Lucy: Most of us, in one way or another, we’re living with the impact of addiction, poor mental health, and trauma on our lives. But in no time at all, we ended up looking forward to coming to the community centre every Wednesday night, and we opened up about some of the most painful parts of our lives, and to be quite honest, I wasn’t expecting this project to impact us in the way that it has.
Katy: What happens when you unleash the collective power of diverse communities, partners, research and creativity. How can we unlock innovation across communities to build a stronger, fairer UK?
Welcome to the Creative Communities Podcast, a series platforming extraordinary examples of research partnerships using art, culture and creativity to tackle the big opportunities and challenges facing our country today.
My name is Professor Katy Shaw and I’m Director of the AHRC Creative Communities programme, a national project exploring the potential of culture and cross-sector co-creation to deliver inclusive innovation in the devolved contexts of our four nations.
In this new series, we’ll embark on a journey across the UK and hear from communities who are using their unique talents and expertise to take on tomorrow.
We’ll explore how creativity and cultural research can empower us to build a stronger, more resilient UK. Across the series, we’ll hear five stories of change, one from each of our Community Innovation Practitioners, or CIPs for short. They’re based in Liverpool, Swansea, Glasgow, Belfast, London, and Portrush, and they’ll show us how cultural research and development is helping to level up their communities.
Each episode is packed with local voices, practical insights, and solutions that you can use to inspire and create change and co-creation in your own community.
In this episode, we’re in Belfast with Áine, whose creative methodology and experience-led facilitation is delivering photography, drama, and community co-creation to help tackle substance abuse and break cycles of silence around complex issues health issues.
Singer: Early morning city market,
Streets uneasy in the dark,
Nothing stirring, nothing moving
Markets men are early at their work, in the morning air
Participant: I am proud. I will always love the Market.
Participant: I am a kind and loving friend. I will always be a Market man. I am community orientated. I will always be proud of my background.
Participant: I am resilient. I will see the Market flourish.
Áine: Hello, I’m Áine Brady, Community Innovation Practitioner and Local Coordinator at Queen’s Communities and Place in Queen’s University, Belfast.
In this episode of the Creative Communities Podcast, join me where I live and work in a historic, working-class, inner-city community in Belfast called the Market. It’s where we’ll explore the power of this Creative Community in dealing with complex health issues it faces, like addiction and trauma, we’ll also look at its potential to develop agency in the midst of such challenges and how cross-sector partnerships, working together in a place-based way can help propel this process.
For over a year, I’ve been working as a Creative Communities Community Innovation Practitioner in partnership with the Market Development Association, or MDA for short, a local community development organisation that sits in the heart of The Market area of Belfast, and Pangur Bán, a local arts group set up by the community to promote working-class culture and art.
Together we’ve worked together with creative methods to reduce stigma around addiction and trauma in community life, and to break the harmful cycles of silence that perpetuate both. The result of our co-creation is the Tapestry project, a photographic project created by our residents here in The Market.
Since 2021, The Market has had a strategic partnership with Queen’s Communities and Place, which sits within Queen’s University Belfast. My role as a Community Innovation Practitioner, or CIP for short, has given us the opportunity to expand on this partnership, using AHRC Creative Communities funding to deliver on the Tapestry project, combining the expertise of market people, local workers, and the and researchers to co-create, drive innovation and improve life outcomes.
Our Tapestry project looks at all aspects of their life in the community, built around our people’s chosen themes of loss, pride, strength, struggle, and home. Our project was completed in a little over six months and brought market residents, community workers, artists and researchers together on a weekly basis to take part in arts activities like poetry and drama, and to help start unpacking deeply rooted issues of community trauma and addiction.
So, there’s about two and a half thousand people who call The Market home and I’m one of them. I was born and raised in this community, and I still live here alongside most of my family and friends. And it’s where I raised my little four-year-old daughter, Banbha. It’s a place that displays the very best of working-class life. Hard work, ingenuity, solidarity, warmth and humour. The people here are the very best.
Clip: I tell you how nobly they were. It’s a true scene in this morning years ago. You couldn’t, they wouldn’t let you down in peace. Oh no. If you were down in these wee houses, which used to hold, when you did down the hills, some of the greatest wakes in Ireland, that happens, they kept up the old Irish tradition.
There was more people around your bed when you were down. It wasn’t good habits. You never died in peace. Nice. Talking to bring you back to life or something.
