I didn’t write these blogs as the activity was happening because they’d have been boring descriptions rather than semi-interesting explanations. We were doing stuff without knowing what was going to happen, so a bit of time to think about why we did and perhaps reverse-engineer some meaning has been very necessary.
This post will give some contextual information and frame the ‘problem’ of the different tactics we’ve used for initiating meet-ups about social practice in the North East in the past. These ‘problems’ revolve around our ideas and experiences of encouraging mutual support without us being focal points or centres of attention, as opposed to relatively passive, teacher-student style ‘how-to’s’.
Lady Kitt and I went for a walk in the early winter and chatted in a pretty free-form way. The way the overlap of our practice has evolved has been a mix of working on ‘official’ things together (Kitt was commissioned to be lead artist on the Socially Awkward project when I was looking after an iteration of the NewBridge Project’s programme committee) and more unofficial things – general chit-chat about the kinds of art-making with people we are interested in, the knotty problems and mistakes of past social-practice projects and the stuff we’d like to share so other people don’t repeat the same mistakes. Since I moved to the North East in 2017 I’d been trying to find the same kind of informal support structure of like-minded people to bounce ideas around with, and hopefully develop projects and our imaginations. In Kitt I’d found one such person – someone who does inspiring work but will also speak candidly about their experiences and tell you if your ideas are daft.
We’d both found ourselves at national events about social practice (like the Social Art Summit in Sheffield in 2018) because it dawned on us, our hobbies included saving up for a train ticket and going to events about socially engaged art. By virtue of showing an interest, and showing up, we accidentally became the go-to people for social practice in the North East – in the eyes of the people we were hanging out with at national events at least (there’s loads of great artists operating in similar ways to us in the North East that weren’t part of this network, and this doesn’t diminish their practices!) and we set up a meet-up for those interested in ways of making art with people in Newcastle and Gateshead. This connected local artists to the growing Social Art Network and plugged us into this wider support structure that has since spun out to include lots of cities, the Social Art Library, Social Artery web-platform and a sense that there’s a real weight of experience of ideas backed up with a generous attitude to sharing and working together. Maybe even a movement?
We knew there was a demand for activity around social practice as 70-odd people had applied to be part of Socially Awkward. We held an event and people from lots of different social practice backgrounds (teachers, social workers, community artists, participation and outreach practitioners, socially engaged artists and plenty more) showed up. Some of the discussion was old narratives and arguments I’d hear 10,000 times before and we didn’t want to go round in circles. Being a contrary person who likes to think I’m really clever, not only did I decide that social art network meet-ups in the North East shouldn’t indulge these discussions (if people want to have them – great. But elsewhere!). I also decided not to replicate the forms of other meet-ups we’d been to around the country, which were often thematic show-and tells or presentations of projects. This is a very enjoyable set-up in its own right, but tweaking the format so it married up with the content was appealing. After all, if we were setting this up, oughtn’t it be pleasing to our whims? It was decided that each session could be a peek behind the curtain, to demonstrate by doing the techniques of social practice. As I work part time for the NewBridge Project it was decided to host the meet-ups in a NewBridge venue and use some artist development budget to pay guest artists to reveal some of the mechanisms they utilise. Now, I walk a weird tightrope where my jobs (NewBridge artist development, teaching at Newcastle Uni) and my freelance stuff (socially engaged art projects) use loads of the same techniques and in my eyes are one big practice. The water is muddied. Running things via NewBridge was good because we had some budget and a building, but on reflection bad because Kitt and I’s autonomy was removed, and we’d have to cater to the broadest audience. If we had accidentally become the points of contact for things like the Social Art Network (by virtue of showing up and saying “hi” rather than any higher power deeming us to the True Chosen Ones of Masterful Practice (although that does sound pretty good). On the one hand we owed it to the other practitioners who weren’t yet part of that interconnected national network to welcome them in, but on the other hand if we were going to be responsible for sorting out events and activity then we’d like whatever we set up to cater to our needs – the reasons we’d boarded trains to go to events and meet people in the first place: sharing what was good and bad about working in the field of social practice, making new friends and learning as much as we could.
To cut a long story (a bit) shorter, we hit a few stumbling blocks. The exact same stumbling blocks that are often hit as artists catalysing activity ‘in the field’ as it were.
- We’d ideally set things up then evaporate into the background.
- We don’t have all the answers (even though we do sometimes hit upon pearls of wisdom)
- We can be blockages for other people and ideas.
The other problem was that you can get caught trying to be all things to all comers, and lose sight of why you have started an initiative. In our case, the first winter walk in the latter part of 2020 permitted us some introspection, and the conclusion that the responsibility of organising meet-ups for social practitioners in the North East would have to fulfil our requirements for such meet-ups, ie not placing us centre-stage.
