Voices.
Testimo.
Global politics sweeps us in and out of each other’s consciousness like ghosts, like phantom ideas of people. Attending the BEAF Arts Weekender made something vivid to me – art makes us come alive to each other.
There’s a line I share in The Future’s F****d, So What. I performed it again at Arts University Bournemouth last week to wonderfully engaged Year 2 graphic design students. The line is:
“Storytelling isn’t about words, it’s about voices.”
In a valiant bid to finally publish it, I’ve been re-editing the UTF book this week and in chapter two I describe the story that this quote leads straight into in the show – Ayleen Jovita Romero singing to the high rises of Santiago under the 2019 curfew. I found out a few more details about the unrest in Chile that year, the Estallido Social as it’s become known. Inequality brings the worst out of us, at least as much those with the wealth and power as anyone looting shops. Is it arrogance or fear? Surely a weird blend of both that too easily takes root when any of us becomes rich.
Politics has always done what it’s doing now, but it’s doing it now ever, ever, ever more disturbingly across Western feeds – have us haunt each other. Unreal, dehumanised visions slipping into our mental crevices, coaxed in by the power hungry. We do it easily, our fears have little roots of truth, clinging to the substrate of our skulls. It’s part of the theatre of unreality long invested in by some weirdo lordly boys who don’t want to pay any tax to the rest of us.
My efforts to not get caught up in ever-building end of days psychodramas haven’t disconnected me from empathy. I’m absolutely feeling the unreal vibes of now, and you must be too. But walking along the ever-unfolding Christchurch Road from Pokesdown station to an Art Weekender by BEAF, I found myself brought back to life, life’s real reality made a bit more real again to me, by what I found.
What I was reminded of, right on my very real-world doorstep.
The Boscombe-based festival organisation opened the doors to three spaces, with expos and artists and events in all of them. The conversations we fell into made me marvel in new ways at what art does for people, and what people can make happen into the world to change the way we see each other. Honestly, it baffles me how it isn’t something we all take for granted in our lives, the creative process of making sense of our experiences, and forming little project communities to realise things.
It made clearer in my mind a local thing. If Arts By The Sea is a breezy, inclusive, wide-open gateway to art, taking away entry barriers to absolutely any passer-by, then BEAF will show you art’s meaningful power in people’s lives. The difference it makes in their vulnerability. Wow but we all need both opportunities where we live.
You might still not know what I mean every time I shorthand my worldview with the word Art, but I’ll explain what I saw here at least.
BEAF itself currently resides in the Boscombe Art Depot, a former department store bang in the middle of the pedestrian high street, repurposed roughly for exhibitions and intimate performances and workshops. Its make-shift, make-do vibe is so practically likeable, you’ll leave wanting to chipboard your front room, hang some work and invite your neighbours round to discuss it. But its Meanwhile pop-up status means it’s an irregular venue for the public, to the team’s frustration.
The Old School House, or TOSH, is literally that – a refurbished Victorian school building that is now a warmly inviting co-working and events space. And literally that too; after years of chilly winters in its high-beamed spaces, new funding has finally fitted some effective heating and I regretted wearing a chunky jumper. It’s airy, leafy, calmly funky and a place you can come back to yourself in, by making and meeting.
Haviland Studios is the newly opened venue of the three – and it was a revelation. A former, I dunno, church or community hall from the 30s, very Deco, its main space upstairs has been simply fitted with artist booths. They were all full. Chatting to its occupants, they seemed a bit giddy to have not only found somewhere affordable to work as artists but to have found each other in the process. Poking around their cubicles as part of the open weekend was exactly like going back to art school – vibrant pocket universes of creative progress fizzing against each other like material fireworks displays. I may be a bit of a pencil straightening designer, but as Mrs Peach noted: “You looked very at home in there.” Obviously.
The creatives.