Áine: But the Market’s also a place that’s suffered and endured. Working class districts overwhelmingly bore the brunt of the thirty-year conflict in the North of Ireland, and therefore, sadly, that means our people also carry the burden of legacy issues associated with it as well. Poverty, addiction, lower life expectancy and poor mental health are all markers of life in my community and others like it in Belfast. But we’re a community that’s highly organised and determined to do something about it.
The Market’s a little over two hundred years old. It sits in Belfast city centre, just a 5-minute dander away from City Hall. It’s always been working class and many of the families living here today have roots in the community going back almost a century. Once a hub of housing, business, and industry, with a strong local economy, from the 1970s onwards this changed drastically, and many of the industries started to close. Fionntan Hargey is a local community worker and Director in the MDA. He explains the history of The Market during this time.
Fionntan: I suppose the problem was, as it progressed into the twentieth century, that whole mixed use notion of a city started to become more monochrome, and I suppose that really kicked the life out of the area in terms of taking all those industries out, all the jobs connected with that, and then in conjunction with that process, you would have had the outbreak of the conflict in 1969.
Singer: Build your ring roads, high rise building,
Glass and concrete up to the sky.
Markets men don’t want to know them, I was born down here and here I’ll die.
Markets are residential towns.
Áine: From this moment on, life in The Market and across the North of Ireland would change forever.
A community with strong republican ties, during this time the historic Market was levelled and redesigned by British Security Services, working in tandem with local planners in what became known as defensive planning. This would have catastrophic consequences for the social and economic fortunes of the local community.
Fionntan: They ensured that the area could be marginalised and contained, as and when it was felt necessary for security reasons. The problem was that culture and logic of defensive planning carried on into the peace process.
Áine: In the years since the peace process, billions of pounds worth of investment poured into the North. Yet The Market, and communities like it, have faced an ever growing, and what sometimes feels like an insurmountable problem, with poverty and health inequality.
Fionntan: What the community seen from all of that investment was gates, walls and fences, forever marginalising you from all those connections. And I suppose if you create that type of barrier, on one side of a barrier, you’re going to get stagnation, and I suppose that has, then, wider health impacts in a community like The Market.
So, in one sense the community is sacrificial, where the disbenefits of urban development are disproportionately concentrated in that area, and as a result of that, the same with all the, disbenefits of ill health. So, in the 2006 Men’s Health report, for instance, in the area, it demonstrated that the average life expectancy for a man on The Market was fifty-seven years old.
Áine: And amongst the disbenefits of ill health, that Fionntan speaks about are substance use and trauma. Since the 2000s, there has been an explosion in drug use in my community and underlying this are huge levels of unresolved community trauma from decades of war and violence.
Claire-Louise Mooney is chair at Pangur Bán, a local arts group based in The Market and a partner for our project.
They were set up by market residents around ten years ago to promote working-class culture and art within the community. She explains the health inequalities that exist.
Claire: We have a situation where there’s now massive levels of mental health issues. There’s huge levels of addiction, and I mean, I see it every day as I look out my window, and that’s all, because we’re an inner-city community and people say, well, you’re inner city, you should expect things like this. Absolutely not.
And it’s awful to look about, but it’s people years ago who you looked up to have now been crippled by addiction issues and crippled by mental health issues. It’s very hard to watch, especially coming from the community, growing up in the community, you’ve definitely seen a definite decline in the area.
Áine: The prevalence of drugs has also coincided with a sharp rise in the number of local deaths caused by overdose and suicide. In a community that’s small and tightly connected, the impacts of this are devastating on local families. And yet, we never speak about it, not in any meaningful sense anyway. Silence begets silence, and the cycle of pain, self-medicating, and loss continues.
With the help of the AHRC, our Community Innovation Practitioner research sought to meet these challenges head on. I wanted to break this cycle and turn the notion of a standard substance use intervention programme on its head through partnership, research and art to create an authentic grassroots intervention.
Participants: I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the dark. I’m scared of failure. I’m scared the world is polarising. I’m scared of what others think. I’m scared of strangers. I’m scared of drugs. I’m scared of not knowing what to write. I’m scared I’m not good enough. I’m scared of death. I’m scared of life.
So, guys, what did you think of that?
That’s emotional. That is emotional….
Áine: So, the origins of our Tapestry project can actually be found about a year before the project kicked off, and well before we’d even applied for the money to fund it. We have a Health Action group in the Market that meets about once a month to identify issues, plan research and create programmes.
At one of these meetings, we talked about the impact of generational trauma and addiction on our people, and what we could do collectively to overcome these challenges. Our residents at the meeting suggested we use arts to engage people in a community conversation and break the culture of silence and stigma.
