Art Work
When working with community groups and organisations it is important to include everyone who wants to take part. Some people prefer to draw, doodle or paint.
Any project can be enhanced with art work that accompanies your group's poetry. Some groups may have access to smart phones or cameras and take images from around their community that support the intentions of the project.
From simple line drawings to artistic photographs these can enhance the work when presented. How you choose your art may also depend on how you choose to present your poetry.
Illustration both supports and often clarifies the writing that it is made to go alongside. Many people, around 60-65%, are visual thinkers. Images can help to strengthen the text and allow the brain to absorb the ideas that the writing presents. In fact, you are often 'reading' the illustrations in almost the same way that you read text.
A picture paints a thousand words. Drawings can serve where words can't - they have additional value where people don't have a great grasp of the written language being used.
Sometimes an idea is succinctly represented in a way that would take a lot of text. An alternative title for an illustrator is a visual communicator.
All art is communication, a way to express but also a way to connect. A mural, for instance, gives something of the artist to the community as well as power to the artist in sharing their thoughts. When words don't come easily, creating something else can be a way to focus, share experience and ideas.
Using visual art as a tool for engagement and for exploring ideas together
Making art together can be calming, meditative and help the maker focus their thoughts or clear their minds. The process is just as, if not more, important to the experience than to the finished work. Work can be made together as a group for public display or individually to be taken home. Work can be placed in the community, shown in a public space, which helps the makers feel grounded, physically, in the local area. This is very beneficial to those who feel that they are disconnected somehow.
Art can be activism, communicating visually feelings about issues faced by disempowered people. This can bring issues to the viewer's attention with immediate impact, helping the viewer to empathise. The creator of the art work is empowered by feeling that they have been heard.
Learning to 'see' through thinking visually can help all of us make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. Taking photos of a local area/environment, printing them out and discussing them as a group can help people notice elements that they hadn't before been aware of and to share those observations with others can all facilitate a feeling of belonging.
Supporting visual arts
You don't need to be a professional artist to lead such sessions. You are learning together and everyone is their own expert. You can never predict what will come out of the sessions or what people will make or show.
It's good to have a framework for your sessions, such as making something which you can take out into the environment. Or you could go for a stroll together looking at textures or signage, for instance, then returning to a base to make work in response.
You could make things from found objects in the environment then photograph them. You could give everyone a camera and let them loose then make a collage of the resulting pics. You could make pottery where everyone makes something that reminds them of safety or comfort.
The possibilities are endless!
Paulo Freire viewed the arts and culture as languages. "To be literate and to be understood by many, people must be able to express their ideas in a multitude of ways", Freire (1973)