There is a validation in making ourselves more obvious to each other, even just as fellow artists. Illustrator Jenny Tarr said to me, standing in the middle of her beautiful diddy workshop, surrounded by her own marks: “I always loved drawing as a kid but just didn’t see how it might be available to me as a job. Going back to art school years later and discovering grown up people do this for a living was a revelation.”
That Jenny’s work is so distinctive and confident it stopped Mrs Peach and her sister in their tracks, climbing the stairs under a sequence of her pieces, makes her own late-blossoming realisation about art in her life even more striking.
How can we live so long not realising who we are?
We do it all the time.
Carmel De’Lisser’s work had arrested me in BAD before I met her; figures caught in frozen motion, erecting and fusing themselves out of woodland landscapes, life forms surely always there in our peripheral, passing by about their business, that Carmel simply stopped time to show us. Her cubicle had also grabbed my eyes the night before and chatting to her the next day in her work space she made clear her practice had validated her to herself in new ways – helped her see herself more clearly. It’s a big thing that doing art does for us.
Developing the installation Sanctuary: How the land holds us, and her pieces for Rooted, she’d long found herself naturally drawn to working with forest environments, trying to work out what was calling her there and why they feel like healing environments. Her figures, her forms, her characters, shaped with fallen branches and tree detritus feel like they are haunting us but to call us back to something. As they did to her.
I’m still guessing that my ancestry has roots in Celtic lives, so something resonated a little in me as I approached them; I think she had more than a couple of people reference The Wicker Man. They felt like figures from the New Forest. But following her flow, research revealed something profound to her personally.
“I had no idea there was such a thing as Afro-Caribbean Paganism, a cross over of north European practices and Voodoo. Suddenly, so much in me made more sense!” she said, like a light had gone on.
Something across seas and three continents resonated to both of us there talking about it casually. Momentarily binding us, her the artist and me the stranger receiving what she’d made.
Right before she pointed me at the one spare shared space left in Haviland Studios and said: “Between us it’s naturally become a sort of gentleman’s private salon in there” and I momentarily considered renting it.
Mahtab Grimshaw’s installation in BAD had me entranced but I hadn’t realised I’d already seen some of her work, a performance piece a week earlier at Vita Nova as part of Kainaat’s Zakham: wounded borders.
A multidisciplinary artist, a puppet maker and puppeteer in particular, her figures populating Anchored in hope, Floating memories, Whispers of Tehran to Boscombe Breeze are enchanting. But when you pull back the curtain they are guarding outside, there is a surprise little world behind it. I won’t spoil it. Bumping into her around the clay workshop table, she explained how it links to her home town.
“The world behind our closed doors in Tehran is more lively than here!” she laughed. “We may wear the hijab there but behind those are whole worlds, parties, dreams. Anchored in hope is a secret Utopia.”
A secret Utopia. An artist realising one. In Boscombe.
Mahtab and Carmel are both artists brought together by BEAF’s Connected Grounds exhibition made by the 23/24 Access BEAF Resident Artists Programme – a group of people from the global majority practicing in Bournemouth and Dorset. The expo made a wall out of their notes and explorations together and in the snaps of themselves together they look like a good gang you’d want to get to know.
One of the elements of it is a hand-written list of ways they chose to understand what art is to them. It included:
• “Art is a way of life. It should be inspired by all kinds of life.”
• “Art is an archive for memory and histories.”
• “Art should be long lasting and have an effect to a community.”
Notice how broad and confident those statements sound.
Working into your feelings with some instinctive creative practice – words or marks or shapes or sounds – seems to me very like the work of space keepers of all communities, especially ancient ones. You might get delightfully lost in the nerdy details of exploring and finishing something but you will feel in some way connected to something bigger in the process, all while feeling steadily more grounded in yourself.
An expansive perspective on life, rooted in the super-local of your own living. It’s the work of sustainability elders. And it sounds like how to mentally survive the storms of an era of crisis to me.
