Work With Others
Alongside painting, I have devised and run many community art projects, often bringing different generations together, including school children; children excluded from school; older-aged people; people in hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, prisons. Up to 2012 I worked part time in a hospice for nine years, enabling people near the end of their lives to work creatively, making books, events and films. Since then, in Ireland, I have done several funded projects in Marymount hospice, Cork, and in nursing homes and day centres in Co Cork. In 2018, a 2 weeks mural project with Palestinian children in ‘Gaza Camp’, Jerash, Jordan.
What follows is a small selection of projects, books, classes and events I have initiated. Many, especially those involving lots of children,were not recorded in any way because I was too busy to take photographs. All that are included here were chosen for their creative content.
‘Heroes and Hope’
Project taking place over several months in the hospice in Cork. Exploring with residents/patients the significance of heroes in our lives, using film, poetry, music, visual art, history, politics and our own experience. What/who gives us hope? We frequently brought what was happening in the world outside the hospice into the hospice, during a year of dire events and trends. One focus was for each of us to find, acknowledge, celebrate even, a time or event in our own lives where we were ‘heroic’ in one way or another. This was difficult for most, but rewarding in the end.
I made a selection of the material generated and used during the project into an exhibition and a book. These are four of the 25 pages. If you’d like to order a printed copy of Heroes and Hope, click here.
Acorn Sessions - Weymouth, UK
We collected big driftwood, those who could manage the shingle on the Portland end of Chesil Beach. For the next few weeks in the Day Centre, an afternoon a week, there was a lot of banging, and talk, about the aesthetics of driftwood, set finally in concrete, and which would go where. The man in the foreground found his plastic arm perfect for tapping the chisel.
Art Project, Hospice, UK
I have chosen one of many projects and events I completed at a hospice in UK where I worked half the week for 9 years. Pictured are the cover and four pages of a book made in response to a call-out to the whole hospice, patients, their families, and staff members, to think about and find a way to portray visually what it is they resort to when feeling low, depressed, in pain. In other words, a ‘pill’ of their own making, hence the title. Each contributor had the opportunity also to write a few lines on the page opposite their ‘pill’. The ‘pills’ themselves were all the same size, mounted on board, and displayed on a wall in the palliative care part of the hospice.
Bandera, Art and Drama Group, UK
I founded Bandera, a small group of artists and performers whose main role was going into, mostly, primary schools, over a period of 10 years, and devising creative and very active approaches to some of the weird list of ‘subjects’ in the curriculum, using drama, outdoors, fantasy, making. Very few photos, too busy at the time.
But ‘Dinosaur’ was one. The class was called to help a Greek archaeologist (Prof. Dino Soros of course) in his secret discovery on a local beach of a complete Dinosaur skeleton/fossil, the children brushing away at their own patch, others logging the ‘discovered’ portions.
Another was ‘Machine’. We got two washing machines from the local dump, and all my tools, and the children took them to pieces down to the last nut, bolt, and copper wire. What could be used for something else? Lateral thinking, i.e. recycled. The rest became sculpture.
Cardenas, Nicaragua - Bridport, UK
Having travelled in Latin America, I started a small cultural exchange between my town in UK and a town in Nicaragua on the bank of Lake Nicaragua. One ‘exchange’ consisted of children of each country making pictures and ‘reports’ about their lives, having learnt enough about the other country to be able to describe aspects of their own lives as if from scratch, (as if to a person from Mars). I took the UK work to Nicaragua, and brought theirs back to UK.
The following year the Head teacher of the Nicaraguan school came to UK, taking part in a series of events and performances relating to their history and culture, including re-enacting the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979) in the classroom.
GM, one of my ‘students’, Ireland
I worked with GM, one morning a week, from 2014 to 2020, when covid struck.
Gordon, a man from a farming family, lives with autism, and has attended the local provision since in his teens (he is now in his late forties). I arranged his first solo exhibition, and several after that. Apart from that role – his stepping stone into the art world – I often worked alongside him, made suggestions about every aspect of painting, provided materials and always encouraged him and took his gorgeous (at best) work seriously. He is a natural at large scale work, and he completed three murals, the most recent being on a busy street in Bantry.
JP, another of my 'students', Ireland
John Paul is severely disabled, a wheelchair user, with limited use of his hands.
He loves painting, and is very determined. Over the years we have developed methods to enable him to paint on a fairly large scale, using board cut into strips no more than about 50 cms wide. Here are some examples.
Kingcombe, UK
Whole days spent by and in a river, drawing, mapping, inventing small worlds with mud, stones, sticks, leaves, water. Fires on clay-and-sticks platforms in the river. Listing the living creatures already present, visibly or by their tracks, in the locations we choose to make our new ‘homes’.
Maze, UK and Ireland
A walk-in maze, wheel-chair accessible, designed by me initially for the millennium, in or outdoor, made of willow, hazel and bamboo, the arched ways covered with dyed cotton fabric. Completely different each time, the maze has been a feature of many events and festivals, the most recent being Townlands festival near Macroom in Co Cork.
MM, sculpture at the hospice, Ireland
A resident at the hospice in Cork, Micheal, had learnt to weld in a factory when young. I asked him had he ever made anything useless. No. I showed him a selection of European welded steel sculpture. He was riveted. He could only use his ‘wrong’ hand. He drew, made clay models, then paper and card ones, then thin tin with my help, eventually arriving at a to-scale tin maquette for the shapes he wanted. I took it to a welder neighbour. I filmed the process, to show Micheal, alterations suggested, back to Denis – the welder - then done. Micheal wanted the parts to be movable, and so they are.
Multi-media Arts project, UK
A year-long project funded by the former Foundation for Sport and the Arts, devised and led by me. I persuaded the Coop, which had just relocated to out of town, to lend us their empty, two-storey town-centre supermarket for the duration, free. The creative work of a dozen groups of people I brought together, often with a wide age range, became 12 large pieces of work for the new Community Hospital in the town (Bridport, Dorset, UK).
This is a glimpse of four of them:
Community: adult group who knew each other through the mental health team, produced this 220cm wide circular exploration of what ‘community’ means in their lives, many animated discussions and much working together.
Town Map: nine and ten year olds each providing a piece of their own history, based in the town, on the same map and given the same ‘weight’ as items of the town’s ‘History’ with a big ‘H’. This was making the map, using an ancient projector.
Eyes: With another school’s eight and nine year olds, we did an experiment about whether we can recognize someone if we only see their eyes, or eye (answer: almost always). This led to our making a ‘collection’ of the town’s eyes, using photography and drawing.
Landscape: Celebrating the local landscape, primary children meeting with an adult group with disabilities, leading to a rich collage of their paintings and photos, many done outdoors.
Mural, Gaza Camp, Jordan
I was asked to make a mural for the street side of a building to be used as a cultural centre in ‘Gaza Camp’, the Palestinian refugee camp set up in the wake of the ‘Six Day War’ in 1967, near Jerash, Jordan. The painters were mostly children of all ages and a few young adults. We managed to finish it in two weeks, January 2018.
Mural, Manor Park Primary School, UK
What, or whom do we imagine we could be, and do, in the future, to be the heroes this world might especially need? Mural made up of eight boards to go on the outside of the front of the school. Three classes of eight and nine year olds involved.
Mural, Wool 1st school, UK
Every child in the school took part in this, over a hundred. They all did preliminary drawings, based on several aspects of their lives and where they lived, then each group had one or two sessions to work on the wall. After the first few sessions, in a heat wave (the buckets had cold water to stand in from time to time), I thought I would have to emigrate, it looked such chaos. But somehow it came together really well, in my view, and certainly in the children’s and staff’s views.
Mural, Young Offenders Institution, UK
I taught Art, and also English Literature, in all three prisons in Portland (Dorset, UK). The YOI was a bleak building, with mostly grim prospects for the inmates. I worked with a dozen of the young men over a period of several months towards making a mural for their recreation room.
Westfield, Special Education, UK
Making an outdoor live-willow structure with some of the pupils in a school for people with disabilities, starting with their making their own designs out of clay and sticks.
