MA Week 29 - some inspiration from Lesley Sutton

Visiting practitioner : Lesley Sutton (www.lesleysutton.co.uk)

27^th May 2016

Lesley has been an artist/curator for 16 years and during that time she has made plenty of opportunities for herself. A really fascinating and inspiring talk.

She started by stating that “art has to make sense to your audience” – this helps them to connect, so observing current life can provide rich source material for this. This can move out into working with and in the community. “You    ->    Art    ->    Other” – what a simple and excellent way of envisaging it. Her art stems from herself, and so does mine. How can I open up my pylons and wanderings to others? Not sure yet… not sure if I’m ready to do it yet.

Lesley herself had realised that her practice was moving into the community and undertook a Community practice course at Staffordhsire University. From this she learnt the idea of “Social Capital”: trust, co-operation, cohesion – producing items for the common good. She articulated three types of social capital, and stressed the need to “tick box” all these criteria when applying for funding: 

• Bonding – close ties, family, friends.
• Bridging – loose friendships, clubs etc – people with whom you share a certain context
• Linking – reaching out to unlike people, vulnerable, excluded – these are the groups that funders really want to reach because working together increases our understanding of each other.

Lesley had previously decided to undertake a residency at Norton Priory Museum for her degree final project. She undertook this like a piece of business planning (so I could do this… I just need the artwork to go with it!) – working out how she could be an asset to them. She investigated the place and its history and sent them a proposal, which they accepted. Her advice was to consider what space might show your work and what boxes need to be ticked to get it in there. Research the space, approach half a dozen spaces, and be persistent!

She subsequently moved on to work with local galleries and local communities, all the time using the same idea of thinking how she could be, or produce, an asset to the gallery or community. For example, she produced some ephemeral garments which depicted fear or constriction. But she wanted to use these garments to tell people’s stories of child abuse. However the gallery saw this as too risky and difficult and was not interested in the proposal. This didn’t put her off, though, and she has had many successes since. One such example was “Stories of Cloth”, looking at the role of cloth in our lives. This brought together six communities, not all of whom could speak English, to explore a shared human condition and to understand one another – so, “life histories” in Bathmaker’s terms. Bringing together isolated communities and also women-only ticked boxes! This was a successful exhibition and it opened doors for her. She had lots of similar examples to this. Working with the community isn’t always easy though. There may be a tension between what the community wants to do and what the artist is being funded to do. Unsurprisingly, Lesley also had examples of this.

She commented that if you are curating, you need to know the space and how to direct visitors around. What do you want them to know? How are you telling your story? An interesting idea of narrative… so could I join with someone else for an exhibition and our narratives could complement and strengthen each other? That would be something to think about. She also mentioned the idea of the gallery as a vessel for other people’s memories. How do I plug into this? I don’t know yet, but again it ties in with the idea of opening up your art to others, as she’d mentioned earlier.

Lesly’s latest exhibition was a Lent and Easter mindfulness exhibition, “Be Still”, in various bigger Manchester venues (Cathedral etc) with some big name artists. Through her persistence and her excellence in her work, she has become quite a big name in the Manchester art scene. She is clearly a gifted women with a good deal of drive, but also a good deal of grace, and her story of making it happen was inspirational. I could see how she had done it, though whether I could do it is another matter. Perhaps by starting with small steps?