provide the space to explore core issues affecting community arts. The reader was divided into sections looking at history, resourcing, ethics, quality and education. The writers are involved in community arts as artists, as administrators and as practitioners. The book also includes the write up of two fora, a forum looking at historical community arts as well as a contemporary community-arts forum. These fora document and chart the movement and sector across the island over the past thirty years. In terms of visual arts, many projects are documented within these pages. Reference is made by Ailbhe Smith and Rhona Henderson to work with a marginalised group of women which was displayed long-term in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. The whole process of the work is described from inception through to exhibition, with all the steps, issues and challenges along the way described in detail. There are many references to visual-arts projects in the reader and the publication highlights government, statutory and policy differences between the two jurisdictions north and south of the border.

In conclusion, the artist in Northern Ireland has a long record of engagement with working in a community context. Over the past thirty years, this engagement has radically increased. Practically every summer scheme and community festival across Northern Ireland, for example, will now have an active, vibrant visual-arts programme and exciting new projects such as 'trash fashion', and workshops developing skills in the area of carnival arts are emerging on an almost daily basis.

We can look forward to a future with challenging and dynamic visual-arts projects taking place across the region, with creative, engaged and committed artists central to the process, working collaboratively with those living at the edges of society to produce exciting and innovative art work.

Heather Floyd is Director of Community Arts Forum, Belfast.

¹ François Matarasso, Vital Signs, Mapping Community Arts in Belfast, Comedia, 1997
² See, for example, Bill Rolston, From King Billy to C - Chulainn: loyalist and republican murals, past, present and future, Eire-Ireland, No. 23, Winter / Spring / Summer, 1997 / 1998, pp. 6-28; Bill Rolston, Drawing Support: Murals in the North of Ireland, Beyond the Pale, Belfast, 1992; Drawing Support 2: Murals of War and Peace (Belfast, 1992); Bill Rolston, Changing the political landscape: murals and transition in Northern Ireland, Irish Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 2003, pp. 3 - 16
³ Danny Murphy, The Wee Can, May 2003, Community Arts Forum

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.42–45
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