Creating a Change Part 4: Active Ownership - Making it Ours

Active Ownership

The fourth stage of the Four A’s

As I have explained before, when the Community Arts Forum set about trying to articulate what community arts actually meant in the late 1990s, it quickly became clear that no it would struggle to find a single definition that would work. There were manifestos, philosophies, ideologies, motivations, practices and processes which together could be understood as community arts. Some emphasised empowerment and participation, others cultural democracy, others the social value of creative expression. But not one overarching, readily accessible term could accommodate all. The Community Arts Forum itself had only recently been established, in 1995, reflecting a growing recognition that practitioners across Northern Ireland needed a way to share experience, support one another and advocate together for the work taking place in communities. This was Northern Ireland emerging from decades of conflict. The ceasefires of 1994 had created the first space for reflection and reconstruction in a generation, and by the late 1990s the negotiations that would eventually lead to the Good Friday Agreement were gaining pace. Communities that had endured violence, division and economic stagnation were now being asked to imagine a different future. And artists were the imagineers of that future. So of course, many in the creative community understood that this moment required more than just political settlement. It required places - safe, secure, supportive places - where people could encounter one another again, where stories could be told and heard, and where communities could begin to rebuild confidence and shared cultural life…maybe. Community arts offered precisely those spaces.

By the mid -1990s Belfast already possessed a diverse range of community arts groupings. Creative work was taking place across neighbourhood organisations, festivals, youth initiatives and artist-led projects. Groups such as Beat Initiative were working with young people through music and carnival projects, while Belfast Exposed Photography had developed a distinctive model of socially engaged photography rooted in community storytelling. Artist-led initiatives such as Catalyst Arts created experimental spaces for emerging practitioners, while theatre companies including Kabosh and Replay developed work engaging directly with schools and specific communities. Participatory arts also flourished through organisations such as Open Arts, CAF and Belfast Community Circus, which opened up creative opportunities to people who had rarely been represented within the cultural institutions of the city up to that time.. Festivals played an equally important role in shaping cultural life within communities. Programmes from Féile an Phobail and Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival demonstrated the scale and vitality of community-led creative expression and the desire for local audiences to see emerging international talent come to the city in more intimate shows, priced accessible and organised sensitively. There were countless smaller neighbourhood arts projects unfolding across community centres and youth clubs across the city too. But it wasn’t all community arts… it wasn’t necessarily participatory practice either. It was this vibrant energetic landscape that François Matarasso and John Chell sought to document in their Comedia study Vital Signs: Mapping Community Arts in Belfast in 1998. The report made visible a landscape of organisations, practitioners and communities already shaping their own cultural expression. Within all this energy, the defining local characteristics of community arts practice were emerging. For a society emerging from conflict, recognition of that Commedia report and visibility it provided really mattered. It demonstrated that the term ‘community arts’ was not peripheral cultural activity but part of the wider civic effort to rebuild confidence, dialogue and cultural participation.

From the small workshops and community festivals, from rehearsal rooms and youth clubs, from conversations unfolding through photography, theatre, music and storytelling, certain patterns gradually emerged. Community arts resisted easy definition, yet its practice revealed a quiet structure. Doors had to be opened. Confidence had to be nurtured. Voices had to be listened to and trusted. And ultimately, the work had to belong to the people who created it. Simple enough sounding perhaps. Reflecting on these experiences over time, CAF elegantly began to recognise these elements as stages within a successful community arts process, that scaling up, step by step, stage by stage, is what I have described as the Four As. Access wasn’t just about opening a door. It was about ensuring that the opportunity existed in the first place. About advocacy, funding, infrastructure, public will. About insisting that culture is not the preserve of the fortunate few but something that must be resourced and defended so that it is genuinely available.

Agency wasn’t just about attendance. It was about people recognising that they are not recipients of culture but actors within it. That they can decide, respond, refuse, experiment and shape the direction of the creative work that unfolds.

