Text taken from TATE; CIRCuiT; Test Risk Change available as a PDF online and in print, video from Nottingham Contemporary YouTube
Nottingham Contemporary worked in partnership with Crocus Fields, an organisation which provides short breaks for young people with physical and learning disabilities.
Artist Sam Metz worked with the young people on three projects, using exhibitions and the building as starting points for the work.
One aspect of working with Crocus Fields was the possibility of participants to be able to respond to artworks in a way that doesn’t privilege vision, verbal interaction or written interactions and which was just being able to respond with the body. An important reason for that is that a lot of the young people, when they’re working and in their day to day life, are testing the world out with their bodies, making movements that respond to the environment, tasting things or using repetitive actions, and it was important that this project did not limit those interactions. I passionately believe that the young people have an existing creative practice and before I met them they had already been engaged in a For me, a key aspect is an ability to self-identify across a number of groups – I have a disability and I’m a creative. I want it to be framed as a creative practice and not viewed through a certain lens. I wanted the artwork created by the group to be seen as it is and I wanted to destabilise a lot of the prejudices that I think happen when a group of young people with learning difficulties enter an art gallery space; young people can be noisy and their behaviours are not what’s expected in a gallery space.
One thing we did was to take some artwork created by a group of young people that are non-verbal and share it with a group of young people who are verbal, and in doing so, allowing the artwork to have the conversation across the groups, where that conversation might not be possible in a social setting or environment outside of the gallery.
It’s about trying to remove the barriers that would make creating artwork problematic; it’s removing the need to talk about what you’re doing as your making; it’s removing the need to sit still as we’re making artwork; it’s really simple things.
Not limiting a young person’s behaviours can impact on raising their confidence. For instance, when you’re working with a young person who is very loud and if those noises are repetitive in a session, these behaviours would then be perceived as disruptive, if you design the session to be such. But, if you design a session where you’re open to disruption, you immediately remove the barrier, and I think that’s really important.
Another thing I advocate when working alongside young people is having something you’re making yourself; using the session to be creative as an individual so that everyone in the room is a participant. It means that the participants don’t have to ask lots of questions about what could be done next when someone’s modelling it next to them – it removes the need for constant interrogation in the session, because a lot of the young people within this group have issues with anxiety and frequent changes. Just stepping back to remove the constant need for questioning what’s happening in the session, or even more importantly removing the need to question through verbal interaction, can make a big difference. Not requiring a young people with learning difficulties to listen to a really long talk about what the session is about and instead just doing the session alongside a young person can have a major impact. Support workers, especially from Crocus Fields, have been fantastically receptive to this, as it’s quite a different approach. The interrogation is still there, it’s just not written in a thesis; we are also not having a verbal discussion about the artwork. The interrogation exists in that moment when a young person starts to think, starts to engage, starts to physically test out through materials. A great example of this is in the young people’s response to a film piece by Simon Starling. They began dancing, responding to the rhythms of the film. They are interrogating, they are just interrogating with their bodies. It’s a different kind of questioning.