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Open-source initiatives I have co-produced.
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A Manifesto for Socially - Engaged Practice
1. Exercise care for yourself, others and the system.
Model the ethic. Your personal care sets the standard. .
2. Show up and amplify.
Be present, share your knowledge, and actively advocate for others.
3. Nurture the network.
Continuously build and sustain links and collaborative relationships.
4. Stay Flexible.
Remain open, agile, and adaptable. Rigidity stops progress.
5. Hold the Door Open.
Remember that collaboration, not competition, is the path forward. We rise together.
6. Mentor and guide.
Actively nurture the next generation of practitioners.
7. Share Power.
Acknowledge the influence you hold and consistently share it with others.
8. Always Contribute.
Work with others to create value; never extract it.
9. Value All Voices.
Actively seek out and honour the depth of many voices and lived experiences.
10. Stay Forever Emerging.
Maintain the curiosity and flexibility of a learner, regardless of your age or tenure.
Images: Jacqueline Mellor for Pier Projects
Developed in collaboration with over 50 practitioners living and working in the East of England during ‘Social Mini’: a symposium on social practice.
Initiated by Pier Projects, co-convened by Take a Part, in partnership with Fine Art at University of Suffolk and with support from Essex Cultural Diversity Project.
Artist Wellbeing Rider: A Collaboration with Samantha Jones.
On Convalescence was an action research programme that was conceived as a period of reflection and recalibration with the experiences and needs of socially-engaged artists at its core. The programme delineated time and space to challenge ourselves and consider how we work with artists and communities. It sought to interrogate the potential of arts infrastructure to foster creative and critical opportunities for artists and communities to explore what health means to them.
Samantha Jones—Artist and critical friend.
I was invited by Pier Projects through their On Convalescence residency to collaborate with Natalie to reflect and reimagine how an arts commissioning agency could embrace a culture of change and consciously create a caring ecology. This gave me the opportunity to build upon my own durational practice of social co-productions of economies, commons and care. The residency brought a unique opportunity as an artist to hold an honest, forthright and transparent dialogue to test new ways of working together with a commissioner.
In a phase of open experimentation within Pier Projects we explored many aspects of how, as creative citizens, we can claim what anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin described in The Conquest of Bread (1892) as our ‘right to wellbeing’.
During the residency we returned repeatedly to the following questions: What should a caring commissioning agency look like? How can we make the relationship ‘well’ between commissioner and artist? How can an artist claim their own right to wellbeing within a artist-commissioner- commissioning ecosystem? And is there a way we can intentionally support a shift in this dynamic to allow a more considered caring arts ecosystem to emerge for both artists and commissioners?
From this exploratory process came the idea of an Artist Wellbeing Rider, an open framework for artists to create, amend, iterate and articulate their own right to claim their wellbeing