Authorship was never meant as a metaphor. It was the recognition that the artwork, and its meaning, belongs to those who make it. That creative judgement, lived experience and artistic instinct are not dictated to by creative authority, or pre-defined in a dot to dot puzzle that limits the scope of creative work. The community arts movement of the late 1990s in Belfast knew that people had to be enabled to define their own way of working and being, in their own words. And that holds as firmly today as it did then. That is the point at which the work ceases to belong to a process and becomes something collectively held by those who created it. You hear it in the language people use,where the ‘workshop’ becomes ‘Our Mosaic’ or the photography programme gets called ‘Our Exhibition’. The creative authority has shifted. That participatory power has been rightly relocated. Active Ownership is therefore not simply a desirable outcome. It is the natural culmination of this process, this scaling up trajectory of community creativity, rooted in autonomy, democratic agency and shared responsibility. We all drew as children. Few of us are given the space to do so as adults. We sang. We imagined. We designed, sewed and stitched. We wrote stories and poems. Community arts is not an attempt to return us to what we may once have learned in school. It is an attempt to reignite that ability to create and express our own ideas within a supportive and generous space.

And in well-supported programmes, facilitated by sensitive, skilled and thoughtful community artists, that ignition begins to take hold, supported by sensitive and skilled artists. Because the crucial role of the community artist is not simply technical. It is relational. It requires patience, humility and attentiveness. It requires the ability to listen deeply, gently, supportively and to recognise potential where others might overlook it, and to hold a space where tentative confidence can slowly grow. And as I have said before, there is a constant quiet generosity at the heart of this work. The artist brings themselves, their craft, their experience and their imagination into a community setting not to impose a process, but to release it. Their skill is in the chat, the regard, the attention to detail, the understanding of where a group's collective confidence suddenly deepens, where the stepchange happens. Or recognising when the works stalls, hits shallows that hadn’t been anticipated. And then enable ways to navigate back, to nurture confidence again and ultimately share their tools of creative expression with their group. Acts of kindness and generosity. So central to the community artists way of working. And when all this is done at all successfully, truly remarkable things happen. The creative power circulates. Participants, those that were so tentative at the start, perhaps even dismissive of their having any chance to achieve, now see their contribution unfold and become that confident authorship. The work becomes shared, and then, owned. ‘What’s Her Name’s workshop’ becomes ‘Our Film’, ‘Our Mosaic’, ‘Our Mural’. The generosity of these practitioners cannot be understated. It is one of the great strengths of community arts, but it also places enormous demands on those who choose to work in this way. The skills required are subtle and complex. Facilitation, artistic integrity, social awareness, empathy and resilience must all be held in balance. The accomplished community artist listens, guides, pivots and entreats - over and over. Nudging, responding, resetting and recharging…perhaps in the space of one session. It is remarkable work and as you may understand, not highly paid but massively valued. There is no need to remind you that average earning for our artists here is around £12,000 pa which is basically minimum wage. Whereas these practitioners are some of the most socially skilled and creatively courageous people in our society. It is precisely for that reason that CAP established the CEMENT programme. CEMENT (Community Engagement, Mentoring, Education, Networking and Training) was created to support the development of community artists themselves - to mentor practitioners, strengthen facilitation skills and sustain the generosity of practice that this work requires. Community arts depends on artists who are willing to share their craft and their skills, time and energy, and their creative authority. That is not something that happens by accident. It must be nurtured, supported and passed on to another generation of dedicated and generous community artists, skilled and sensitive to the challenge. In that sense, the artist remains central to the process. Not as the owner of the work, but as its catalyst, its alchemist. And when that catalyst is present - when the right artist meets the right community at the right moment - the spark of creativity can become something much larger. It can become a beacon that communities themselves continue to tend, actively owning their own projects and processes. In a world where equality is repeatedly strained, where disparities in wealth and opportunity widen, where ecological impacts fall most heavily on those with the least protection, and where our public institutions struggle to sustain our confidence, community arts offers a different paradigm, a different way to enable ourselves collectively.

