Loraine |

Loraine

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 | Loraine Leeson and the Geezers

The dynamics of difference

“In a situation where the creativity is coming out from putting people together, it’s a big trouble shooting exercise and as long as everyone’s feeling okay about it and you are still achieving the thing you need to achieve, it’s okay that it’s difficult. It’s never going to be easy.”

We caught up with Loraine immediately after she had facilitated a ‘Developing Work with Communities’ workshop at SPACE (in hackney, East London) for artists working in participatory settings. For The Not Quite Yet exhibition Loraine worked with the Geezers, a self-organising Older Men’s group based in the area. The resulting series of exhibits promoted ‘Geezer Power’ – proposals for harnessing the River Thames’ renewable tidal current to power London’s homes through environmentally friendly and educative means.

Click here for exhibition text.

In the podcast Loraine talks about Conflict Resolution training that she undertook with Newham Conflict & Change (whose staff also delivered one of the Artist Development Workshops as part of this programme). Conflict Resolution, explains Loraine, has had a transformative effect upon not just her artistic practice, but also the process of project conception and management that precedes and parallels it. She recognises a fundamental change in her own position and intentions that shape her dialogues with participants, and an ability to embrace the possibilities around different, discordant worldviews:

“Conflict happens when differences come together. But differences coming together are a real dynamic force. Differences coming together is what you want. It’s how you create those safe spaces that allow the differences to come together, and interact in a way that is positive rather than negative….that’s where the basis of innovation comes from…..if you work with someone similar to you, you’ll probably do something predictable, but if you work with someone different to you, you’re likely to come up with something new.”

Loraine vividly describes how this outlook has affected two projects that she has engineered and facilitated in a schools environment, Infinity Story and VOLCO. The first of these began when, several years ago Loraine used her leverage as an ICT Link School Governor to develop creative means to offer young children a first “glimpse of the possibilities” around participatory media. She talks about how she used her role to seed interest and buy-in to the project at a range of levels, and her simultaneous role as a strategic coordinator of relationships that are, by definition, unstable and challenging:

“the key thing to know is when to stop packing more things in”

Loraine defines her practice as ‘dialogic’ ((according to the field described by Grant Kester in his book Conversation Pieces, in which Loraine features and which she, and we, recommend). We spend some time thinking about the skills that artists whose work could be categorised in this way could benefit from, beyond the artistic and technical skills deployed ‘in the creative encounter’ – touching on adaptive language, active listening and negotiation skills. For projects of any scale, Loraine points out that developing ‘management skills’ – people, project, money – are essential.

Again and again, we return to the point about how real creativity is rooted in discordance and conflict – core potentialities of the working context we’re mapping through this initiative – and how, as Loraine eloquently puts it,

“the problems are the stuff of which it’s made”.

In the book mentioned above, Grant Kester explains some of the reasons behind the insufficient mapping of dialogic arts practice; its unstable and ephemeral nature, the challenge they offer to conventional contemporary art criticism by not focusing on producing static, ‘finished’ artifacts and so on. Loraine offers us compelling advocacy for this kind of work. We invite you to listen in and dialogue with us about the dialogical. What are your experience of the impact of difference and discord within your own work as a participatory artist? Do you have distinct support needs in relation to this area? Do you feel under pressure to gloss over, or obscure difference, rather than embrace the opportunities it might suggest?
Tim Jones, June 2008

Loraine Leeson’s practice since the late 1970’s has centred on the exploration of art as a catalyst for social change. This has involved engagement with trades unions, tenants and action groups, local communities and young people around issues of regeneration and identity. Her projects intervene in the public domain using forms that over the years have ranged from posters to photo-murals, events, public art and interactive web sites.

LINKS
Loraine’s website
Newham Conflict + Change
VOLCO
Conversation Pieces book by Grant Kester
Getting to Yes – book link