Reflecting on Creative Neighbourhoods
Reflecting on Creative Neighbourhoods
An Introduction by Liz Wewiora, Head of Social Practice (Open Eye Gallery), and Jess O’Neill, Creative Community Engagement Officer (Culture Liverpool)
Culture Liverpool and Open Eye Gallery are delighted to share the findings of a round table learning event - Creative Neighbourhoods which took place on 27th November, 2023. The event brought together artists, commissioners, community members and key stakeholders, to explore how socially engaged approaches to arts engagement can better enable local residents to shape and share what matters to them about their local area.
The event took place within Open Eye Gallery’s venue, which featured an exhibition called A Place of Our Own. The exhibition featured two Historic England Picturing High Streets projects with photographer Tony Mallon and the Prescot Photography Club, in collaboration with Knowsley Council, and work by photographer Suzanne St Clare and Chester Traders, in collaboration with Chester and Cheshire West Council.
The exhibition also included work from Our Home. Our Place. Our Space; a Liverpool City Council’s County District Centre scheme project, featuring photographers Lucy Hunter, Sarah Weights, Tricia Grant-Hanlon, Walton residents and young people from Walton Youth and Community project.
For the day’s event, we also showed a pop up display of another Culture Liverpool project, Croxteth Speaks delivered by All Things Considered Theatre. After having time to look at the work, we invited guests to the round table discussion about the key themes emerging from the projects and explored the value of these practices.
This publication gives an overview of each project and shares the reflections from the day, shared through Open Eye Gallery’s philosopher in residence Lauren Stephens and illustrated and designed by artist Tasha Whittle.
Portarit of the High Street
For the Portrait of the High Street project Photographic artist Tony Mallon worked in collaboration with local residents from Prescot since the summer 2021. He invited people to set up a local photography group to reimagine the high street and create a contemporary portrait of the area.
With cameras in their own hands, through Tony’s support, the local residents have become the documenters of their own community, using a combination of street photography and portrait techniques to tell their stories.
Prescot Photography Group and Tony Mallon at A Place of Our Own exhibition launch, photo by Rob Battersby, 2023
Barbers, Prescot, photo by Stephen Jackson, 2023
Lou’s cafe, photo by Tony Mallon, 2023
Croxteth Speaks: All Things Considered
Over 6 months, All Things Considered Theatre worked with dancers, spoken word artists, DJs, photographers and filmmakers in Croxteth. Using inquiry-based arts methods they explored with the young people their sense of their local area and how they identified themselves based on the place they live. 12 films were produced that shared the young people’s views about the changes that they wanted to see in their community; these could be viewed via QR codes that were placed around the local area. The project ended with a finale event at Croxteth Hall, where a panel of change makers were tasked with thinking about the questions they now needed to ask their team to make change.
Croxteth Gems Group, photo by All Things Considered with Croxteth Gems, 2023
Images by Croxteth Gems, 2023
Our Home. Our Place. Our Space was a project by photographer Lucy Hunter, Walton Youth and Community project and the wider community of Walton. Lucy worked for over a year in the area with residents, trying different camera techniques and exploring the area through photowalks and portraiture to share their perspectives and experiences of the local area. Photographers Sarah Weights and Tricia Grant-Hanlon also assisted with the project.
Walton Youth and Community project group with artists Lucy Hunter, Sarah Weights and Tricia Hanlon-Grant at A Place of Our Own exhibition launch, photo by Rob Battersby, 2023
Our Home, Our Place, Our Space installation at A Place of Our Own Exhibition launch, photos by
Rob Battersby, 2023
Suzanne St Clare and Chester Traders.
For the past two and a half years Suzanne has been working with business owners trading on the historical Rows in Chester. Together they’ve been chatting about how these business owners came to Chester, their community, challenges, the quirkiness of independent trading and their love and passion for this beautiful, historic city.
Inspired by photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Gregory Crewdson and Julia Fullerton-Batten, the traders and Suzanne have been working together to create a series of stunning images and video works that document the daily lives, stories and individuals who make up this local high street.
Niki, Chester Health Store, Photo by Suzanne St Clare, 2023
Chester Traders and Suzanne St Clare at A Place of Our Own exhibition launch, photo by Rob Battersby, 2023
Ash, Ancient World Store, Photo by Suzanne St Clare, 2023
Creative Neighbourhoods: Reflecting on Socially Engaged Art for the Northwest
This roundtable discussion explored a wide variety of thoughts and concerns for socially engaged art, beginning and ending with enthusiastic chatter from an interesting arrangement of representatives from northwest cultural organizations. Sitting together in a circle in the foremost gallery space at Open Eye Gallery, there were approximately thirty representatives from organizations like Culture Liverpool, Historic Liverpool, Shakespeare North, Croxteth Speaks, Open Eye Gallery, a local councilperson, various local photographers, a visual notetaker, and myself.
The overall conversation was inspired by the current socially engaged photography exhibition, A Place of Our Own. Like a quilting a blanket, I wrote down the fabric of the views expressed during this session, cut them up, and have stitched them back together according to theme.
The session started off with a question about ‘placemaking’: what does place-making mean to northwest cultural organizations and the communities they aim to reach?
Place-making could be seen as having a sense of an area’s community or encouraging a sense of belonging somewhere. However, we should be careful using these sorts of words, since artworld language like ‘place-making’ can exclude the very people organizations are trying to reach. What is this vague phrase actually doing? If place-making is an aim for cultural organizations partnering with communities, it must be said that these places in and around the northwest already exist.
