Art should not be a privilege
Feeling Supported
We talk about talent as though it bursts through the door and announces itself; as though anyone who was going to be good at something was destined to always find that out. Most people never do. Not because the ability wasn’t there, but because the opportunity to discover it never came.
The artist who runs our Gorton women’s group through our Home from HOME programme puts it more plainly than that. “If you’ve never got a paint-brush put in your hand then you don’t know that you’re the best painter ever. We cannot have that.”
She describes herself as a community artist, an illustrator, a craft artist, and a co-creator in all her work. “My medium is people,” she says. She tells stories and lets the stories decide what they’re made of, whether it’s textiles, clay, or whatever the story needs!
She has been supported by Home from HOME since the very beginning, involved in the early conversations about what the programme would be, and came to Gorton specifically to bring art back “into a space where it had been lost due to funding cuts.”
What grew there was named as “a sisterhood, because it’s just so easy to be there. It’s like comfy slippers, a big breath, a moment of peace. It’s safe.” Nobody has to do anything out of their comfort zone. “People are met as they are that day.” You could make something ambitious or you could sit with a cup of tea, and there is no pressure to share anything difficult. One woman fed back to her “I just feel so peaceful, I need a nap.”
“It’s an invitation to belong,” she says.
It would be easy to hear all that and picture something gentle and undemanding, but that’s not the case either. “We’re not just chucking colouring books around, there’s some incredible artists in that room.”
As part of the programme, the group has built a whole street of houses, with each woman creating autobiographical sculptures, which they all physically walked down together when they were finished. They made a seven-foot woman, embroidering her dress and her hair between them. They work in clay, where she shows people a technique but then tells them to ignore it if they want: “Some people need structure, others go rogue, and that’s where the magic happens.” The finished pieces go into exhibitions, and then they go home. People “take them home as legacy pieces.”
“The things we make are beautiful,” she says, “but they feel secondary to the connections and networks that have formed.”
So far this is a story about an artist supporting a room full of people. But really, her experience as a practitioner is more personal.
“I’ve been supported here for years, and I feel trusted. If I have an idea, it’s taken seriously. I’ve been able to develop my own practice, especially with clay, and bring that into the group. I don’t feel like a risk, I feel supported as an artist, and that’s huge.”
Community artists are routinely funded to deliver, not to develop. They are booked by the session, measured by headcount, and rarely trusted with an idea that might not come off. Of the seven-foot woman, she says: “As an artist, you don’t always get the chance to make big work like that, but here we were supported by HOME to just say, ‘let’s do it,’ and make it happen.”
An artist who feels like a risk makes safe work. An artist who feels trusted and supported makes a seven-foot woman with a room full of people who’d never made anything before!
Two things come out of being supported like that. One is the standard of what gets made, and the other is what she’s able to be generous with. Her phrase for how the materials are handled is “plentiful not precious” - there is enough to go round, and it is there to be used. “It’s about making people feel valued. Something small to us can mean everything to someone else.”
“This isn’t just about craft, it’s about real artistic development. There are incredible artists in that room. If people aren’t given access to art, they never get the chance to discover that. That’s not OK.”
Home from HOME provides opportunities for somebody to discover what they can really do by offering a room, good materials, an artist who is trusted enough to take a risk with it all, and enough weeks together in a row for some of it to land.
“There aren’t enough spaces like this,” she says, “and people notice when they disappear.”
If you’d like to help more people feel supported, you can find out more about Home from HOME’s goals for its final year here.