And so, we got to work and started planning with community workers and local residents’ ways to make this happen. In September 2023, with funding secured, I took on the role of the Community Innovation Practitioner and kicked off our Creative Communities project.
So, we threw the net wide open and invited all market residents to take part, no matter age or gender, in a photography project that would chronicle life in the Market.
We were really honest in telling people that the project would be using the arts to explore the legacy of the conflict, community trauma, and substance use in the area. We recruited seventeen people, eleven adults and seven young people, who all lived in The Market. The adult group was quite varied, with our youngest member being in her twenties and our oldest in her seventies, and the youth group were all young women between fourteen and eighteen.
The groups met separately in the local community centre, and we recruited Matt Faris, an amazing artist facilitator with a working-class background, who ran the sessions with me. Matt already had a relationship with the community. He’d helped facilitate an arts project for the MDA a few years before, and the people who took part loved his easy-going facilitation style, his warmth and compassion.
Over six months, me and Matt met the groups twice a week and we explored life in the community using a series of arts-based methodologies like poetry, drama, map making and of course photography. We worked with them for over six months and over that time the group grew closer and began to open up about their personal experiences of trauma and addiction.
They worked together to create a photography exhibition that would eventually be showcased in Belfast City Centre and which we all know now as the Tapestry Project.
So, let’s hear from some of them participants, will we? Let’s sit down with John from our adults’ group.
John: My name’s John. I’m thirty-seven years of age. Grew up, born and raised in the Market area.
Áine: And Molly from our young people’s group.
Molly: My name’s Molly, I’m seventeen years of age, and I’m from the Market as well.
Áine: I wanted to know what it was like for them, growing up in the Market.
John: Growing up round here, I had a really good upbringing, had a good family and stuff, and I had a happy, happy childhood. The Market is a great place, didn’t have much back then, but we had what we had, and we made do of it. It was a great area, and I’m always proud to say that I’m from the Market area.
Molly: Yeah, I think we’re all like that.
Alex: See, to be honest, there wasn’t much when you were growing up either, but you had nothing to worry about. You had no problems. You were just always worried about getting out with your friends. That’s all you really cared about, and it was just good. They actually say, like, no, I’m scared about this, I’m scared about that. Like, yeah, there was nothing you were ever scared about.
Áine: I always say it’s like a wee village in the inner city.
So, to give people an idea, me and John grew up together. Went to school together from nursery all our days, John. We’re the same age. Our mummies and daddies were good friends. Our daddies go way, way back, and we’re very close. And then, Molly’s mummy, Aisling, was the same age as me and John, she and I were like childhood best friends and us three grew up together.
I remember Molly being born, I remember her mummy telling me she was pregnant, and now I’m taking her in groups for projects, I guess. So, our lives are so intertwined in the Market and there’s a million connections between families and right across the community and even us three around this table now, it just shows you.
John: You’re always connected in some way. Even in the groups, when you do the groups, there’s always a family member, a cousin, or somebody goes with somebody’s family member. And then when something happens in the area, everyone pulls together as well, which is good about it. If a death or something, or something bad happens, they all pull together.
Áine: When I first came, or the MDA first came, to try to recruit you’s, what did you actually think about it at the start? What made you come through the door on the first night?
Molly: See, to be honest, I was like, no, no, I just, I don’t know. I just, all I cared about was being in bed, being in the house. Didn’t want to really do anything, and then see, when I actually came out and I took part in the group, see, once I heard that it was about, like, trauma and stuff, and just all stuff like that, what it was based on, obviously, because we’ve all been through it.
Every single one of us has been through it. I was just getting more interested in it, and I was like, this seems like something that I could be part of, and something that I would enjoy being part of, and now, now we are. We’re here.
John: And for myself, I got asked to be part of it then when I got asked, I felt very privileged, and I went till the first night. The love was unbelievable. But as the weeks went on, as Molly said also, I got more involved. If I opened up about something, as we say, we all have pasts, I would have opened up about addiction or about trauma or whatever, and then someone else would open up about it, and somebody else.
So, it was good to get things out from your chest, and letting more people know about it, and then, other people were opening up as well. What I loved about it, every week it was something different every week. So, when you were going, you didn’t know what you were getting into. Like, one we were doing a bit of acting drama, the other one we were doing photos, brought back memories of, like, as I’m in recovery from gambling and drugs, I was able to show my wee coin for my recovery, five-year recovery coin. Photos of my wee nephew who I lost. So, your emotions, you were up and down and, that’s what I loved about that.