Now, I am not suggesting that community arts can replace the public support structures and institutions that sustain us, our health services, our education system, our social protections. Not at all. Those structures remain absolutely essential and must be defended and strengthened.

But community arts can show us something equally important. It shows how we can come together creatively to address the issues we face, to heal wounds that may otherwise remain unspoken, and to assert our rights and our dignity in positive ways. It demonstrates that cultural democracy remains alive to our needs and circumstances, no matter our age, background or social position. It shows us self-reliance. It offers us power. It creates change.

And when people are given the opportunity to participate actively in creative processes, something more begins to happen.

Agency improves wellbeing. Shared authorship builds confidence. Collective ownership strengthens social connection. The act of making something together, a song, a story, an exhibition, a performance, restores a sense of capability that many people have been denied or have quietly lost over time. It reminds us that our voices matter, that our experiences have value, and that we are capable of contributing to the cultural life of our communities. These are not small outcomes. They speak directly to our health and wellbeing as individuals and as a society.

Loneliness diminishes when people create together. Confidence grows when ideas are heard and respected. Communities strengthen when people feel they have a stake in shaping the cultural spaces around them.

Not rocket science - just observable facts. So in that sense, community arts is not simply about creativity. It is about connection, confidence and collective strength. It supports our wellbeing not by prescribing solutions, but by enabling people to rediscover their own capacity to imagine, to express and to participate.

And that in turn may be one of the most valuable contributions we can make to the health of our community and our shared society at this or any time. Community arts transform lives.

Five Years On: locking down

March 2020 was a time of huge uncertainty. Information was conflicting, government advice was unclear, and the arts sector—like many others—was left wondering how best to proceed. As CEO of Community Arts Partnership, I found myself facing a difficult decision: whether to wait for official mandates or to act pre-emptively to protect staff, artists, and the communities we served. I consulted our board and impressed on them the urgency I felt. 

We decided to close our doors before government restrictions were enforced. It was not an easy decision. The weight of responsibility was immense, and there was no precedent for a crisis of this magnitude. Where some in the contemporaneous media questioned whether it was necessary, for me and our staff and board, we expressed relief, understanding quickly and sympathetically the seriousness of the situation. That early decision to shut down all direct contact work marked the beginning of a long and challenging road.

Closing the doors was just the first step. The immediate challenge was figuring out how to keep things going in a world that had suddenly shifted online. The scramble to adapt was chaotic: staff members had to set up home offices overnight, artists needed to find new ways to engage with their audiences, and community groups—many of whom relied on face-to-face interaction—had to adjust to digital platforms that were unfamiliar and, in many cases, inadequate for the kind of work they did.

Some aspects of the transition worked better than expected. Digital meetings and collaborative tools became lifelines, allowing work to continue in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even a decade earlier. But there were also gaps. Not all projects could be transferred online, and for some artists, the shift to digital engagement meant an immediate and perilous loss of income and opportunity. We found ways to support. We signposted and we filmed; we edited, we zoomed and then we zoomed some more. The shift wasn’t just logistical; it had a profound emotional and psychological impact on everyone involved. And for the very vulnerable, it meant trying our very best to offer some continuity. 

With everything in flux, maintaining financial stability was of course a critical concern. Arts organisations faced an existential crisis, with many fearing they would not survive. Many artists went into freefall. The government response provided some relief: Northern Ireland received £33 million from the UK’s £1.57 billion Cultural Recovery Fund, which provided emergency grants to many. But it was understandably and regrettably slow. The Culture, Arts & Heritage Recovery Taskforce was established in May 2021 to oversee the sector’s reopening and long-term recovery. These interventions helped sustain many organisations through the worst of the crisis, but they were not a panacea, even if they had all been realised. And for a sector that was already struggling with decades of systemic underinvestment, artists bore the brunt of it. And so they left, or took any job to get by, or went to ground, unhappy, isolated and alone. 

For us in CAP, securing funding meant constant engagement with funders and policymakers, making the case for why community arts mattered even more in a pandemic. Some programmes had to be adapted or scaled back, while others found new life in digital formats. The efforts of the sector were so evident, but so was the vulnerability. 

