Participants in a community arts project may be of any age, any gender, any ethnicity, any faith.

Often the participants in community arts projects are groups who are marginalised in some way - who do not have access to mainstream art activities. But this does not mean they do not have an important contribution to make. This image is not a community arts project as such but it is an art project aimed at capturing different kinds of people's imagination and skills.

The relationship the artists builds up with their participants is what matters. Are they real collaborators in the piece of work being created or are they there merely to serve a purpose the artist has decided upon?

How is the partnership going to work? Who has the ownership of the piece? These must be the questions that drive the work.

The artists are both participants and professional artists. They are those artists who wish to collaborate with communities. To make work together. To respond to the needs of communities.

Once again they can be any age, any ethnicity, any gender, any art form.

They need to be sure how they want to work with the community and be open with them. They bring skills but the community has their own skills. Their practice is ethical in that they are not there to use the community but to be of use to the community.

That partnership can lie at different places on a spectrum. The spectrum of Participation.

All art can be said to be participative in that even a painting requires a viewer.

But active participation needs to be meaningful.

The relationship between artist and participants denoting what kind of project it is.

Active engagement. May share their stories etc. but the work is made by the artist.

Collaborative Making. Still often artists led but participants more engaged with the making.

Co-creation. Equal ownership of the work.

Participant initiative. Led by the community but artist brought in to work with them.

Recently I was working for the Goethe Foundation - sound installation made both sides of trenches in WW1. Thinking about how schools might work with museums and galleries and communities.

Recognising each of us has things that link us to our stories, to our identity. Part of a community art project is about conversations, creative enquiry between the participants and the artist.

How might we begin to have those conversations in a participatory way that connects people and the art work?

Thought about Disobedient Objects exhibition. Ten collected own badges. Then story Steve's Mum and Dad India. Then poems about war. Then own objects in families. What might you use? What do you have? Share this and think about how it might work within a project.

meetmeatthealbany.org.uk

ownership

challenging poetry, stand up comedy, circus skills

but challenging isolation

cafe has all sorts of people coming in

Koestler Trust. Mentoring of artists to become curators as well as making their own work.