Molly: It was good to get stuff out like that you thought that you wouldn’t have been able to ever get out, do you know what I mean?
There was times where I went to the group and Matt was talking about like, opening up and I was sitting in the corner and I was like, no, no, definitely not. But see, the more we spoke, the more comfortable I got. And the more like, we were talking about new topics and new things and then, all of a sudden, I was like, I was just opening up and telling everyone everything about my life because I felt comfortable with it.
I felt like these people were actually listening, and they were opening up about their lives as well, so I wasn’t the only one, it just made me feel comfortable, do you know what I mean?
John: You also got to learn about yourself. I learned a lot about myself through getting involved in the MDA, where people commenting to you, saying how well you’re doing, or how well you are, or you could be a part of this or part of that, and I never had that, so that there being told that there – it gives me more confidence in myself, more self-respect for myself, love and care for myself. And it did, it helped me in a big, big way. I’m very thankful for getting involved in it.
Participants: I want to become a better person. I want to get into uni. I want to be more productive. I want to be less stressed. I want to pass my A Levels. I want money. I want to travel all over, around the world. I want to make people proud. I want to change the world around me with art.
Áine: I always think there’s something so powerful when anyone who’s going through a hard time or real adversity in their life, when they feel like everything’s falling apart, I’m a great believer that you have to get up and take part, build, create and connect.
It’s therapeutic, if you feel like you’re at the worst moment in your life or you’ve come through real struggle, being part of a group and connected to a group. It’s a really powerful thing. I think it’s healing, but it also gives you a sense of self-worth, of belief, identity, and it builds agency. This project is the building blocks to start conversations in the community.
John: You also got the, where people in the area, as we say, you would see them in the street and say hi or hello and goodbye. That’s about it, so, when you got interacting with other members from the area, who you know all your life and stuff, even some members who’s not from the area, who’s now been living there for years, and you got to know a bit about their background, about them as well.
And then, when we interacted with the younger ones, you learned a lot from the younger group also.
Participants: I want to help my siblings as much as I can. I want to achieve in life. I want to be more spontaneous. I want to make my family proud. I want a happy future. I want to feel more solidarity. I want to make my family happier. I want my dad to get released.
John: You could have been feeling down, and you come out feeling you’d face the world because you got everything off your chest. Also brought back memories to show the person where I was and who I was, to the person where I am now and who I am now, and what’s ahead of me.
Alex: And the journey you’ve made from that.
John: Yeah, big transition. And it’s a positive one, it’s just, it keeps going up and up and up.
Molly: It just builds your confidence as well. See, before I ever done this script, I wouldn’t have been able to speak in front of a camera. I wouldn’t have been able to speak the way I’m speaking to you’s now. I seen my friends when they took out their phone and the camera, I was automatically like, putting my hand up, hiding my face, like, I was just scared to be seen anywhere, you know what I mean?
And see now, you, Áine, asked I’m going to get you to do a sweet video for us and I was, I’m shaking like a leaf. I was like, no, no I’m not doing that.
Áine: My community chose to address the problems of legacy, trauma and substance use through creative methods because we think these create a solid bedrock on which to build and sustain connections.
And we firmly believe that building strong connections to each other, our land, to knowledge, and culture, and economics provides the best way possible to unroot the impacts of trauma, colonialism and legacy in our community, and they address the complex health and economic issues they’ve created.
And when you underpin these creative methods with research, as we’ve done with the Tapestry Project, what you begin to do is create an evidence base and a blueprint that other communities experiencing similar problems can pick up and adapt to their local context, to do the same for their people.
The Market isn’t a stranger to creativity and the arts. In 2016, Pangur Bán and the MDA worked on an extensive drama project, to reinvigorate the area whilst delivering community activism as part of the Easter Raising Centenary. The 1916 Project explored the values contained in the Easter Proclamation, and why these were still relevant to the community today. By linking back to the modern day, it wasn’t a nostalgia project, but rather one rooted in the community’s current context and experiences.
What followed was a play devised, written and starring local residents and it was a huge success. The 1916 Project sparked a new wave of community activists taking part in MDA work and was the first time a community wide conversation had taken place about the conflict and its impact on our people. The success of this project convinced residents and community workers that the best way to address substance use and trauma in the community was through creative methods, and this is the origins of our Creative Communities project. Fionntan and Claire-Louise explained why this is such a good approach.
