Art Week Exeter

A Social Art Commission with the community of Heavitree

This summer, after sharing my practice and ideas through an energetic, creative presentation process known as Patter Scatter, I was awarded one of three social art commissions for Art Week Exeter. An opportunity to explore, in my own community, our relationships with place and nature. And with each other too, considering how we record and remember our experiences and how a creative exchange across generations in a place familiar to both of us can forge new connections – with people, with place, and with nature.

As is central to my creative practice, I took a moment after each of the four sessions to write up my experience …

Wednesday 4 June
Parklife Hub, Seniors Coffee Morning

Well now, this was a privelege and a joy.  To take a table usually filled with coffee and cake.  To litter it with nature collections.  And to receive such a warm welcome from the folk who meet here.

Tentatively, tentatively … I’m not here to force creative activity on anyone.  But just perhaps, we can have a look in the boxes, pick through them.  Down the table, attention caught by Camellia pods – how many of us have Camellia in the garden; how rarely the trees bear fruit.  Nearer my end, T and I found the Foxglove Tree pods, from the tree by the surgery.  He was wary of creating, but as I formed a circle, he told me, nudged by B beside him, of the catapult he built as a child, how he was aiming at the cat but instead broke the glass in the greenhouse.

Persuaded S to make a trail with me; M continued it and it began to unfold across the table – after teaching me ‘flicky sticks’, which had sticks flying across the table, narrowly missing teacups.  The glee of mischief – please let this game surface again next week!

Later, I began to trail with C, wrapping our arc round L’s mandala.  A dinosaur emerged, though which end was the head and which was the tail remained undecided! 

Next to me, J was ‘museuming’ – a made-up word for the act of choosing and admiring each individual piece, each different, and laying it in an array, celebrating each piece equally.

Quietly, the session gained momentum and there were Doodles everywhere – designs and trails, patterns and pictures.

What a start to Art Week Exeter.

Friday 6 June
St Michael’s Primary Academy, the yurt, with Wildlife and Eco Champions

I found you all in the corridor;
A barely contained bag of exuberance and enthusiasm.
Bubbled together along to the yurt –
Are we going to the park today?
No that’s next week,
I’ll explain in a minute.
Lunch around the mat.
Names and eating, questions and connections –
Are we going to the park today?
No, today we’re going to have a go at Doodling here.
I saw something in the park, by the Hub
Did you now?  I wonder who did that?

Lunch finished,
Wriggling, negotiating spaces,
Writing names with sticks,
Anchoring names in my mind before you move again.
Instinctive embellishment – initials into names, into decoration, logos, motifs.
Instinctive collaboration –
Circular hoops making unwanted boundaries
As you paired into twos, then threes, even fours.

Familiar rustle as I offered up the full collection.
No hesitation, you dove straight in –
Sharing, talking, dreaming, visualising
Dinosaurs and zodiacs,
Stories and patterns.
While in the corner, two of you worked quietly, independently,
Making your own worlds of delicate beauty.

A rustle again as I invited you to connect all your work …
You could have continued another hour.
But time will forever march – forever frame school life.

Stepped back, admired our work –
Noticed spaces, dove back in, for five more pieces each,
To finish.
It’s never finished, really.

And after, pausing to reflect,
To think ahead:
What will it be like, to collaborate with older people?  What will we need to think about?
Your answers flowed like water.
And to Doodle outside, without these collections at your fingertips?
We’ll think about the wind.
And … how might you to talk to these people, who you’ve never met?
Ah.  Now this was tricky.
We’d tell them our names.  Again and again.
And we’d ask them their names.
Say hello, be polite, be friendly.
Ah, yes, but what does friendly look like?  What might you ask?

And bit by bit, we began to think of the stories we might share,
The memories we might pursue.
How, after all, has the park changed over all these years?

What games can we teach one another?
How has hide and seek changed,
Across generations?

Folks, you are so keen.
You are ready.
See you next week.

