Public Art and Local Civic Engagement

This research has a dual focus: it will compare two different forms of contemporary public art and their significance for the development of reflective and engaged citizens in Ilfracombe, Devon, and it will develop an innovative arts sensitive method to work with visual data and visualisation, with the aim of locating the study in cultural experience. It will deploy this alongside a 'citizen's forum', a focus group based 'citizen's forum' to assess their respective merits in enabling members of the community to express their feelings and opinions of these two artworks. The findings will have significance beyond the town and inform policy makers, arts commissioners, evaluators, academics and the arts and cultural sector on the kind of public art most likely to promote identity, belonging and citizenship; also the mechanisms whereby these effects are achieved and can be evaluated
In 2012, Ilfracombe was home to two public artworks: the temporary visit of Alex Hartley's Nowhereisland and Damien Hirst's twenty year loan of the 66 ft bronze statue, Verity. These two very different kinds of public art came together in the same year in the same small coastal town.
Nowhereisland involved the journey of an artificially created small island from the Arctic to the south-west coast of England as a visiting 'island nation'. As it travelled through international waters, the island was declared a 'new nation' with citizenship open to all. Preparations for the arrival of Nowhereisland had already begun eighteen months previously, with activities and events involving local people exploring the meaning of local and national citizenship within a globalising world. Hirst's Verity was created as a 'modern allegory of truth and justice'. It towers over the waterfront, the tallest example of public art in England. People travel many miles to see it, stimulating regeneration and tourism in the town. Neither artwork has escaped controversy and local citizens have expressed a range of opinions and feelings, positive and negative, about the value of such public art.
This research will ask what meanings and values these artworks represent for the local community, why, and in what ways? By facilitating debate in a citizen's forum, and an innovative method of associating to visual data, the research will be looking to understand how the arrival of the artworks is embedded in local memory and imagination, their ongoing effects and lasting legacy for people, individually and as part of the wider community.
These questions will be researched with: a literature review, a media and archive review to understand the initial feedback and reactions to the artworks; short interviews with stakeholders and biographical narrative interviews with the artists to understand the artworks' importance in the artist's life work and their intended significance; the Citizen's Forum will stimulate debate and there will be a visual matrix for each of the artworks. This innovative method accesses the visual imagination and those aspects of artistic experience which cannot easily be expressed in words. It will provide opportunities for creative community engagement by introducing ways of expressing feelings and ideas through images that often arise when looking at art. In the visual matrix a group of around 35 participants will be able to express their relationship to Nowhereisland and Verity by offering pictures and images that come to mind when thinking about the artworks. In this way the complex emotional reactions and ideas connected to citizens' appreciation of the artworks can become available for interpretation and analysis by the research team. The findings from the different data sources will be compared and combined and fed back to the participants for further discussion and refinement. The team will report and disseminate the research through web and print based media, conference, seminars and workshop.

Impacts Summary (with methods of dissemination in brackets for cross-referencing)

Beneficiaries of this research will include local and national funders, commissioners and policy-makers concerned with the value of public art in promoting civic engagement, inclusion, identity and citizenship; the arts sector concerned with how to produce public art to realize these aims; the arts and social scientific academic community concerned to understand the nature of the relationship between cultural experience and citizenship; communities who are offered the opportunity to experience informed and strategically commissioned artworks; evaluators who are offered new tools for researching experience as well as process and outcomes of public art projects.


Specifically the project will:

- evidence the value of different kinds of public art to citizenship and the means whereby this contribution is realized to inform funders and commissioners, local authority policy-makers and planning departments, especially in relation to contested decisions for which there is little research based evidence. These concern temporary processual projects versus artworks with long-term physical presence. This project will evidence the type legacy of a temporary public artwork might establish compared with a permanently sited commemorative sculpture or integrated design within the built environment. (Situations summit and online report)

- Inform funders and the arts and cultural sector about appropriate methodological principles for the evaluation of place-based public art projects beyond the commonly used on-site questionnaires and surveys. (Situations summit, seminars, report and book chapter)

- provide evaluators with a practicable, affordable and tested methodology for researching cultural experience (academic dissemination, methodology article)

- Develop concepts to describe the nature of public engagement with public artworks, with a particular emphasis on the constitution of reflective and engaged citizens. (academic journal, book and report)

- Refine and share expertise on forms of negotiation, advocacy and communication necessary to bring about such impact within the professional art sector. (seminars)

- Promote local engagement and deliberation with respect to the legacy of verity and Nowhereisland (vis the group data collection and feedback process itself)

- Develop theoretical insights on the psychosocial pathways where by different kinds of public art achieves its effects and its potential impact on social relations within communities (academic dissemination)

- Inform all stakeholders about how intrinsic, instrumental and institutional dimensions of public art act in combination to achieve these impacts (All channels)