Fionntan: So, if you were to try and do it as a public meeting or some type of deliberation or discussion around an issue related to the conflict, an issue related to drugs and addiction issues, people can very quickly get their backs up or can get defensive, and at times they can get argumentative around it. If it’s done through drama, it allows people to step out of their own skin and step into somebody else’s shoes, see it from a different perspective, and tease out the wider context, the wider issues, and tackle those issues rather than, I suppose, individualising it to the degree where it encourages dialogue rather than division.
Claire: We had a wealth of different people across different ages, across different genders, all coming from the area. You know, art can be like people getting together and standing up and sharing stories.
Áine: What I’ve seen with all the art forms used by the community is that it allows people to voice their opinions about something without having to put themselves front and centre. So, they can write a poem about an issue, or they can insert an opinion via this character they’re playing. So, it’s not about them and it makes it easier for people to open up.
This is how we use art as a tool for community development. It allows issues of trauma and legacy to be put on the table, but it also gives so much back. When people develop a sense of agency and advocacy, it means they can also advocate for themselves and their community.
We use the term empowerment so much. I know it feels worn out, but we do see this in real time, using artistic methods. We’ve seen time and time again, creativity given back abundantly in terms of community development potential.
Fionntan: I suppose it’s the power of the arts as well, and creativity, if you look at the community. There’s history of marginalisation and also stigmatisation, like any inner-city working-class community, most media narratives are negative around the community.
Áine: Over the six-month period that Matt and I worked with the participants on the tapestry project, we saw a massive change in the dynamic both within and between the adult and young people’s groups. You may be surprised to learn that Matt and I never once mentioned the words legacy, trauma or addiction when facilitating the groups.
We anchored everything around exploring what life is like to be working class and from the Market. To be honest, the really important work of bringing these hard to talk about issues to the surface of opening up, well that was led entirely by our participants. The creative methods we used and the time we allowed for the project to embed and run gave people the space and safety to form relationships, build trust, develop a group identity and share their stories.
Activities like asking people to create a map of their lives, to bring in an object that is meaningful to them, to create a poem around it, to come up with words that describe the community, and create a short play – all of these facilitated the process of building connections and breaking stigma and silence. And eventually, after a few weeks in the group, people were feeling comfortable enough to talk openly about some of the most uncomfortable parts of life in our community.
Here’s Molly. She says this was her favourite activity.
Molly: I liked the wee one where we had to bring something special. ‘Cause see, to be honest, anyone could have brung anything. But to bring something that just meant the most to them, and you obviously had to tell your story on it. So, I brung a necklace that my friend Lucy, who actually does this group, she got me, has a photo of my mummy on it. And I brung it because it just means so much to me because obviously my Mummy’s not here no more and I can just always wear it and bring her wherever I wanna bring her with me, which just means so much to me. And people were bringing like their auntie’s mass cards and stuff like that, or something that a family member who they’ve lost had give them. And it just, it means so much.
Do you know what I mean? Like someone had brung a card from that their daddy had wrote to them who, like, they don’t see any more and stuff. Like it’s sad, but you get to open up about it and say how you feel about it, and it just makes you feel ten times better, it really does.
Áine: I remember that night, Molly, it was like, it was a really powerful night, but I remember, because it was a real turning point in the young people’s group, from like, up until that point, we’d be having a laugh, we’d be touching on the light stuff.
Molly: I think that’s when I really was like, I like this group, you know what I mean? Because see, that night when I went home, I had actually said to my granny, the group was really good tonight, like, I, my granny would have just been like, oh she’s away to another group because it was always just like, the youth club I was going to, to do groups, and I never would have thought that I’d have been doing a group in the MDA, do you know what I mean?
And when I had actually taken part in it, I was like, God only knows what this’ll be about, what we’ll be doing, and then I actually did start going home and I was like, that group was really good. ‘Cause it actually brings out so much in you, you could be going, and you could be the saddest person ever, and you’d be coming out just feeling so much better because everything that you had sitting on the tip of your tongue, you got to get it out.
Áine: Another one of those activities was taking photos, which would later go into the Tapestry show at the exhibition. We’d give each participant a disposable camera and set them a weekly photography challenge outside of our sessions.
Our participants came up with five themes around Market life. Loss, Hope, Pride, Resilience and Struggle, and these form the basis of the photos that they took. This creative challenge encouraged them to explore community life in their own time and see things about The Market that they perhaps hadn’t noticed before.
Here’s Molly.
