As this stage of our Creative Case project draws to a close I’ve realised that one of the unexpected effects has been to change my relationship with a number of the paintings in the exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery which has been our springboard, ‘One day, Something Happens; Paintings of People’. It’s not necessarily that I know more about how or why they were painted or have learnt more about how to look at them in a visual arts sense, although that has been fascinating too. No, the work we have done has been much more of a creative tangent and the result has been to make certain of the images into old friends. Encouraged by Rommi to set a writing exercise, I suggested we each pick a character in one of the paintings and create what they might say if they spoke directly to us out of the frame.

I choose the older man in Barbara Walker’s picture Boundary, which it turns out, was painted in a barber’s shop in Handsworth, Birmingham. It seems an oasis of calm and everyday activity, in which there is something very tender in the way the barber is cutting his customer’s hair. I found myself writing – from his perspective – about the wedding ring which gleams gold on his hand. I wanted to know about his wife and I found as I was writing he told us that she had died and of how important she still is to him. It’s fiction of course- although it could well be true of someone of his age. Later Rommi and I talked about the media portrayal of Handsworth and how unlikely it was to be this calm, almost domestic interior. I realised I would love to be able to commission a companion piece from Barbara Walker. In my head I wanted to see a painting of two or three teenage boys, perhaps the sons of the man in the Barber’s shop, just hanging out together at home or somewhere familiar and comfortable- in the way that my son and his friends used to do when they were still at school. It’s an image of young Black people I realised I had never seen in a gallery, and it felt as if it could form a diptych with Walker’s original piece.

When it was Nigel’s turn he asked us to write about how the colour red spoke to us in the paintings. Both Rommi and I, without any conferring, chose to write about Milly Childers’ self portrait. For me her confident, uncompromising stare was underlined by her red artist’s smock. A colour I suspected no respectable Victorian woman would readily wear. The red gives her a confidence and makes her stand out. When I looked at her dates (1866-1922) I realised that she had lived through a time of immense change for women- from Victoria’s reign in the mid nineteenth century- post the Brontës but at the time of George Elliot, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sojourner Truth and Louise May Alcott- and on into the twentieth century through the First World War, the Pankhursts and Emily Wilding Davison. She was still alive when Virginia Woolf published her early work and died in the world Vera Britain knew, when the first women were finally able to vote. At one of our meetings I used an old theatre exercise and sculpted Rommi into a reflection of Milly’s stance bang in front of the picture. Later I discovered that Rommi had used this experience as the starting point for a poem – another unexpected outcome.

– Rachel Feldberg, Festival Director.

You can read Rachel’s previous two blogs about Outside the Frame and Creative Case here.

One Day, Something Happens: Paintings of People opens at Leeds Art Gallery on 6 March and runs until 24 May.

From Outside the Frame is a Creative Case NORTH Exploration. Creative Case NORTH is a programme of sector led activity exploring the Creative Case for Diversity, developed by a consortium of arts and cultural organisations convened by Arts Council England from across the North area, including:

Creative Case NORTH Partners: Alchemy, ARC Stockton, Artlink, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Contact Theatre, Contemporary Visual Arts Network, Freedom Festival, GemArts, STAY, ZENDEH.

Creative Case NORTH Critical Friends: Open Clasp, Prism Arts, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.

Although I have been around the visual arts for a long time, including curating the Festival’s 40^th anniversary exhibition and once as a wide-eyed student, being asked to ‘clear up’ a floor sculpture people were treading on at a private view- I remember crouching on the floor, shovelling it into a bin bag, feeling sacrilegious –  it’s still exciting to go ‘backstage’ when an exhibition’s being hung. A bit like staying the night at the Natural History Museum.

Rommi, Nigel, Kenny, the musician working on the project, and I, had been sitting round the table, grappling with complicated and important ideas: should the ‘creative case’ still need making? And even if it does, whose responsibility should that really be? Surely by now people understand that diversity ensures a variety of perspectives, makes the arts exciting, nuanced, artistically challenging – whatever the artists involved choose to work on – and ensures we don’t arbitrarily exclude half the people whose work we could be enjoying. We touched briefly on how who you are never goes away but how you don’t necessarily want to make work that constantly foregrounds it. Sometimes being a woman and having a rich mixed heritage is centre stage of what I write, sometimes it just lurks in the wings

Rommi talked about the need for us all to ‘be awake’- to be aware of that there are parameters and a political context for our playful explorations and how important it was for all of us to see our own ‘othernesses’ (whatever they are) as of equal importance within a diversity context.

And she raised important concerns about the problematic nature of short-term diversity policy projects which, specifically and particularly engage artists of colour and then are found lacking in terms of longer-term implementation and impact.

And when we found ourselves getting hemmed by how other people saw us, Nigel suggested we should try taking ourselves back to the work, go and explore it, in the gallery next door.

Which is how we found ourselves, squatting on the floor, surrounded by flip charts, heady with Kenny’s music, while the exhibition’s curator and her colleagues in white gloves hung the exhibition around us. It was like being in the middle of a piece of contemporary dance: they would stand considering one of the pictures propped up against the wall, and then point across the room. And at that signal, someone in white gloves would carefully pick up the picture, holding it upright between two hands and cross the gallery floor. Gradually I could see there was a conversation going on between the pictures, which one balanced with which, how the colours related or perhaps overshadowed one another. At the same time, we were having a written conversation with one another, scribbling our thoughts and replies on the flip charts as we looked at the images, and with Kenny as we responded to his improvisations. And now and again passing members of the public peered through the glass doors into the gallery to watch this unusual spectacle, so that we in our turn found ourselves ‘in the frame’.

– Rachel Feldberg, Festival Director.

You can read Rachel’s introductory blog about Outside the Frame and Creative Case here

One Day, Something Happens: Paintings of People opens at Leeds Art Gallery on 6 March and runs until 24 May.

From Outside the Frame is a Creative Case NORTH Exploration.  Creative Case NORTH is a programme of sector led activity exploring the Creative Case for Diversity, developed by a consortium of arts and cultural organisations convened by Arts Council England from across the North area, including:

Creative Case NORTH Partners: Alchemy, ARC Stockton, Artlink, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Contact Theatre, Contemporary Visual Arts Network, Freedom Festival, GemArts, STAY, ZENDEH.

Creative Case NORTH Critical Friends: Open Clasp, Prism Arts, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.