Cultivating Compassion - Living well together, as public art practice

For weeks, I’ve been trying to argue against my statement, to critically disprove and question my thoughts on why “I hate public art,” and then, as if by magic, the universe delivers. The recent announcement of the unveiling of the new public sculpture ‘The Strength of the Hijab,’ a 5-meter-tall steel depiction of a hijab-wearing woman, was installed in Smethwick in October 2023. Commissioned by Legacy West Midland, the organisations aim is “to bring people together across diversity and inclusivity to celebrate and learn from cultural heritage through sharing our specific and common histories, beliefs, arts, and traditions”. Smethwick is my hometown and somewhere I have proudly worked as an artist, educator, and community organiser for the last 20+ years. This serendipitous moment creates the perfect starting place to write about public art practice.

Within this writing it is my aim, to ultimately claim the term public art as that which is situated in the public sphere and that it is owned by us all and thus could be renamed community public art or community public art practice, claiming the territory or perhaps power of Public Art. If we consider Beuys' claim of the term social sculpture then to simply understand public art as a sculptural object fabricated in metal, plonked into a public space through a brief consultation and a committee decision, is a ridiculous practice. 

The sculpture, in terms of its figurative representation, may never be able to reflect the complexity of the discourse surrounding Muslim, Hijab wearing women; and why would we want to still our understanding today? It will fail in representing multiplicity and without a doubt, will serve as a few people's reflection of worthy artwork. The subject matter of this representation of a woman wearing a hijab could be called out as positive racism, and maybe even reflect benevolent prejudice. I question whether this truly does elevate or whether it affirms inferior positions in society. However, the biggest question for me is why commission the work by an artist whose experience is so far from the subjectees? Can a white male artist really express the complexities of this subject, and would the resources not be better served through community resource and result of community decision making, rather than a commissioning panel.

I can see and liken this practice to placemaking, and gentrification - how urban development crudely claims space as a place making exercise, reimagining community shared spaces without ever having evolved within and from that community setting, without knowing the difficulties, the issues, or taking the steps to confront difficulty. Gentrification as an economic process assumes that an area can be made better through economic development. It assumes that where deprivation exists that displacement is the answer to improvement, simply eradicating signs of poverty and difficulty - exclusion through affluency. In considering Mary Douglas statement “dirt is matter out of place'' let’s not create assumptions of dirt and disorder as being naturally bad, let's consider the complexity of the interweaving of place, community, and space. Let’s not get caught up in the tenuous place-based decision making by those involved in urban development, forming gentrified relationships between policy, place & people. Public Art as a form when delivered from this context might always fail, as the written process articulated through policy documents, is too far from the textual complexity of everyday life.

Instead, I want to use this space to consider the idea of a public or community art practice. One that is not resting only in objecthood but oscillates through process and form, that holds dear ideas of inclusivity and accessibility with care and enables people to truly “come as they are”.

For the last five years I have been working at Grand Union Gallery, an arts organisation based in Digbeth Birmingham as the Collaborative Programme Curator. A role that I have situated both inside and outside art. My strategy for this work considers the role, function and value of art within wider society, and my approach is to consider how the inherent cultural and social capital of Grand Union can be used to create support systems for those who need it. Digbeth is an area that is currently undergoing rapid regeneration. Some of the big ego players looking to obliterate existing beautiful eclectic glimmers, have called it an industrial wasteland, ignorant to its thriving ecology of artists, independent businesses, third sector support organisations and surrounding social housing. All could do with investment to continue to thrive, but in order to encourage new wealthy communities it is clever, in that naming Digbeth as a ‘wasteland’, automatically removes all of these people and histories. Within my role I recognise cultures' rich potential role in regeneration and civic infrastructure, both here and more widely across the city. By navigating systems of urban regeneration, public and private partnerships, communities, and cultural sectors the wonderful thread of complexity creates the context for this work.  

My approach for this work has been simple to focus upon creating opportunities for social and environmental transformations, developing strong working relationships between people and communities that enable genuine inclusivity. The research and development of this has fallen under a creative community led programme called the ‘The Growing Project’ which aims to foster regenerative working methodologies to activate agency in communities acting at the intersections of feminist sensitivities.  The context of Digbeth, rising issues with visible effects of homelessness, and seeing social agendas inability to address these created the perfect place to begin. 

For me the work we have been creating through ‘The Growing Project’ is an example of a community art practice that situates itself in the public and uses community development and regenerative practices at its core. The growing project is a circular, transformative community programme. Using art making, gardening, cooking and simply being together as a way to offer support and friendship to people going through difficult times. Working together with artists, designers, gardeners, ecologists and chefs, we work compassionately to facilitate and support people who may experience physical, social, environmental and economic disadvantages. Together as we remediate land and bring life back to spaces, we develop communal knowledge and upskilling - creating sustainable life practices.  Involvement in the project offers opportunity to build self and community empowerment and worth, whilst creating space for expression enabling people to fully embody where they are at and address their specificity and offer positive transformation through being and working together.

