Captive Arts: Curating the curious symbiosis between the arts and imprisonment

This project seeks to conduct the first empirical investigation of artists in English prisons. Its main research question is: who are prisoner artists and how does the experience of imprisonment shape their identity, artistic outputs and their reception within and beyond prison walls? While imprisonment is a predominantly detrimental experience, actively curtailing fundamental freedoms and animating our cultural infatuation with harsh and long punishments in Western neoliberal societies, the arts - in their various manifestations from visual art, sculpture, music, theatre, poetry and creative writing, among others - are thriving inside prisons. The arts in prison play a fundamental role in enabling for prisoners an otherwise inaccessible opportunity for expression and act as a significant source of education, therapy, and communication with the outside world. The arts have also been increasingly mobilised by penal institutions as one of the main ways in which objectives such as rehabilitation and tackling recidivism can be addressed, a strategy that has a long, if somewhat turbulent, history.

This project seeks to understand this curious symbiosis between the arts and imprisonment, and how and why artistic identities emerge in penal settings. It will provide the first comprehensive examination of the role that the arts play in the lives and identities of serving and former prisoners and by deploying qualitative and arts-based methodologies it will enable a systematic engagement with prisoner arts, to advance our understandings of the emotions of punishment, the impacts of imprisonment, the experiences, coping and resistance strategies of prisoners and the political messages we can derive from prisoners' artworks. The study will curate a comprehensive account of prisoner arts as a distinct art genre.

It will unpack the potential of the arts in A) articulating the experience and effects of imprisonment; B) transforming the lives and trajectories of prisoners and former prisoners; C) acting as means of political expression in an otherwise repressed institution, connecting those inside with audiences outside. This latter aspect will also inform the public engagement activities of the project which seek to utilise the affective power of the arts to alter public perceptions on issues of crime and justice and showcase the impact that prisoner arts can have for individuals and communities alike.

The project seeks to make a substantive contribution to prison studies, criminology, socio-legal and community arts and outsider arts research by advancing a conceptual toolkit for studying the ambivalent relationship between contemporary punishment and creative expression. The project involves empirical fieldwork including interviews with prisoners, former prisoners, arts therapists working in prisons, and arts practitioners and educators in prisons. It also involves ethnographic observation of short arts-courses offered in prisons and analysis of artworks created by participants and of prisoner arts available in the public domain.

The project will include the organisation of a major, international workshop engaging a range of practitioners and stakeholders in policy-informed and research-led discussions on the future of prisoner arts. It will host the largest prisoner arts festival of its kind at Warwick Arts Centre, co-produced with former prisoners who are artists. It will also create the first digital archive of prisoner arts to be hosted at Warwick's Modern Records Centre to promote future research and wider engagement with prisoner arts. The project will also produce a website that will showcase prisoner artworks and findings from the project, and host podcasts and blogposts on carceral aesthetics and the experience of becoming an artist in captivity. Academic outputs will include a monograph, two peer-reviewed articles and media outputs at arts-based, prisoner-led and criminal justice platforms.