What began as an emergency measure gradually became a long-term reality. Remote work, once seen as a temporary solution, became an embedded part of how arts organisations function. Even as restrictions eased, many aspects of remote working remained, changing the nature of collaboration and engagement. Even this year, after five years, some of the remote still remains. 

The shift had both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, it has allowed for greater flexibility, reduced travel time, and enabled wider participation in meetings, workshops and events. On the other, it led to the loss of physical creative spaces, disrupted all the informal networking opportunities, all the chats and craic, and left some artists and many communities feeling utterly isolated, burnt out and vulnerable. The community arts sector, which thrives on in-person interaction, had to find new ways to build connections and foster collaboration.

Beyond the logistical and financial challenges, there was an even greater toll: the human cost. The pandemic took lives. Friends, colleagues, and community members were lost. Not necessarily to Covid 19 but those remote funerals became the only option for so many, stripping away the opportunity for collective mourning and leaving many with that grief unresolved. It also completely shifted school age kids towards even more screen time, on their own or at least, alone in an online connected labyrinth. Many still haven't bounced back from the isolation, the torturous home-schooling and lack of contact with peers and friends. For a great many, the effect of the pandemic will be felt for many years yet. 

The impact of these losses was profound, and the sense of isolation only made it harder to process. Our work in the arts, which is built on relationships and shared experiences, had to navigate not just professional challenges but that deep personal challenge. Even now, five years since it all started, we can all still sense the echoes of that grief and loss. Standing outside, apart.

Looking back, the decision to close down face to face work ahead of government mandates was the right one. It prioritised the health and safety of those we served, even if it came at a cost. It kept vulnerable staff members safe too. But no one knew how long it would all take and while many just lashed out at anything and everything, the careful and considerate took a beat and kept on working.

The pandemic may have indeed forced a re-evaluation of how arts organisations operate, highlighting the sheer immense vulnerability that we all share in times of crisis, but it also put us more in touch with those people and communities already challenged by health issues or those already struggling on the margins. The exacerbation of every deficit and difficulty was the pandemics long lasting price.

Where some aspects of the sector have recovered, others remain in flux. Face to face working is more prized than ever but while digital engagement has reshaped how many work, it has also become way more complicated and indeed, unsure. Spam, junk, scams, clones. They’re all more dangerously rampant than ever now . And AI seems to have only accelerated the level of level of everything - albeit washed in lazy computer generated platitudes and inaccuracies. Reaching out? Please, get a grip!

Remember building back fairer (never mind better, which was a forlorn hope, dashed hopelessly early). As the emergency funds are a thing of the past and everyone is fighting for funds from every possible avenue, the question now is not just how we rebuild, but how we ensure that the lessons of the past five years are not forgotten. How do we create a more sustainable, adaptable, and inclusive arts sector when there is little by way of new investment? How, when the arts have been summarily de-prioritised by our central government in the Assembly's PfG and replaced with top down short term missives about new priorities without any new monies, how do we survive, never mind grow? And how do we honour those that worked so hard and gave so much, at personal and often professional cost, along the way? Five years on, there are more questions than answers. The arts did matter…they should still. 

The empty chair

I wrote last month that the arts locally had never been in such peril as we are now. As over 100 arts organisations representing the infrastructure that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland has nurtured over many decades and to whom they often refer as ‘the arts ecology’ here. A month since that blog post and nothing has changed - no letters of offer, no signed off budgets and therefore, no confidence in how to move forward. There are of course more problematic aspects where the word NO figures prominently - NO money - to pay salaries, overheads, insurance, artists fees etc and NO minister … even though we have a minister apparently…

You see, the Arts Council, to much fanfare, launched its 10 year strategy after an exhaustive process where they consulted art professionals, organisations and practitioners, and indeed engaged across governmental departments and agencies to synthesise a creative strategy to offer some guidance and shape a trajectory for the arts until 2034. And the department that sponsors the arts here,the Department for Communities, was, we were told,  of course approached in a timely way so that the minister would attend. And I believe he had said he would but on the day, NO show. So, NO budget, NO letters of offer, NO minister…just an empty chair where a minister charged with championing and supporting the arts should have been sitting. The chair of ACNI did say he had received apologies from the minister. But couldn’t someone from his staff have read his speech and given us some crumb of comfort that he at least acknowledged the sector??