Molly: I loved it. I think that it actually, it brung out so much emotions. It’s just amazing to see taking photos of the waste ground and stuff, knowing in a couple years time that that’s going to be something different, and we can have something to look back on. To say like we were taking the photos, and we were talking about that when that was the waste ground, and the convent as well. Like, it’s all gonna change it’s not gonna be the same but we can say that we were all doing a wee group about that when it was the waste ground and the convent and –
John: Even my wee, the wee five-year coin for in recovery of gambling. I showed Matt at one day in the community centre where we’re trying to get the proper photograph dimension thing and he’s seen it, and obviously it’s just a photo of a coin, but that Matt’s seen it in a different perspective to me and then when it was put up and on show it shows me where, like, that’s my five year recovery coin from being in recovery, so…
Molly: Because you probably didn’t take as much pride in it until everybody else was praising you for it.
John: So, people were able to see it and see Gamblers Anonymous, like, the fee on it for the five, and when people spoke about it or asked, It’s John Bassett’s, it’s his recovery coin.
So, as Molly says, Matt always seen it in a different way from what I would have seen, or we would have seen. And the wee photograph of my wee mum with her boxing, when you said that, you wanted that printed out Áine, like it meant the world to me, so it did.
Molly: People are probably thinking, why is she taking photos of the sky? It could mean to you, like, oh look, it’s just a lovely day, or like, it could mean something different to John, but to me, I’m like, that’s my mummy, do you know what I mean?
BBC News: An exhibition with a difference. It’s not just about viewing, it’s about healing, using art to help everyone to talk.
Áine: After six months of taking part in weekly sessions and capturing photos in their own time, our participants met on a sunny April evening in a city centre arts venue called Two Royal Avenue to launch their photography exhibition, which they are called ‘The Market: A People’s Tapestry’, with the tagline ‘Sharing Stories, Breaking Cycles, Building Connections’.
The group decided on that name because the storytelling and intergenerational parts of our project made them realise that, in its two-hundred-year history, the Market is made up of countless smaller stories of families and residents that have woven together like little threads to create the story of our community as a whole.
Seamus: I would just like to thank everyone for coming out today. It’s an absolutely fantastic turnout. There’s been a lot of work put into this exhibition, and it’s an honour for us and for everybody to see so many people through the door tonight and again, I hope you all have a good time.
Áine: The opening night was amazing. Over two hundred people filled the venue to view the photographs, watch a spoken word performance by our participants and listen to their experiences. We included lines from participant poems throughout the exhibition too, to add context to the photos and bring them to life even more.
We have photos that represented the old Market and the impact of the conflict on community life, photographs of loved ones lost through suicide and addiction, photos that represented the solidarity of our people, and photos of the vibrant nature of community activism and the agency within the neighbourhood. It was an emotional and powerful night that resonated around the district for weeks.
Community Voices: We’ve been able to just bring the Market together, look at all the bad things that’s happening to the Market, but then we’ve been able to come out the other side and produce something like this, something amazing, something brilliant.
Community Voices: Keeping alive the characters and the stories within the community because, if we don’t keep them alive, they’re going to be lost, so why not continue passing them down to generation, generation?
Áine: I have to be honest here, I believe massively in the positive role art and culture can play in people’s lives.
But as a Market woman I don’t always have time for how heavily stratified the culture and arts sector in the North is around social class. After the Good Friday Agreement in the mid-nineties, there was an influx of peace money from the European Union into the North of Ireland, and a lot of this was accessed by the arts sector.
The thinking was, of course, that art and culture could be used as a tool to end the sectarian divide, and to this day, peace money continues to come into the North, and arts groups continue to access it. And to be honest, I’ve no great problem with this. The problem for me is that projects like this are always directed at working class communities, as if these are the only places in our society where sectarianism and bigotry exist.
It puts the blame for division onto our most vulnerable people, rather than onto the structural issues that actually caused it in the first place, and how this has manifested itself in real life is largely middle-class arts organisations apply for money to run projects in working-class communities without ever really speaking to those communities. Then, when they secure their money, they land at the door of community organisations, like the MDA, expecting to be met with open arms, when actually we just view their attitude as being no better than colonisers coming in to civilise the natives.
I don’t dispute many of these people are probably well meaning, but their undercurrent remains the same. Working-class communities are a problem to be solved by middle-class groups and processes. In the Market, we were determined not to repeat these same tropes in our project. Having me embedded as the researcher and Matt as our artist facilitator was fundamental in achieving this.
