Loraine Leeson is a visual artist and director of cSPACE , an organisation which uses the arts, media and cyberspace to support local communities and young people in the expression of individual and collective visions, dreams and aspirations as a means of effecting social change. Since the late 70’s her work has involved engagement with communities around a variety of issues including regeneration, identity and education. Most of this has been done through organisations which she has co-founded and directed for this purpose, including the Docklands Community Poster Project, The Art of Change and currently cSPACE . Over the last decade much of her work has focused on collective production with young people through digital media. Her work has been widely shown and published in the UK and abroad, and is currently being documented for a major retrospective exhibition to take place in Berlin in 2005. Loraine has taught and lectured in universities throughout the UK, has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of East London since 2001 and is a faculty member of the London East Research Institute.
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Loraine founded cSPACE in 2002 as a charitable company based at the Docklands campus of the University of East London. It developed out of The Art of Change community co-operative, and builds on more than two decades of socially engaged and public art practice in East London. This experience is now applied to the dissemination of opportunities offered by new technologies and the higher education environment within which cSPACE is based, for the benefit of the communities it serves. This is done through the production of collective, collaborative and participatory artworks in and for the public domain linked to teaching and research within the university.
2002. The CATCH (Fanshawe Avenue/Longbridge Road roundabout, Barking, London)
Where are you going, and what do you wish?
The old moon asked the three.
We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we…’
Anon
The Catch is a gateway public artwork for Barking town centre designed by artist Loraine Leeson of cSPACE, in collaboration with Anne Thorne Architects Partnership and built by Alloy Fabweld Ltd. It is The theme reflects two key elements of Barking's history - the fishing industry and the area's Saxon heritage. Ultimately however The Catch is an image for the future – its possibilities grounded in the area's history and experience as the basis upon which the potential of its young people may be realised.
The artwork represents two nets being cast upwards and outwards with the force of a wave. Their structure derives from Celtic knotwork, similar to that found on the stonework in the ruins of Barking Abbey and is constructed from rolled aluminium, the ‘nets of silver’ of the rhyme. Fish, designed to move with the wind, appear to leap from the net. One of the intentions of the artwork is to support and inspire children and young people of the area in their ideas and wishes for the future, reflecting the borough’s own strategy for regeneration.
A local junior school close to the site was involved and all 360 children participated through making a fish of their own, accompanied by a wish for the future of their community. Their work appears on The Catch website through which information about the artwork and its references may also be accessed. Artist Loraine Leeson involved graduate students from the University of East London, together with young people from a sixth form college to help run the workshops. All also participated in a mentoring programme designed to offer a cascade of skills and experience from the arts organisation to the students and young people, and thereby to the children, each providing support and role models to their younger counterparts. The University hosted an exhibition at its Docklands campus in February 2003 where all the work produced in connection with the project was displayed.
2000–ongoing. CASCADE. A programme of activities begun by Loraine Leeson in 2000 that has created placements and mentoring around arts projects in the community, involving children, young people and university graduates. The current programme partners the University of East London with Newham College of Further Education and an East London School through ideas of what how the proposed London Olympics may affect the local environment.
1999–ongoing. VOLCO. VOLCO is a Virtual Online Co-Operative environment, an evolving virtual planet being constructed by children co-operating across the world. Hundreds of young people are creating the Volcan archives through interaction with others of different cultures and life experiences. The result is a growing and increasingly complex virtual society out of the imaginations of children. This is being developed into a transferable educational resource capable of supporting a wide range of subjects in the school curriculum.
The Art of Change was a visual arts organisation founded in 1992 by its co-directors Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn. It built on the work of the Docklands Community Poster Project, producing work with communities of interest for the public domain. The Art of Change practice centred on issues of change - particularly the transformation of the urban environment and its impact upon quality of life and cultural identity, and was realised through a series of discrete projects around this theme. These included work with young people, initiatives around issues of sustainability, and public artworks based on community consultation. Digital technologies increasingly underpinned the work, initially through digital imaging, then through exploration of the communications opportunities of the Internet. This aspect of the practice together with the education work later became the basis of The cSPACE Trust, founded by Loraine Leeson in 2002.
Art of Change projects led by Loraine Leeson included the following:
1992. West Meets East. 16 ft x 12 ft photo-mural and touring exhibition. Produced with teenage Bengali girls from Bow, East London. The project explored the theme of their experience of living in two cultures.
1993–94. Celebrating the Difference. Digital montage displayed as a 16 ft x 12 ft photomural. Produced with pupils from the Isle of Dogs, East London. Working with a group of culturally mixed teenagers, the project dealt with issues of culture and identity, commonality and difference in an inner city area fraught with racial tension.
1994. Between Family Lines. Four-projector tape slide production and exhibition made with women from five cultures who had suffered under fundamentalism or orthodoxy. Collaboration with Karen Merkel of Cultural Partnerships and Women Against Fundamentalism, who used the materials for their education and support work. Video version available from Concorde Educational.
1995–96. Awakenings, after Stanley Spencer's Resurrection . Commission by the Tate Gallery and exhibited at Millbank site 1995/6. Digital montage as a 13 ft x 7 ft Cibachrome print produced with pupils from an East London school. The young people explored works in the Tate's collection, deconstructing what was historically, culturally, class and gender specific, and then 'changed places' with the artist to re-make the work about themselves and their lives. Collaboration with artist Peter Dunn.
1998–99. I.D. Commission by the Tate Gallery, Millbank to create a website project taking inspiration from the Tate’s John Singer Sargent exhibition. The work was undertaken with two secondary schools in London Borough of Tower Hamlets ( www.cspace.org.uk/id )
The Docklands Community Poster Project was founded in 1981 by Loraine Leeson in collaboration with artist Peter Dunn in response to the concerns of East London communities over an extensive proposed re-development programme. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher designated the land surrounding the working docks, from St Katherine's Dock east of Tower Bridge downriver to the Royal Docks, as an Urban Development Corporation. This effectively removed local control from an area crossing five London boroughs, with the aim of transferring it into private ownership. However, this land, which became known as the London Docklands, not only incorporated docks and warehouses, but was also home and workplace to 56,000 people. Historically, up to this time the communities of East London had been poor but politically active. They were not against development, they just wanted it to also meet their own needs. A struggle ensued…
Loraine and Peter were approached by the trades council to produce a poster alerting local people to what was to come. Following a period of consultation with tenants and action groups, however, it soon became clear that the proposed poster was not enough. Posters were indeed wanted, but ‘large ones’ to match the scale of the proposals - also design work to help with individual campaigns, documentation of the area before it changed and a record of each battle as it was fought. In addition, there was a need for easily accessible information that examined key issues such as housing and specific development sites in more depth.
They raised income and set up the Docklands Community Poster Project as a community co-op involving representatives of each Docklands area. This met regularly to report on local developments, agree issues to be represented and consider the audience that the art and design should serve. This fell into four main categories. Photo-murals were produced as large billboard-size images offering an overview of the situation to local residents. A graphic designer was employed to support local campaigns. Documentation was made of events as they happened, and a series of exhibitions was produced which examined the issues in more depth.
The project lasted throughout the eighties. Eight photo-mural sites were built which displayed changing photo-montage images dealing with the political situation and then with more specific issues such as housing and the Canary Wharf development. Many events were organised in collaboration with the Joint Docklands Action Group and other community based organisations. The most notable of these was perhaps the Peoples Armadas to parliament where on three occasions thousands of people took to the river to present the People’s Charter for Docklands to politicians in an event that was both serious protest and community festival. Finally the People’s Roadshow, a culmination of the exhibitions, documentation and photo-murals with expert speakers, toured the country and visited other places in Europe to take the lessons learned by the Docklands communities further afield. An arts project that began as a request for a poster eventually became the cultural arm of an extraordinary campaigning community over a period of ten years.
In 1978 the East London Trades Councils wanted to disseminate information about health issues to the local population in light of the cuts being made to the National Health Service. Having seen the work that artists Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn had created for the campaign to save Bethnal Green Hospital they felt that the arts could be effective in supporting their work. A steering group comprising members of local branches of health workers unions was instigated to work with Loraine and Peter on a series of ‘visual pamphlets’. These were in poster format, but contained more information, and used for display in doctors’ surgeries and other health venues where people spent time waiting.
Eight different posters were produced over a two year period. These were widely distributed within the health sector, and exhibited in ‘Issue – Social Strategies by Women Artists’, curated by Lucy Lippard in 1980 for the ICA, London.
The seventies in Britain saw the first wave of cutbacks in the National Health Service, carried out initially by the Tories, then continued through the 1974 Labour government. As part of this policy, many small hospitals were closed. The Bethnal Green Hospital in East London served the local population as a community hospital valued for its continuity of care and accessibility to local residents. It was still working to capacity and its patients would have nowhere to go if its facilities were withdrawn, except to extend already over-long waiting lists. In 1977, following orders for closure, its staff decided to ‘occupy’ the hospital while a campaign was mounted to safeguard its future.
Artists Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn were approached by the campaign committee to produce a video to make the case for retaining the hospital. The ‘Emergency’ tape was soon followed by a series of campaigning posters and later an exhibition for use in the hospital foyer to place the specific campaign within its wider social and political context. It was through this work that these artists first explored the use of photomontage as an artistic and political tool, which was to become their hallmark. The work was also exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in an exhibition entitled ‘Art for Whom?’ curated by art critic Richard Cork to promote the idea that art could be used as an effective means of supporting social change.
© 2004·05
MA Urban Renewal The course has a strong interdisciplinary emphasis and is designed to equip people at different stages of their careers with the means to reflect more systematically and in greater depth on their own field of practice.
Host Cities, Education, Culture and Regeneration
A conference about the issues facing Olympic Host Cities. View the speaker presentations here
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