What exactly is being made? Instead, perhaps the term should be ‘place-changing’, not ‘place-making’. Yet this also becomes problematic, since the aim of offering change to communities should be wary of tokenism or patronizing, which will lead to greater feelings of community mistrust towards cultural organizations.
How should cultural organizations build trust with northwest communities? How can Liverpool and northwest culture become more community led rather than led by cultural organizations?
One way this can be done is by listening to specific needs and co-producing projects. Place-making then takes on the meaning of creating personal narratives and fostering agency and ownership over how local areas are portrayed or how change is attempted. For example, there seems to be three divisions of Liverpool communities: north, central and south. Within the three Liverpool divisions, there are even further community divisions of age, culture, and religion. How can cultural organizations best serve these communities? There is the importance of listening and having voices heard. Also, there is the importance of not just telling positive stories about communities but telling real stories about communities. An example was given of a recent cultural project funded by a local council which ended up taking a critical view of that council. What is best practice for this sort of co-authorship of projects? It is important to find the right artist to work with these communities, so that their voices can be heard in a real way, not just in a positive light.
Cultural organizations aim to tell community stories, using creativity as a way to understand others and their social concerns. Should the aim of these cultural projects between arts organizations and local communities be ‘art for art’s sake’, like encouraging creativity for the sake of creating art? Alternatively, should the aim of these projects be socially beneficial, like providing an opportunity for communities to creatively take ownership of themselves and their area? Some participants in the session were against the idea that these cultural projects should only aim to create some idea of art for the community. Instead, they expressed that cultural projects should be primarily socially-focused and community-driven, with concerns about creating beautiful art left as a pleasing addition to the overall project.
How can cultural organizations best empower communities and encourage creativity as wellbeing?
There should be an emphasis on the value of creativity as a practice that can lead to positive results for communities. It is not the finished product of creating something beautiful which leads to such results for communities, but it is the creative act, the process itself of creating which leads to community wellbeing.
Creativity is transformative for communities through the process of ‘creative interventions’ offered by cultural organizations. However, not everyone feels welcome in arts settings, like a theatre or a gallery space. How can cultural organizations better communicate the value of art and creativity to local Liverpool communities? Could this lead to more community-led cultural projects in the northwest?
Once projects between cultural organizations and communities have been established and run their course, what does responsible practice of aftercare look like? How should organizations ethically end projects? Within one member’s organization, individual projects are heavily scrutinized whether or not they should go ahead precisely because of this question of how to end projects. This means that established partnerships between communities and organizations should not suddenly end once the project is seen as completed. Another issue for projects is considering when exactly it is completed: if cultural organizations had unlimited budgets, no project would ever end.
There also lies the difficulty in measuring the overall impact of projects. The practical point was made that local authorities end up funding more projects than arts councils. Should local authorities continue to use community regeneration funding for arts projects, or, for example, improved library resources? Should councils fund local problems using pragmatic solutions or more creative solutions? An example was given of an arts regeneration project providing a creative solution for the problem of a local eyesore. Cultural organizations are not just solving the needs of real problems through their projects, but also provide engagement to these local areas in a way that pragmatic approaches to problems may not be able to offer. A pragmatic approach might have hired a company to deal with the eyesore; instead, the local community was engaged to creatively solve the problem together. This difference of impact is hard to measure when reporting on the impact of projects to cultural organizations’ key stakeholders and policy makers. There is a difference to reporting on quantitative data, such as how many community members attended art workshops, and qualitative data, such as what the community members felt about their experience of the workshops. Also, how can organizations best measure the impact of improving a specific local area, if the impact might not be felt immediately, but instead years in the future?
The session concluded with the question of looking towards the future: what would a ‘good culture model’ look like for northwest cultural organizations? Many commented that larger organizations who pay staff to write their bids should help out smaller organizations who cannot afford to pay bid staff. There should be more collaboration between organizations to encourage this sharing of resources, rather than adding to the competition for limited funding. If there were more opportunities like this session for cultural organizations to meet each other, perhaps there could be more collaboration between organizations, leading to greater impact for communities in the northwest.
There were two interesting points mentioned by members in this session: the first explores creating socially engaged art for the sake of creating art, or the creation of socially engaged art for social change, or perhaps a middle view that combines the two. The remarks made by the represented cultural organizations seemed to mainly advocate for the middle view, meaning that socially engaged art should primarily aim to socially impact its targeted communities, but could also have an aim to be art.
Some art is created simply to be art; socially engaged art is different to this because it has a slightly different aim towards social engagement and collaboration. The second point mentioned by members in the session involved the question of solving community problems pragmatically or creatively. Is art always the answer to local problems? Some pointed out the fact that local councils could either put their funding into pragmatic solutions or creative solutions. For example, councils could secure more funding for library books to pragmatically improve literacy rates. Or they could take a more creative approach by financing a cultural organization to partner with the local community to offer poetry readings and workshops. There are some instances where art cannot solve the world’s problems; however, what art can do is lead us to think about ourselves, our neighborhoods, and our problems in a different way than a pragmatic solution might offer.
--Lauren Stephens is Philosopher in Residence at Open Eye Gallery and a PhD researcher in the philosophy of art at the University of Liverpool.
Designed by Tasha Whittle