Matt is working class. He has a strong identity in this and a critical awareness of the intersections between social class and art. This was so important for us, to have someone from a similar background who could understand the struggles of our people, identify with their strengths, and who understood the importance of building agency in the face of their challenges. It also helps that as a person, he is the embodiment of warmth and compassion.
Here’s Matt talking at the tapestry project opening night.
Matt: Wow. To say I feel emotional is an understatement. So, way back when it was a dark winter night, November, we met up, we talked about the project. Suddenly we were delivering it, and now we’ve got this incredible exhibition and it’s been a whirlwind. It’s been an absolute privilege as an artist to work on this and to go on a journey alongside all the residents that took part in this.
We’ve used drama, we’ve used written words, photography, we’ve created maps, we’ve told stories, we’ve shared, and I really believe that all of those different creative outlets have meant that people have been able to express themselves. They’ve had a voice, they felt heard, they shared stories, they’ve learned about each other.
They’ve developed these incredible relationships where it was so supportive, there was this trust. There was a very unique sense of humour, but there was that whole thing of diving into the very darkest places, coming together, and then working out ways of navigating through that. So, we’ve got these photographs here, but there is so much – this is almost like a tip of the iceberg, and there is so much else that has been explored and experienced by the participants.
Áine: Now let’s hear from Lucy, one of the young women from our youth group. Here she is with an impassioned speech about her experiences of the creative world.
Lucy: I think it’s also fair to say as well, that even though most of us, in one way or another, we’re living with the impact of addiction, poor mental health, and trauma on our lives, we would never in a million years have spoken about it this openly to one another, let alone anyone else in the Market. It’s something we’ve just carried around without ever really speaking about it, but in no time at all, we ended up looking forward to coming to the community centre every Wednesday night. We’d done things like poetry that felt really weird at first, but then we ended up loving it. We laughed a lot, and we opened up about some of the most painful parts of our lives, and to be quite honest, I wasn’t expecting this project to impact us in the way it has.
In a way, we rediscovered the Market, and now we see it in a way that we haven’t before. We’ve seen our people’s hurt, their vulnerabilities, but we’ve also seen our people’s incredible strength, our pride, and our unending solidarity with one another. I for one can say that after taking part in this project, I know that after university, I want to come back here and take part in the work to keep making our community the best it can be. Me even standing here, it’s breaking a generational cycle, and it builds human connection, and we’ve seen this happen in our group.
Áine: Lucy’s emotion on the night of the launch was unexpected, but not surprising to me. I’d just spent over half a year with her and the young women in the group, week in, week out, and could see a huge amount of growth and development in them during that time. As their confidence grew, so too did their ability to be vulnerable with one another and open.
I asked Molly what her family’s reaction was like from her doing the programme and seeing her photos on the launch night.
Molly: It was amazing because, see before going back like, I would have never done stuff like this and my family would have never done stuff like this, and see when my auntie and uncle did come in they were like it was amazing and they were texting me “so proud of you, so proud of you”, like I was getting them texts so much.
Áine: We spoke to some of those that came on the night of the exhibition launch and their reactions were incredibly moving.
Community Voices: They made me feel proud of the Market and really, really self-aware of the community and how much it’s grown.
Community Voices: It made me feel great that the Market community spirit is still alive, and still very active and thriving.
Community Voices: Coming here tonight and watching everybody talk, and everybody participate, it made me feel so proud to come from the Market. I’m so excited for everything in the future, especially for my son and all the kids growing up.
Community Voices: It’s the best night I’ve had in a lifetime.
Áine: So, as you can imagine, a project unpacking the deep-seated issues of legacy, trauma and addiction using the arts and combining it with research, it wasn’t always straightforward.
We had no idea in the beginning what we were all coming together to create. Resources were limited and timelines were tight. I actually feel a bit naive now looking back to all those months ago, when we thought we could finish this project, exhibition and all, within twelve weeks.
I’m grateful that we were given the breathing space by Creative Communities team, for timelines to move and plans to change, because isn’t that what co-creation is about after all? Not having a predetermined outcome for an issue or a project? But instead, there’s an authentic coming together of people to explore, create and innovate.
It would have been unfair on our participants as well to rush the process, to expect them to delve into some of the most painful and private parts of their lives, in a way that was contrived and rushed. I think for me, that’s been one of the key areas of learning. When it comes to using creative methods in this context, I can’t think of another research method that gives as much time, deepness, and participant-researcher connection as this one did.
