At the end of this year-long R&D project, we commissioned artist REBECCA DAVIES to creatively evaluate the project. What follows is a deep and personal dive into the ocean of material produced over the last 12 months - picking out, with an inscrutable and independent eye, the key notes for how we, artists, can, should and need to make change.
Details of how you can access your own copy the full hi res version of the evaluation, coming shortly.


PLAIN TEXT
1. ARTISTS MAKE CHANGE
We all do. We can be cooped up in a studio in the arse end of nowhere, working on our own, day in, day out. Or in the most public of contexts and sat round the table with blokes from local authorities.

So long as the work is seen.
So long as the work is a part of the special exchange that happens when someone encounters it.
Art makes change.

The invitation to ‘evaluate’ the Artists Make Change programme worried me. I’ve had some funny and negative experiences with evaluators – most have had an agenda, never really getting to the essence or truths.. And well, it’s a bit dry and often seems like the bit that needs doing and is squeezed in at the end.

I found myself waking up every night after the invitation – BUT I COULD DO THIS! BUT WHY ON EARTH WOULD I NOT DO IT? The invitation provided so many possibilities in my mind. But I’m not an evaluator. I’m an artist. And that was really what I needed to do here – respond to this work as an artist. I was invited to ‘reduce’ it in the best way I knew – drawing from it.

I had in fact experienced quite a lot of the content anyhow – and relished being in the company of all these artists in their domestic spaces. Access to such discussion is rare in Stoke (where I am based). There is a small (albeit vital) art community here and the last year’s open access to the wider art community online has certainly been one big plus of the giant illness we’ve all had to endure.

The problem for me was – and still is (because I don’t think I will ever stop drawing from conversations and experiences like the ones people shared here so generously) – how would I be able to reduce all these words and ideas without being reductive? I didn’t want to do what I felt ‘evaluators’ have done on projects I have been a part of - push my agenda – I wanted to push against that and the biases I have.
The thing is, I am human and DEFINITELY have bias (in my control or not) – particularly from lived experience of being an artist myself.

This short text is the smallest of intro/outro to my evaluation of the GIANT Artists Make Change programme to accompany a body of illustrations, map and game of Art Career Snakes and Ladders, representing the tip of the iceberg.

2. DELVING IN

Barely a few conversations listened into, and I thought, there’s clear goodies and baddies being talked about here. There’s vast landscapes with mountains to climb, choppy seas to cross. There’s hooded sceptres. It’s obvious this would make for the best Graphic Novel.

…But that would be linear. And nothing is straight here – there isn’t a clear beginning nor an end. It’s complex, wiggly, knotted and often explosive.
At times, it’s a mess.

I began with Barby Asante and Languid Hands “I hate to say we’ve been excluded” says Barby “because if we really go to the depth and creation of the art world – we were never invited to the party”.

There’s making the work/change as artists – but what becomes clear after more listening so many of these conversations is the difficulty to make the work – and what was presenting the biggest challenge? The very institutions who should be supporting, representing, championing
and at the very least PAYING the artists – THE ART GALLERIES.

But the ART WORLD was just one world making things difficult for us to get on with it. There’s also the REAL WORLD (not that the art world isn’t REAL buttttttt YOU try going to an opening at Hauser and Wirth and come away NOT thinking you’ve just left a banqueting scene in Gormenghast – good luck babes).

There’s the real world – and surviving that – rising rent, tory government, unaffordable art education and the fact it’s being eradicated from children’s experiences at school too.

3. MY APPROACH

So there’s US (the artworker – and this is important here as this programme identifies a number of times). And WE as artworkers are trying to navigate two overlapping worlds – and those worlds pose so many threats. But in spite of this, we continue to make work – some work in response to the threats, some to challenge the threat, some to collaborate with others and try to diminish the threat and others, to simply make any work is a stand in itself – because to make work in this world is a feat. And all of these types of artistic production are a force for change – because ultimately, art gives us hope and helps us to imagine things differently.

