Creativity at home

Background

This is one of a series of five articles showcasing the interim insights of the Learning through the pandemic project.

Common Vision and Creative United have been commissioned by Arts Council England to deliver the project, listening to cultural practitioners and sharing community engagement and participation best practice from the first two years of the pandemic.

Each of these articles are a preview of content which will appear in a final playbook; they include an overview of the learnings under this theme followed by practical resources you can explore. The playbook will expand on this with top-tips, case studies and consideration points

This article was written by Matilda Agace, Senior Research and Engagement Manager, Common Vision.

Learnings

The pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented context in which cultural organisations and practitioners have been unable to interact with their usual communities in conventional settings. As a result, many have adapted so they can reach people at home instead. 

Since the first lockdown in March 2020, cultural organisations and practitioners across the country have been testing hundreds of different analogue and distanced engagement approaches to spark creativity in their communities and keep people feeling connected and supported. Our workshops and interviews with practitioners have shone a spotlight on how creativity and culture can put people’s needs and abilities at the heart of their work – meeting participants where they are. Many of the activities were targeted at those experiencing some form of digital exclusion, or who might not otherwise participate in creativity and culture. Often, they were seen as a way of ‘giving back’ to communities and designed to feel like a gift for the recipient, boosting their mood and sense of belonging. Some of the most popular approaches include:

Creative challenges

Faced with long stretches of time away from in-person activities and learning programmes, many organisations have used creative challenges to inspire accessible creativity and connection. A number of mediums have been used to engage people remotely: from the national TV show Grayson’s Art Club which attracted over a million weekly viewers, to printed physical challenges included in creative packs, and combining in-person activities with digital forms of communication via social media, newsletters and WhatsApp groups. 64 Million Artists’ Create to Connect activities saw daily challenges distributed directly to 6,665 email inboxes, with thousands more accessing challenges via social media and local community connectors. Whilst Staffordshire Libraries and Arts Service’s Crafting Communities project used WhatsApp to post and share artist-developed weekly creative tasks, facilitate mutual support, and signpost people to other resources. Staffordshire Libraries are now using the same model to bring isolated residents back into libraries, through artist micro-residences.

Creative packs

Whilst creative challenges can be light touch and purely digital – as simple as a sentence or two of instructions – creative packs provide people with everything they need to take part in a creative project. Emerging out of a concern that some people lacked the digital or artistic resources they needed to participate in creativity at home, creative packs have shed light on new ways to approach accessibility and inclusion in culture. The scope and variety of creative packs that are being produced through the pandemic is astounding. Sometimes they are used to teach certain skills like photography or ceramics and are accompanied by Zoom tutorials. At other times reaching new or specific audiences is the main goal, such as the Bags of Creativity distributed by eight Local Cultural Education Partnerships to 9,000 children in social care settings; or the approach by The Auxiliary in Middlesbrough which worked with local charities to send out 100 disposable cameras to refugees and vulnerable older residents, and then returned to them postcards of the developed film. Creative packs have been used to create group projects like a town mural, bringing together individual, modular parts. 

Postcards and newspapers

Many cultural organisations and practitioners have been turning to paper distribution to keep communities engaged and connected. Low cost to produce, and easy to distribute safely through post-boxes, these are also versatile in terms of art form. For example, rural touring theatre company New Perspectives’ postcard drama saw six successive postcards to portray a drama through mocked up correspondence between characters. The postcards were mailed out weekly and reached more than 2,200 people in 26 countries worldwide. Other participatory approaches have involved co-creation approaches such as The Turnpike’s Art by Post project which aimed to keep older audiences socially connected; Sheffield Museums’ Museums by Mail project in which volunteers to hand wrote postcards that were then sent to older people in care homes or distributed through luncheon clubs.

Phone calls

Whilst this might seem like an old-fashioned way of connecting with people, phone calls have proved an effective way to deliver creative work, such songs and stories, whilst doubling up as an important welfare checks or form of personal and emotional support to isolated participants. Arts La’Olam’s Telephone Jazz Singalong took jazz song requests by phone and artist Helen Macdonald sang along with participants over the phone. Phone calls have been used to build on or amplify other engagement, for example Southbank Centre’s (B)old programme of singing and poetry workshops for people with dementia was adapted for lockdown through a mix of postal activity packs and telephone calls, and Arts Derbyshire used 121 phone calls as their main method of running their workshops and creativity programmes for housebound older adults.

We’ve seen how these approaches were used in a range of ways and adapted to the specific needs of participants and the art form used. Across many of the examples we found a common emphasis on accessibility and inclusion of audiences or participants who may have otherwise been experiencing exclusion, and the combination of creative activities with more formal mutual aid and signposting to support services. This often has led to new partnerships between cultural organisations and other community organisations to engage marginalised groups – one example is the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art and Birtley Hub Resource Centre’s Art Lab, or Left Coast’s The Upside project with Groundwork, a set of local housing associations and other local community partners.

Resources 

The resources below may help your organisation develop your at-home provision, get new ideas for developing your existing at-home work, and reflect on what the future of these methods are beyond lockdowns. More will be available in the ‘Learning through the pandemic’ playbook, due to be published by Common Vision in early 2022.

64 Million Artists Activity Packs: Alongside 64 Million Artists’ archive of creative challenges, they have produced activity packs with ideas and guidance for creative challenges. The first is designed for community groups, with tips for both offline and online working. The second is for schools and families, with guidance on safeguarding and tips for getting creative at home. 

Fun Palaces: Tiny Revolutions of Connection: Resources and ideas from Fun Palaces for over 25 small creative activities for fun and entertainment during lockdown. These could be useful starting points for designing your own creative challenges and creative packs.

Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance: How creativity and culture are supporting shielding and vulnerable people at home during Covid-19: This report from June 2020 has 50 concise case studies of creative work that happened in the early stages of the pandemic in people’s homes. It also has an overview of challenges and strengths in these organisations’ approaches, and recommendations for leaders in health, social care, local government, and culture.

Creative Arts East: Developing Creative Wellbeing Packs for an Older Audience: This blog draws learning from Creative Arts East’s Creative Wellbeing postal packs. It contains tips for recording audio for CD (which they put in the pack to guide people through activities), and practical guides for making accessible instruction booklets for older audiences. 

The Eden Project’s phone tree template: At the bottom of this page on forging community connections during the pandemic, there is a PDF template with instructions for setting up a phone tree.