It was talking to Caroline Beale Johnson that topped out my sense of wonder, however. A photographer and camera nerd, her work curating and facilitating Seeking Refuge is the sort of project a lot of us would want to make a big deal of, but she’s the perfect person to be in the middle of it because she has excellent perspective. The stories we thread and A seat at the table are among its most recent works, pieces in TOSH that express the experiences of people taking frightening journeys to make new lives in Britain who are currently living in Bournemouth. Folks from dozens of countries are here under such circumstances just in my little town.
The first is a huge cyanotype tapestry and additional prints. Its aim was to represent all types of people bringing their experiences creatively to the project – “young unaccompanied refugees, asylum seekers, and the male and female refugees who come to our ongoing workshops, to create one large communal artwork.”
The second piece is: “a communal work of embroidered plates of food inspired by the countries of people seeking refuge in the UK, currently staying in Bournemouth. Some of the dishes included on the plates are; Gallo Pinto from Nicaragua, Mopane Worms from Namibia, Kibbeh from Syria, Pide from Turkey, and Ful Madames from Egypt. Each dish represents a culinary tradition from a country where people are seeking refuge in the UK”
As you know, I am connected to ideas and people and concerns for Bournemouth town centre, not so much further along Christchurch Road from Boscombe. Something that gets slipped in as a reference noticeably often is asylum seekers, living in the hotels there. Caroline’s relationship with them clearly has no agenda to dine out on their testimonies – even with a massive embroidery dining table involved. Her desire is to simply encourage them and their sense of humanity in a new setting where they are routinely alienated, othered. Reading the book of first impression quotes from them after arriving in the UK is sobering.
I didn’t think I needed telling. But simply glimpsing perspectives of such experiences, in works and stories, brought alive – made three dimensional – the human reality of having to leave home to start a new life. How ordinary a part of real life are such challenges and the people having to face them.
When people like Caroline and everyone making BEAF happen hold space to do work like this, the humanising, community strengthening effect of using artistic practices to help outsiders of all kinds make sense of emotional truth and be seen by others… it is life bringing work.
It renders news feed psychodramas into wispy ghosts and connects my consciousness to strangers like they’re living lost siblings.
Which is what we really are to each other.
The buildings.
I’d add an extra thought here I also left with. The buildings themselves represent something else I’m getting at in these thoughts – renewal. Re-seeing of spaces and who should be in them. When BEAF co-director Carol Maund stood in the middle of the gathering for the Friday evening launch, she said something that I noted to her afterwards as wonderful to hear, a moment I clocked: “We love this building, everyone does, and we’re so grateful to be part of it.”
Forming part of the Boscombe Drama Centre when I was a kid, it became vacant somewhere in the mid oughts and then an informal arts space occupied by local creatives trying to stop it being demolished. When the council finally evicted them, it became a cultural sore still smarting with some today. Memories can sometimes be too long, too inflexible. It had built to be such a contentious site at the time, I went down there on the morning of the evictions to sort of mark it and make sense. Carol’s words on Friday evening, and how she’s worked to encourage the uses, vibe and people of TOSH in the last few years shows how all things can heal and find new life when artistic vision is released.
Live somewhere long enough and you start to see ghosts living around you. I’m sure Boscombe has many. But when you work into things like artists do, you might find that they’re not ghosts at all but real fellow travellers. Or maybe the spirit of your ancestors.
None of us should be surprised that this can happen in an unglamorous high street in an ordinary part of town. After all, I found my life-changing first synthesiser in Boscombe, a tool from the very Gods fallen from Mount Olympus into Eddie Moors Music. No wonder I still haunt Christchurch Road, though really I’m hunting for magical artefacts.
Beautiful holidays and art galleries alike are places of escape, but home is where we have to face ourselves and get on with making our real lives.
Thank goodness for the life-savers who can help us find our voices.
Explore the wide work of BEAF at gotbeaf.co.uk >
And for your interest, a look at the UTF show I mentioned at the start:
