Rising East Online

Photofeature

Providing a creative framework for the young

by Phil Cohen

Loraine Leeson, the artist who focuses on East London's urban regeneration, discusses her project to engage young people in a debate about the bid.

View Loraine Leeson's photos: CASCADE 2004/5 >>

Loraine Leeson has been working as an artist in East London for the past 20 years. Her photographic, and now multimedia, work with communities and young people is internationally recognised, with exhibitions in Britain, Europe and North America, and a major retrospective planned for Berlin in 2005.

Her work has often dealt with issues of urban regeneration - for example in relation to the 1980s redevelopment of the London Docklands, and more recently, since she moved to the University of East London's new Docklands campus in 1999, with the Thames Gateway.

She has set up cSPACE as a vehicle for her current work, which includes the VOLCO project in which children construct an imaginary planet world to explore their ideas about identity and difference. She is also currently collaborating with LERI on a number of projects, including a Young Person's Guide to the Royal Docks.

One of her current projects uses the Cascade methodology, to bring together schoolchildren, Newham College of Further Education and UEL students in a project examining the environmental implications of London's bid for the 2012 Olympics, for the people of Stratford and the Lower Lea Valley.

We asked her to explain something about her working method. Did she find it difficult to reconcile the spin surrounding the London 2012 campaign to get Londoners to 'back the bid' with the need to develop young people's capacity for critical thinking. Did she see the project as focusing children's aspirations around the bid, or helping them get some imaginative distance from it?

'I see my work as providing a creative framework within which young people can explore the issues that are important for them. In this sense the Olympics bid is just one possible context.

'We provide them with a certain amount of information, and then take them on site visits to Stratford and the Lower Lea Valley to see for themselves what the environmental issues are. I see my role as an artist in providing an overall aesthetic framework within which collective imagination can be brought to bear on issues of everyday concern.

'In contrast to the kind of community arts work where individuals "do their own thing", the children in the Cascade project produce work which is in dialogue with the bigger picture and with the enhanced skills they are getting through the intermediation of the older student mentors. In some ways this is a legacy project, it is about passing on skills - critical and aesthetic - from one generation to the next. So it is very much about process, but there is an end product too - an exhibition of work which will be shown publicly and which, for example, will be visited by the London 2012 team. This aspect is important since it is where participants see their contributions valued.'

Certainly, as the work illustrated here shows, the young people working with Loraine have developed some inspired interpretations of the proposed Olympics site. In many cases their graphic boldness is matched with both compositional skill and visual imagination, to stunning effect. To illustrate the process of creative transformation we have in some cases included the original site photograph that Loraine took, and which provided the basis for the students' work.

As part of the project, the children have produced a series of postcards addressed to Sebastian Coe, leader of London's bid. Here is one example by a 10-year-old:

 

This plea closely echoes the sentiments of the video letter made recently by a group of teenagers in Newham as part of TELCO's successful campaign to get London Mayor Ken Livingstone and London 2012 to sign up to a charter ensuring that people living in one of the most deprived areas of London will substantially benefit from the Games coming to their area. A group of young people from Newham schools working with Fundamental, a team of community architects, have also produced their own model of the Olympics site, stressing its potential for environmental sustainability.

These projects show that young EastEnders have a proactive role to play in shaping the area's future, not just in relation to the Olympics bid but regeneration issues more widely.

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