Instead, we had Gary Lightbody, the mainstay of N Ireland's most prolific contemporary band, offer his thoughts on why the arts should be more valued than they are and to plead, on our collective behalf, that they receive the monies that we as a society deserve. He remarked in his excellent speech that when he meets politicians, the impression he’s left with is that they believe the arts are a luxury that cannot necessarily be afforded. Gary has shown leadership, he had demonstrated knowledge and understanding and offered support. But Gary is a singer in a succesful rock band, and unfortunately, Gary is not our minister for the arts.

But we do know that the current minister for the arts is very keen on asserting his demands that people here be treated exactly the same as citizens across the water in GB. We also understand that as a minister for the economy in the last administration, he was very keen to engage with the business sector and to celebrate their successes. So, why not come to the engage with the arts sector - one of the most efficient business sectors that there is - employing over 5,500 people, creating significant pathways for employment, training and R&D, assisting in facilitating a creative workforce of the future through multiple and wide-ranging schools programmes, and contributing actively to a healthier more engaged society for our young, our elderly, our minorities on the margins and supporting massively the evening economy and bolstering the cultural tourism offering. There is not a corner of life here where the arts are not actively contributing.

Pound for pound, the arts over-deliver and across the years, we’ve had to become expert in so many applied areas of working that an organisation can now switch from delivering a capacity-building training workshop to young artists, to working with groups with a whole range of physical and emotional challenges in the next breath and then celebrating new artistic work on an international stage that evening. There are over 100 annually funded organisations who are doing this type of work, day in day out. And the Arts Council was describing how we collectively see the arc of that work over the next 10 years in their strategy. Still NO show, NO minister.

Then the arts community starts to think - maybe it's US … are we the problem here? Are we?...

too sensitive about being the lowest funded region in the arts across the UK by 50%, or receiving only a fifth as much as they receive per head compared to the Republic …

Are we too progressive in that we challenge the status quo and insist that the arts and access to them is an inalienable human right…
Are we too confident in our skills that we can support people, amateur and professional, to have ambition to get up on that stage and show ourselves for the creative people we are…
Are we too empathic, working with so many people who cannot be reached by formal education, for whom life every day is a challenge and the chance to celebrate achievement is so so limited…
Or are we just too resilient, that having been treated as Cinderella across too many pantomimes, we are still here, decades later and now almost 2 months into a financial year and still have yet to receive any monies from our principal funder because the department can’t decide how poorly to fund this sector??   

And so as we wait on tenterhooks to find out how we support the working lives of 5,500 people, we can browse the net and celebrate the minster attending a variety of meetings elsewhere...

The arts can build back better

Like anyone involved in the arts in the North / N Ireland, I am anxious that not only do the arts survive this pandemic, but that all associated with the arts manage to be in a position to support our community as we take two steps forward and one back around re-opening after lockdown and re-establishing ourselves and our role. Because the arts can be a formidable force for good, an incredible means of supporting a population that has been traumatised by inter-community violence for decades and was starting to come to terms with itself, this wave of Covid 19 and its horrific impact on our community will reverberate for years to come, compounding our trauma, exposing the vulnerability of our elderly and those with underlying conditions (approaching 90,000 households here) and increasing disorders like depression and anxiety in our teenagers and new mothers, etc . And this is only the first wave of this global pandemic. So, as a lot of us have done during the lockdown, we have turned to the arts for respite, release and escape. The next challenge for the arts will be to offer consolation, express fears, manage bereavement and cope with loss. If as a creative community we manage to rise to that challenge, then we will assist this society move another step toward resilience.

