Creative community change

To be an artist is to hold on to a sense of hope that dreams can be made reality. The creative act in its purest form is that.

You dream up an idea, it floats around in an intangible cloud, then you put in the work to will it into existence. Utilising craft, patience, imagination and hope that the thing that emerges provides some connection to the magic of the concept. 

While this certainly seems true in experiencing the creative process firsthand, it is actually in witnessing artists in other spaces that the power of this act of hopeful imagination emerges.

Seeing artists and creatives in community spaces. In spaces of learning or healing. In workplaces and in the organisations working proactively to shape the cities of tomorrow and the communities of today. 

When we look at the news and stories from the wide world, the pressure can feel intense. It can seem like a lot to hold. And while it might be nice to hide away from it all, that can also feel empty. The real power seems to sit in that space of tactical hope. To see the darkness around and to still turn up and create something beautiful. Something that Brad Montague called ‘hopepunk’.

“Every day you are presented with many blank canvases through which you can share a story. This might be emails, text messages, events, products, stages, and on and on and on.
Wherever and however you can: communicate hope.
This is not a request for ignoring the bad. That’s toxic positivity. This is a joyful rebellion. This is an active working and fighting for a better, more hopeful, more joyful future, together.”

Artists are great at enabling this in our communities. The art classes, the drama productions, the art trails. The community creative spaces. The creative humans working shoulder to shoulder with people in the community looking for something else. 

Community creativity is about connection. It is about engaging in a playful act alongside other people. It is time spent in third places with other humans where you might talk, or not. You might just find yourself being present in the creative act as other people do the same.

An artist can serve as a wayfinder. A conduit into the creative act, with enough experience to help each person to find their own path. The artist can be the changemaker by utilising their skills and connections as creative practitioners to engage with the needs of their communities.

Embedding creative practice into systemic change can be an effective way to facilitate connection and understanding. Whether that is through artists-in-residence in partnership with civic infrastructure, or creative practitioners providing mana-enhancing support through artistic activity for people experiencing hardship. Working with artists provides access to a powerful set of tools. 

So why don’t we do this more regularly?

It requires a collective shift in how we understand the work of community-connected artists, how we resource projects to support preventative work, and ultimately a shift from short to long-term thinking, including how we understand impact over a broader timeframe. This collective shift is one that sits across a range of sectors, including social, corporate, philanthropic, and government sectors, and long-term accessibility requires ongoing investment of resources of time, space, finances, and people. 

It is also about understanding the power of the creative process as a significant tool that makes positive contributions to this social and systemic change. Seeing the role of artists and artistic activity as being a catalyst for much broader outcomes, and understanding that investing in things that may look creative on the surface, can also have impacts on health, education, social cohesion, and community wellbeing. 

This approach for social cross-disciplinary community-embedded creativity sees the role of the artist shift from industry-based conception as an individual producer of discrete creative outputs, to a view where the artists is a collaborator and enabler of creative situations, and the artwork is better understood as a “an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end”, and the community move from a traditional perception of ‘audience’ to seeing themselves as co-creating participant, a direct part of the artistic process. 

Artists can help to reflect society and can inspire it. The creative act can be used to share diverse stories, to create space for marginalized voices, and serve as a tool for advocacy and for hope. We can choose to create together to find a hopeful path into a thriving future.  

Written by: Dr. Jeremy Mayall, Creative Waikato CEO