Centred upon caring for specifically those who experience vulnerability in their living situation and/or experience crisis and marginalisation from the effects of not having needs met, the project creates communal growing spaces in derelict, underused uncared for spaces as an approach to explore remediation through compassionate community development work.  I believe that by responding directly to marginalisation through addressing needs, we can address and improve outcomes for the most vulnerable, and build an inclusive community and societal practice that recognises everyone positively.  In turn this helps everyone to thrive, not just the few. ‘The Growing Project’ is an evolving community participatory approach, enabling individuals to connect with each other through doing things together.  We make more than the sum of our individual parts.   

This work of ‘The Growing Project’ achieved through communal practice of togetherness achieves all the propositional statements set out in The New Rules for Public Art written by Situations and published in 2015 for the new possibilities of public art.  Rule 12 Get Lost “Public art is neither a destination nor a way finder. Artists encourage us to follow them down unexpected paths as a work unfolds. Surrender the guidebook, get off the art trail and step into unfamiliar territory” holds the most potency and the power here.  Art, or more accurately the creative process, enables us to surrender to the process and find something we didn't know we were going to find.  This holds such beautiful potential for people who are hurt, traumatised or looking for meaning and purpose.  This ability to see and express yourself in a new way alongside others is so affirming and is the very reason and motivation for the work I am doing.  We all need the pleasure of finding new meaning through creative expression and then connecting with others through it. 

The garden as a site and context for community art practice offers so many symbolic opportunities. Gardening or cultivating nature with others, is a transformative activity both individually and communally. It offers a space that is slower and connected to the flow of seasons and counteracts fast paced, immediate capital culture. It is achieved over time, we can experience success and failure and through our eyes and mind we can oscillate between the micro and macro, and cycles of life, death, life. The garden or green space enables an interconnected relationship with nature, one that intermingles the layers of social and esthetic resonance in our relationships to local places, to tell the disparate stories of the interconnectedness of land and lives and exposes the contradictions of political attitudes to land.  ‘The Growing Project’ as a community art practice creates social and physical interaction with people. This experience feels close to what Suzie Gablik, an art critic described as ‘connective aesthetics’1, rejecting the idea of an artist as “individual creative genius” and creates a practice that is socially responsible to the planet and societal needs.  It recognises and highlights the importance of the relationship between individuals and their contexts and communities. 

“Just as the state of the planet is unsustainable, so our lifestyles have become psychologically unsustainable.  Depression has recently overtaken respiratory illnesses to become the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide.  Whilst this rise is not directly linked to climate grief, it is not unrelated to it because the problems are so wrapped up in each other.  Neglecting what people need in order to thrive is a symptom of the same mindset that has failed to help nature thrive.  And that issue takes us to the heart of what it means to cultivate.” 

• (S Stuart Smith The Well Gardened Mind, (2020) London, P282.)
  

By focusing on social and environmental injustice and responding to restorative needs we can begin to regenerate in a way that is different to most top-down city regeneration master plans that extracts, exhausts and obliterates in favour of new economic growth.  We have seen through the 2020 pandemic and post pandemic recovery, the cost-of-living crisis and ongoing housing crisis.  Those who are most in need are least served. Arts cultural capital has a duty to lend visibility, advocacy, and creative thinking to aid regenerative solutions for people and land. By working within, without, and in-between ecologies, it can speak through and across multiple disciplines, connecting sectors and industries.  It can build collaborative partnerships, reciprocal actions and create new networks that are restorative, regenerative, and subsequently sustainable for both people and land.  Soil is a powerful metaphor here, demonstrating how within each square inch of productive soil millions of living networks and exchanges take place - working together providing a nurturing home for other life to grow.

If we are to really solve the ‘what is to become of our post-industrial city centres’ then value has to be re-thought. Maybe soil fertility, garden and green spaces can be our new superhighway for nourishment for people and land.  We could move how we ascribe value in Urban planning decision making beyond economic - to the ecological, the social, the cultural value systems. We can encourage landowners, those with power to accept value beyond the pound as contributing to their overall wealth and health for not only themselves but the world that they live within, not without. We are all interdependent. We have to develop more than objective understandings of our experience in and of our time living upon and within this earth and move towards a more spiritual sensitivity. We cannot marvel at our sophisticated civilisation if we are unable to look after those who really need it.  Here the garden and or community cared for green space, can exist as public community artwork, it can continue to serve as a symbolic reminder of this restorative and regenerative potential whilst remedying specific social and environmental vulnerabilities. It is this type of legacy or monument that I believe we should be enabling and encouraging as public art.

1. S. Gablik, ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art, Vol.6 (2), (1992), pp.2-7. and M. Salwa, ‘Community Gardens as Public Art’ in Public Art and Aesthetics, Vol. 15 (1), (2022), pp. 41-53