To have me as the Creative Innovation Practitioner, someone embedded in this community, acting as a researcher, working on a project that is by the people it serves, and facilitators rooted in class politics. proved to be a powerful combination for co-creation, that challenges, complex issues, and the relationships, the creativity, and the learning that came from it as a result has been so enriching. The experience really will stay with me forever.
The Creative Communities programme funding allowed us to take a considerate approach, underpinned by evidence, but also rooted in the lived experience of place. This gave participants the space and safety to speak more openly about community challenges, and the arts-based methods allowed for this to be expressed, offering not only the opportunity to share stories and build connections, but also to empower participants.
And the benefits have been enormous with residents reporting that they feel less alienated in community life, that the project allowed them to open up about their challenges for the first time. All of the young people who took part now say they want to stay living in the community and play an active role in community life.
The MDA has also seen an uplift in the number of residents taking part in their activities and using their services as a result of the project. Programme partners have embraced creative methods in a more holistic way, embedding them across a whole range of health and education programmatic work, rather than as standalone arts programmes.
It’s also created an appetite within Queen’s Communities and Place to do more arts-based research work, recognising the power of creative methods within a scientific, evidence-based framework. Which serves to support, rather than stifle, creativity.
To date, policy around the issues our project explored has viewed working-class communities as a problem to be solved, rather than an asset to be harnessed. It’s a deficit orientated model of policy development that assumes an inherent lack of capability, social and cultural capital, within communities like mine. Our Tapestry project turns notions like these on their head and demonstrates what can happen when policy is directed towards trusting communities to find their own solutions, and then resourcing them properly to get there.
With issues like substance use, trauma, and legacy, there’s no silver bullet. There’s no one intervention that’s going to fully address these issues. We’re not saying that arts and culture will solve everything, but we are saying it’s an important part of the puzzle, and when arts and cultural programmes are actually underpinned by research that is co-created and driven by the communities they’re designed to serve, well, the possibilities are endless. In this type of research, it’s not possible without authentic cross sector partnerships, people coming together in a genuine and committed way with a shared purpose and the backing from institutions like the AHRC to do so.
John: I am in recovery. I will always be a Market man. I will never give up.
Participant: I am Irish. I am proud. I am a granda and love it. I am happy to be living in the Market.
Participant: I am happy. I am strong. I will look forward.
Participant: I am a community activist. I am a daughter, auntie and sister. I am creative. I will see the Market flourish.
Participant: I am a mother, a sister, a daughter. I am a Market woman. I will survive.
Participant: I was born in the Market. I was raised in the Market. I will always tell stories from the area. I will always respect the people.
Participant: I hope I get all I want. I hope to have a good job.
Participant: I am a good sister.
Participant: I want a happy family. I want to be a good person.
Katy: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Creative Communities Podcast.
If you’ve enjoyed this episode of the Creative Communities Podcast, please like, follow and share it with your friends and colleagues. The more we can share these stories of resilience, collaboration and creativity, the more we can empower other communities and cross-sector partners to get involved with research and development and create a more inclusive innovation system for the UK.
You can hear more about the work featured in this episode, get further information about the AHRC Creative Communities programme, and find out how to get involved by heading to our website, creativecommunities.uk. We’ve also included all the links mentioned in the episode in the show notes.
You can like, follow on your favourite podcast platform to be the first to hear all five episodes from series one. We’d love to hear your feedback via the website and watch out for an announcement about CIP round two coming soon.
Because inclusive innovation matters, and that means research that is by all, for all.
The Creative Communities Podcast is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council via the AHRC Creative Communities programme at Northumbria University, with podcast production and training by MIC Media.
Join us for the next episode. We’re going to be in Neath, Port Talbot in South Wales with Alex, exploring how co-creation with a diverse range of community members is breathing new life into heritage sites, how they’re rethinking the stories they tell, and engendering new skills, as well as fostering a sense of belonging.
Episode preview: I think we’ve all been totally surprised at how much heritage was here. We’ve been able to access funding from places like the Lottery Heritage Grant and it’s become something more than we ever, ever dreamed of really. Now it’s well-used with all sorts of groups.
We recorded the volunteer hours. The last year was two thousand hours, so financially, it’s the amount that is saving the council by that small bit of seed investment, to unlock that time.
It isn’t just about money, it’s about people learning skills. There’s so much added value that isn’t financial.
Heritage doesn’t matter if no one’s really going to engage with it, the communities is what’s going to help move that forward, we need to get them involved, so co-production, co-creation, is the key to heritage now. It’s the community who’s in charge, and we’re just the facilitators of that.
Katy: Happy listening!
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