But among the outcry from a small group (including the actor Sean Kearns who was a brilliant advocate) representing theatre, venues and audiences last week that presented to a committee at Stormont, came the warning that the sector faced "cultural Armageddon" (although another has a survey entitled "After the Interval" which doesn't communicate much in the way of the obliterating of a sector, on the one hand, never mind offering scant sympathy or regard towards the thousands of lives lost and millions affected by the global pandemic, equating it to a theatre intermission, on the other). The catastrophist pronouncement along with the alarming insistence that all organisations in the sector "face obliteration" might make for good press coverage, but the truth is that all arts organisations have been faced with economic uncertainty as an ever-present for years and each is working hard to make sure that this is not the last battle, but unfortunately yet another challenge in a litany of setbacks, cuts, historic under-investment and lack of adequate financial protection and security. The acute emergency of having no audiences for theatre is of course a massive immediate challenge to an already weakened position.

If the last 12 years were characterised by cuts and further neo-liberal pressure to become more economically self-sustaining, the next 12 will be even harder, as we stare into the biggest recession the world has ever seen. The challenge is for our whole society to #buildbackbetter , finding ways to amplify the fantastically creative possibility that a greener, more people-centred economy might be advanced by the humanity and compassion of the arts, rather than fighting to save our place in a failing economic model, that has never embraced the arts adequately.

To all those who claim that the arts sector is part of the Creative Industries, it is time to recognise our place within this and perhaps to see ourselves somewhat apart.  TV, Gaming, Films are extremely expensive to invest in and are hugely profitable businesses - you need only look at the all-too-often mentioned TV show about swords and sandals and snow (I watched one episode and that was that!) . But the figures around the creative industries are massive because they embrace a huge swathe of economic activity that is not connected to what we do in our small arts sector - Advertising and Marketing and Architecture are part of the creative industries - and do not relate directly to anything most of the organisations in the local cultural sector are engaged in. IT, Software and Games account for over 40% of this Creative Industries catch all - accounting for £45bn in 2018 in the UK.

Music, culture and arts by comparison accounted for 8% of the GVA of the Creative Industries.  What I'm trying to get across is that by constantly associating our arts sector with one of the most profitable areas of the economy projects us in the wrong light; it says that we generate massive profits. We don't - if arts organisations break even, they are doing well. That has always been the case. Now, venues in particular are faced with losing 90% of their box office, which will be devastating. But others are quickly finding new ways to develop and present product and change will be at breakneck speed over the coming years. The new normal must offer progress, otherwise its just another empty promise.

We are the culture and arts sector, the Cinderella of any Creative Industries - left to the funding vagaries of the public purse and dependent on between 30% and 70% subvention from government or  philanthropic funds. The organisations that keep craft traditions alive, that work tirelessly with older people in residential homes (how necessary is this now???) the organisations that reach into every community centre, school, disability group, supporting newcomers and native residents , in every corner across the country, facilitating projects in film, fashion, poetry, dance, drama, sculpture, visual arts, painting, drawing, designing and offering a platform to the arts of yesterday to be maintained and grow and support us all,  as we look forward to tomorrow.

Don't confuse us with the for-profit sectors of the Creative Industries! No, no, no... this is the for-people sector of arts and culture. There will be many more struggles ahead, this is not Armageddon, the final battle. The arts will fight on.

But we do need help, badly. That reality has been recognised and has meant that an extra €25m was allocated to the arts sector in the South just two weeks ago. If we in the North, were to receive the equivalent per capita, it would be approaching £9m of 'new' money.  This is crucial - the British government must offer additional funds to our devolved Assembly, a portion of which must help save the arts, especially those that have seen their income 'fall off a cliff' to quote the overused phrase. We need our political class, not to petition our Minister to find more cash locally out of already stretched budgets (albeit the £4m June monitoring funding announced by Finance Minister Murphy may be a boon, once we understand how it's to be deployed)| but we need to direct our plea to the British Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer to release additional emergency funding and recognise the unforeseen circumstances that this sector finds itself in.

