Transcription of Creative Story Exchange Conversation, 12 May 2023
Nicholas Perkins and Dionne Freeman
N: Hello Dionne! I thought it would be helpful to have a little chat about the project as a way of recording what our ideas were for it, what we think has come out of it, and what we can learn for our work in the future. But I just wanted to start by asking you, how you come to be doing this work with young people in these different settings – in schools and in hospitals? How long have you done this work for and what’s the particular benefit of engaging with these groups?
D: I’ve been working for about 20 years within the arts, community and education. But my particular area of interest is working with people who can use the arts as an alternative way of communicating things that aren’t always that easy for them to communicate in other ways. It provides a platform, a space to say things and to do things that otherwise are really difficult to do. And I think that's what's really interesting with the arts (and especially in healthcare settings): you can take yourself somewhere else for a short period of time and use that creative activity as a vehicle, making really amazing opportunities to have conversations that you wouldn't have otherwise. And for me as an artist, I think I see things in a really different way from a ‘standard’ point of view. I mean that's probably one of the reasons that you put this project together –to see the pieces in the exhibition in a different way and see how others can interpret them. But yes, for me, that's what's constantly surprising – that you can have a starting point and you can work with a group and the reactions and the ways of seeing and responding are always, always unexpected. It’s a constant feeling of surprise that’s always interesting.
N: I can totally see that. Especially, working with young people. You think a conversation might be going in one way, or that they're doing one kind of project, and then it can suddenly turn into something really different, partly because they're not so inhibited by conventional ideas about what something should be or what ideas should ought to go together. And instead, they make their own, creative connections.
D: Absolutely. And I think as well that when you’re working with young people, making things visual can sometimes help provide the sort of vocabulary that's sometimes tricky to access. When you're working with young people, they and you just have these quick gut reactions to things. They're just always really energetic and honest and they're not inhibited or distracted by other things that happen. As you get older, you carry lots of other experiences with you, whereas working with young people, it’s just that raw honesty that's really interesting to me.
N: Yes, that's been a great part of the project. For me, one of the really surprising things about how this project developed was the way in which this particular medieval story, the story of Horn, wove its way into the work. – The story exists in Middle English (there's a poem called King Horn), but there are other versions of it too. In different ways, and stripped down to its basics, it helped to get people thinking and inspired and then linked up with an actual horn that's going to be in our exhibition: a big medieval horn from York Minster, known as the Horn of Ulf, which we used pictures of, along with other objects and stories. As an academic, I'm interested in how stories exist in different versions and for different audiences; how they appealed across time and were altered. In an English literature department we often want to find nuances and complications when we read them, and they become part of a canon of literature. But you asked me to retell the story of Horn, just into my phone in a few minutes, and I loved the way that the participants responded to it when they listened and started painting or drawing in response. It brings it right back to the idea that it's a really good story, and then each person took something different from it; it spoke to them individually.
D: Yes, each person looked for something that feels familiar, something that you can get that connection with. And I think that the young people really did that when they listened to you retelling the story, and they'd focus on things that you can't predict. And another aspect that really surprised me wasthe need to be able to be heard by another group and I think that was really powerful, being able to create a response, create an interpretation, share that with another group and feel really heard, really respected. With Oxford Spires Academy, one of the young people said that they felt that they were in this position where they were helping the younger children at the hospital school tell their story, and they could see they could see their emotions, and they could see how they were simplifying things from the story. And then they said that they could recognize the more complicated experiences of the older people in the hospital. And they said, ‘yeah, we’re kind of in the middle’. And they really felt that they were able to communicate those different thoughts and feelings from the different groups, even though they never met one another in person.
If we’re still thinking about things that surprised us: Firstly, the confidence of seeing work shared with others and that thing of being heard and being respected, but also the value of having the work started for you. Actually, for that older group in the City Hospital that was really powerful -- being able to go in and say ‘right, could you help this younger person with their artwork?’ If they were faced with a blank canvas or an object they’d probably say ‘no, I don’t want to get involved’. But here, because it’s presented as helping and joining and collaboration, it was much more accessible and appealing. And I think it unlocked a sort of permission for some of the participants to be able to go ‘yeah, I’m gonna do that because I feel like I’m contributing’. I didn’t know that would happen, and it was very interesting.
N: I particularly remember one of the children at Oxfordshire Hospital School looking at a canvas and starting to say ‘Oh well, no, other people have already done this, it belongs to them, and I shouldn’t’, but with a little bit of talking about it and starting off in a small way, he then developed confidence and said ‘Ok, well this is my bit of the story, and I know what I’m going to do with it’. That was great. In medieval stories, they would often start with what we think of as a formula saying, ‘Listen up, old and young, rich and poor, I’m going to tell my story’. And of course, it’s a cliché to say ‘everyone needs to listen,’ but actually using those narratives was away to help understand communities and different generations of people participating. The performance of a poem could be a moment where people could come together and have different responses but from the same space. And I think that's similar to how our different groups have been able to communicate through those works of art. Obviously they're creating them as well as listening. They're not only an audience, but when we think about medieval texts, we can see them as being created in the act of being listened to and then recreated the next time someone tells it, or the next time someone adapts it or writes it down, down, or translates it, or puts it in a different format. So an artwork that emerges through a conversation between people has a lot of relation to some kinds of romance storytelling, rather than an artwork that sort of issued from the mind of some genius and then everyone else just admired it. It’s really lovely to see that collaborative aspect of it.