Reducing the conversations, essays and discussions into three topics sort of helped me to organise all my scribblings and drawings into at least some kind of order :

THE ARTIST.
THE THREAT.
THE CHANGE.

So THE ARTIST (also art worker) and a summing up of who we are – how we describe ourselves and the work we do. NOTE : this part cannot be defined – it is irrational, mysterious, never-ending, intangible, chaotic, pulsating but never repetitive – a giant energy that is responsive and constantly changing. Summing up this to me was maybe the equivalent of a mathematician trying to explain pi. Impossible because of all the possibilities it presents.

But one thing that was clear across all elements of the Artists Make Change programme was that the artist made art because of an innate NEED to do it.

4. THE THREAT

Artists are agile – Navigating a range of WORLDS – ART, POLITICS, ACTIVISM AND ACADEMIA we cross boundaries, play parts, shake hierarchies and speak all sorts of ‘languages’ in order to infiltrate spaces (and make change). You can’t catch us! Social hierarchies are broken through creating satire, hosting celebration and causing chaos (as practiced by Array Collective).

But we are NOT immortal – and so here it is important to represent THE THREAT.

THE THREAT presents conditions that are sub-standard, repressive and harmful for art workers – who continue to make work in spite of the risks. Our need to make work is exploited here by these threatening conditions and environments. ART is under threat – not just from government, but from the art institutions who exist only BECAUSE OF US.

This was an area spoken by the artists sometimes in visual, tangible ways, for examples, as a silo (Barby Asante and Languid Hands) and a moat (Demi Nandrha and Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan). But also as a (bleak) landscape – whose spaces were not accommodating, representing, accessible to so many of us – as black people and people of colour, as disabled people, as women, as people from marginalised communities – and more. So, the harmful structures created by arts institutions and our government, but in addition, the precariousness of affording to live while on an insecure income.

Here it felt natural to depict this landscape through a map that illustrates the worlds according to Artists (who) Make Change. But also, playfully in a game of Snakes and Ladders - that demonsrated the ups and downs of artist’s survival - how often it feels like everything rides on two things - funding applications and rent.

5. THE CHANGE

But that in spite of this – what Artists Make Change demonstrates so brilliantly, so beautifully and so energetically is Artists ability to create solutions – and provide hope IN SPITE of the threats.

This is THE CHANGE and it is defining what we are capable of doing to bring about change. So many of these conversations outline the change we need in order to keep being artists and inspire others to become artists.

The Change: hope for the future

ART supports, creates, nurtures – IMAGINATION
So that we can
Imagine HOPE
Imagine SOLIDARITY
Imagine BETTER REPRESENTATION
Imagine ACCESSIBILITY
Imagine BETTER FUTURES

Which in turn builds confidence and creates empowerment….
…. to design, build and MAKE CHANGE.

We demand safe conditions for the art workers who make art, teach art and look after the buildings that platform art, so that we can in turn, NURTURE IMAGINATION.

“Value art because art is a proper job” (Lubaina Himid)
And it is important to take ‘the thing that conjures little dreams’ seriously.
Because whilst the work might create magical moments, it is labour – that is “ Conceptualised as a luxury… Divorced from labour and is undervalued” (United Voices of the World Design and Cultural Workers Union)

ARTISTS MAKE CHANGE IS A VALUABLE REFLECTION, BUT IMPORTANTLY IT IS A CALL, TO:
- CARE FOR ART WORKERS
- SUPPORT ART EDUCATION
- RESPECT AND MAKE SPACE FOR ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES

DON’T OTHER US.
LISTEN TO US.

- REBECCA DAVIES, 2021

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We'd like to thank Rebecca for this fitting endpoint, our commissioners, A-N, and our steering group within A-N's Artist Council, AND all of the artists, art workers, practitioners, contributors and participants, who made this project such a rich, rewarding and important project.