A Selfless Art

For the current episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene and I spoke to Griselda Goldsborough about her practice of making and sharing art in hospitals. It’s a conversation full of ideas, enthusiasm and joy.

I first thought about art in hospitals in 1985, when I met the late Anne Peaker, who led an organisation called East Midlands Shape. Anne was a potter who had taught art in a London prison before establishing Shape to support the arts in all kinds of institutions—day centres, special schools and hospitals as well as prisons. She became something of a mentor to me then, wise, generous, and supportive. She had a gift for making people believe in themselves and when she stepped back from Shape, she persuaded me to apply for her job over lunch at her Leicestershire home. I did and spent six happy, rewarding years in that role. Anne, meanwhile, returned to the issue of art in prisons, researching, with Dr Jill Vincent, a landmark study for Loughborough University and campaigning to establish the work. The National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance is the descendant of her efforts, and it honours her memory in an annual lecture. Anne Peaker died too young but having made a profound mark on many people’s lives.

It was Anne who first helped me see the difference between art in hospitals and art therapy I mention in the conversation with Griselda. I had asked her why the work of East Midlands Shape was not art therapy. She told me that art therapists work with the part of the person that is ill or injured, whereas a community artist works with the person as a whole. It was a simple distinction, and though I have learned much since then to enlarge and enrich it, it remains true and useful, I think. And it speaks to the more general question of how artists see the people they work with. Do I focus on the other person’s problems (whatever I imagine them to be) or do I meet them on an equal footing, without prejudice or assumptions? Do I believe it’s my job somehow to make them better or rather to accompany them in a process from which we will each draw the benefits we need?

I had worked for many years as a community artist before I heard the term ‘saviour complex‘, describing a mental attitude in which a wish to help others becomes misguided, burdensome and even dangerous because it is actually concerned with the ‘saviour’s’ needs and interests. When I heard the term, I had to recognise my own mistakes in that respect, but I think Anne’s wisdom helped me avoid some of the dangers. In particular, I was always committed to working with the whole person; I never wanted to be a therapist.

Of course, arts and co-creation practice is defined in subtle shades, not rigid boundaries. It’s working in the borderlands that makes this a restless art. But policymakers do not much welcome ambiguity. They rarely have experience of arts practice or sometimes of how the people they make policy for actually live. And their profession encourages a view of the world divided between those in need of saving and those whose task it is to save. That is, I think, central to why things have gone awry in participatory arts practice and cultural policy. The ideas I’m trying to organise under the metaphor of a selfless art are my response to that because, whatever saviours are, they are never selfless: that is the problem.