D: Yes, it felt much more like a conversation. And I know at the start of the project we were thinking ‘What are the key themes that we're going to use to help hook the groups and get their interest?’, whereas actually the story just provided that anchor throughout, and what we’d focus on and what felt important evolved session by session, and then the artwork would help communicate that but also remind the group what they were thinking about. And it changed course every session but the story was also holding that together. And I think that trust was also a huge thing – being able to trust, being able to share your work, to be worked into, reinterpreted, and the trust that everyone’s focusing on the same thing, but in a very different way and actually that’s OK as well -- it's OK to retell it but tell things slightly differently, or have your own opinion. I think that was quite liberating for some of the participants to feel connected to it in that way.
N: That’s definitely true. I actually had a worry at the start: especially with those long, large canvases, they were working on. I loved the first look of them, with just these really bold colours that some of the participants had done. They were very simple, and they stood out, and I thought ‘Oh I’d put that on my wall right now’. And I got worried it would get spoilt by the other people, but you have to let that go, and see the richness developing through it. They’re quirky and they’re really interesting, the way that the finished pieces have developed out of that. The canvases in particular develop a style of storytelling in different ways. Even those initial colours were a representation of moments in the narrative of Horn, but then later on when other layers were added, you get different sorts of stories developing within the canvas. They have a richness because of that layering.
D: I think that’s something that was so prominent in the project – that you’re always projecting your own situation or your own stories within things. As soon as you look at artwork you try to connect with something that feels familiar and then you associate it with an experience of your own. And it’s the same with stories: you try to find that human connection, and I think that’s what happened with all of the artwork – as it evolved it moved from became the time of the story itself, to thoughts of childhood, to memories from the different participants. Everyone added their sense of self to the surface in some way, and how that connected to the story.
N: It’s something that I’m interested in in the medieval stories as well: what other narratives they connect to. Sometimes we don’t know for sure, because they don’t usually cite those other stories, and we don’t have much direct evidence of what people thought of them. But there are other possible stories that they often seem to connect to or be aware of. And it's valuable to think of a whole network of storytelling, which an individual romance like King Horn is just one node, giving a larger sense of the tradition. And if you put it alongside a different text in a manuscript or tell it next to another story, then it has a different meaning. A lot of the older people would often draw on their own particular memories themselves as a way of adding to and contributing to the work. And then with the young people, sometimes they’d do that too, but they were also often thinking about other books that they’ve read or other stories that they’d been told, and linking those together as a way to focus their creative ideas.
D: You can see the physical layering of that within the artwork – how one story then inspires another story and it’s just constantly evolving and changing as storytelling does. You can see that in a really visual and physical way on the surface of the canvases. And on the object as well where things have also changed from session to session where people have worked on the surface itself, exploring the potential of the surface. I’m thinking about how the teacups don’t have to have a set identity, that identity can change. It was quite brave to do that… it's taking on those different perspectives. Thinking of the potential of a surface was quite a surprise to some of the participants as well as the stories opening up. The ways of working on things changed as we were doing the workshops as well.
N: I love the way that you used things like old teacups and saucers and plates and a teapot as the objects because, in a way, those things also represent a form of storytelling already. Making a cup of tea, having a chat and a drink, that sort of interchange is also representative of community and where you get storytelling – it’s through, and partly around, those kinds of objects. And I suppose that objects like that – like a tea set or something – can also be quite important. They could be gifts or family heirlooms or things that have a story attached to them as well. I’ve got a tea set that belonged to my grandparents, and I really love it. I don’t use it very often, but when I do it’s special, and it has that family story attached to it as well. In this project the participants were not only just looking at objects in that way, but using them to tell new stories.
D: That’s something that can come from exploring surface, but also thinking how the objects and the canvases had their own story – particularly the objects – before they had something painted on them. As the project evolved, the objects and canvases had a real presence in the workshop spaces, and they had their own kind of story and their own identity – they all became part of the conversation.
N: That’s something objects can do. It sounds a bit strange to say, but they seem to hold memory. And they seem to embody the relationship between people. And I think it’s lovely that we now have those artworks – they are there as an embodiment of that connection between three groups of people who never actually met in person. And at least two of the groups we could say in unusual circumstances, being in hospital and being unwell, and how that helped make each of these groups part of something beyond themselves.
D: I loved the sense of connection, of shared experience. We tried booking Zoom calls where people could join at the same time, but it was never natural. Actually, what was very powerful was that shared experience through working on the same thing, knowing that somebody’s presence, their time, their focus, their interest had been there before them. Things like when we were listening to the same music in the session it was just magic seeing the young people at Oxford Spires Academy just so engrossed in their work and just so completely into what they were doing in that moment in time – just listening to exactly the same music that the older patients in the hospital had listened to the week before with probably similar emotions and similar set up in the workshop. (the older patients had created a brief playlist for the young people to listen to.) That shared experience was something that was special in the project that I really enjoyed watching.
N: At some point, we might want to note down what we think this sort of project can do further on or what lessons we might have learned. But let’s pause here.
D: I think it’s worth noting that the thing with routine with some of the patients at the hospital and then some of the younger people that was really powerful – and I think that’s one of the main things that was on my mind.
N: It’s nice to see how many of them really looked forward to doing more. Especially the older hospital patients whose days can feel quite long and often they were a bit isolated because of COVID, so they were quite restricted. It was really lovely that they had this to look forward to.