Wednesday 11 June
Heavitree Park, with Seniors and School Children

Sometimes in the last week, I’ve wondered at my naivety and idealism – to think that I can bring together utter strangers across generations and expect them to collaborate.  Who am I to engage such social engineering?

And every time, the train of thought leads me here:  it may not be perfect, but if I don’t try, then nothing will happen.  It’s chemistry: nothing happens if people aren’t brought together.

So I tried.  It was a big ask.  It was incredible.

I feel as though my world has shifted a little.  I’m so grateful, and so impressed, by every child and every adult who stepped into the uncertainty of collaborating creatively in nature. 

I do believe you had a good time.

Friday 13 June
Heavitree Park Basketball Ground, with … everyone

Mind and body so tired they no longer form sentences.  But … Fragments:
Constant uncertainty of the weather.  Inside or outside, in or out.
Set-up time slipping through my fingers.
The masses arriving before we were ready, and no way to hold them back: they slip in because they belong here, this is their place.
So many people, all at once.  So. Many. People.
G clinging to me, the overwhelm hitting us both.  A hard moment.
T, with her Mother-in-Law, and Adrienne – little oasis of calm doodling on discs at the table.
Scent of dried lavender.
Letting go.  Slowly, constantly … letting go.
Sonia, bubble of colour, a cluster of children drawn to her like butterflies.
The child who tipped more and more things into her circle – her jungle – and then, finally, jumped on it.

I turned around and … all the materials were gone, just like that.  So I rallied a crew and we headed out, foraged beneath the Sequoias, children showing me each treasure they found.
Small girl with a bag of cones: This is the best day ever.

Seeing A talking to adults, like an adult herself.
Sending my children off to the café with a tenner.  I don’t do that enough.
The frenzy at the typewriters.
Curiosity about the inks.
Letting go.

The drone: vision of Ethan with a cluster of children watching over his shoulder
D’s Mum, who said how valuable this project had been for getting him outside.
Why did I think I could control it?  Why did I WANT to control it?

Berni: We couldn’t have had a better fit for Parklife
My team: absolute gold, each of them.  Sarah and Emily.  Berni.  Becky and Andy.
And hardly a drop of rain.

Emily and Sarah:  The deep down privilege of having a team who hold me and understand me so completely.
Gratitude for the dozens of faces that showed up.  The familiar ones and the new ones.

The crash, the absolute crash as I got home.  Of defeat.  Of overwhelm.  Of everything that it was and everything that it wasn’t.
Gratitude and regret for the adults who showed up: Sorrow that I couldn’t tend to you better and foster the introductions I’d imagined.  [Adrienne, the next day, telling me how important it was to come together with people of all ages; T, later, sharing that her Mother-in-Law is really reticent about creating, doesn’t believe she’s any good, and that today she got stuck straight in]

The trickle of messages that came in afterwards, that told me that while I was busy trying to contain the chaos, magic was happening elsewhere.

And then later, as the drone pictures slipped into my phone … seeing Doodles from above for the first time ever.  The scale – that there was, after all, a kind of coherence.  There’s almost a teardrop there, don’t you think, in the shape?

Seeing the Doodles in the context of the park – just how big what I TRIED to do was.  And just how big what I DID was.

And I hardly even spoke to Ethan with the drone.  Thank you, Ethan.

If it wasn’t what I thought I would do, it was still something quite momentous.  I counted up the circles in the drone pictures and there were 79.  That means that in two hours, at least 79 people came and doodled.  No wonder it was … busy.

I’ve never felt so tired in my life.

The hardest thing about social art is that you can only learn by doing it WITH people, and I’m so eternally grateful to you all for letting me learn on you.

Berni: You’re part of Parklife now.

With a thousand thanks to Art Work Exeter, Parklife (and Berni in particular), St Michael’s Primary Academy, Emily and Sarah and all those who took part. The social art commission is introduced here.