So far, those additional monies have not materialised yet we read everyday of the quasi-Keynsian budgetary investment being made by the Tories - but not to the arts. Scotland has tried to shore up its sector. The Arts Council of N Ireland have done their utmost to assist individual artists and organisations, offering £1.5m in emergency funds. But here, we need a Barnett Formula applied to the emergency monies being allocated in Britain and we need it right now. We need it across those sectors that assist the public to manage to impact of it all - health services, social services and the arts and cultural services. We're not seeking billions. No. It's a tenth of the money spent on an abandoned track and trace app, or one percent of the RHI overspend or 0.05% of the annual budget here.

So, as the deadly waves of Covid-19 sweep across the world, let's recognise that we all want our life to return to some type of normality. One of the fastest ways to that returned sense of well-being is to tap into the expressive power of the arts and get ourselves out of our bunkers, mentally and physically and allow the arts an opportunity to help this society process the impact of coronavirus on our lives and give us a platform to move forward and build back better.

The new normal must be better than the old one - for all our sakes.

#ArtsMatterNI
Baineann sé le tábhacht na nEalaíon sa Tuaisceart
#BuildBackBetter

no quick fix

In this part of the world we know only too well that there is no such thing as a quick fix. The outworking of the social disarray that this society has had to live with over the generations , before, during and indeed after the Troubles, still has a way to go before being in any way really fixed. Now, in the face of Covid-19 and the constant anxiety and daily uncertainty, we know that this global upheaval will take time, years and years, before we either return to something we recognise as normal, or we normalise the unrecognisable life we currently lead.

Within this, there has been a headlong stampede to embrace the digital world - with rock stars, old (Ancient even) and new, blasting away from lockdown at their iPhones in their living rooms, sounding pretty ropey ( not all of course, Springsteen still manages to sound amazing singing into a quality microphone).  Organisations, my own included, have had to develop presentations on line to finish off programmes or announce awards etc the Seamus Heaney Awards. Everyone still hoping that this is only a very temporary situation.

But, as hard as we try, this disembodied digital experience can also be quite isolating, because it can often starkly remind us that things have utterly changed and that the contact we might enjoy via a screen can never replace the human contact we all took for granted for so long.

But little networks, smaller eddies of conversations and generosity have been springing up all over the places. NI SCRUBS for example, where individuals with connections through arts programmes like CAPs Trash Fashion or Tides Dare to Change project, are now sharing resources- overlockers, sewing machines, materials and creating a productive community that is directly assisting in the challenge to resist coronavirus. Some of these participants are taking refuge here from the Syrian war and now are helping medical teams battle Covid-19. New deeper connections are made. Not built on profit, or narcissism, but on mutuality, generosity and togetherness. It’s no surprise that many have enjoyed that connection through highly expressive community art practices and programmes.

So, in looking to the future, we can rebuild our community connections, we can renew solidarity and we can together find ways not be overcome by these days. In other words, as a community, we have often shown the resilience to continue.

But of course there has always been a terrible cost. Today, as death rates mount astronomically in the case of the U.K. and US, and we see the terrifying numbers escalate in our elderly population, especially those poor souls in care, we must reach out to that population, thoughtfully and creatively and offer them some respite.
CAP has an Artful Older People that is offering kits of materials and ideas to a set of care homes to bring some welcome distraction and support moments of calm creativity. Many organisations are doing likewise.

We cannot be complacent. While the arts community is seeking emergency support thanks to the programme that the Arts Council has just opened up, it is only a short term exercise as well. 100 x £5,000 and that fund is used up. And we know there are many more artists and creative practitioners who really need support now because we will be counting on them to assist all our community to come together again: to make sense of this trauma and to celebrate the humanity in our lives and shine a light in the darkness, paying tribute to the loss and exploring the failures. The means for all this to be experienced is  will fall to our creative community. Take time to take care of these workers. They may not be frontline but their work will be crucial. To express; to resist; to grieve and to renew.


Stay safe
#TakeHeartMakeArt