Inclusive Arts: an action-based research project

I am a student in the second year of the Inclusive Arts Practice MA at Brighton University. Inclusive Arts can be defined as**supporting creative opportunities between marginalised and non-marginalised people through artistic facilitation and collaboration as a means of challenging existing barriers and promoting social change. **Alongside my own creative practice I have been working with marginalised community groups in India and the UK for the last 10 years, including older people, children in care, refugees, street children and adults with learning disabilities.

*In the second year of the Inclusive Arts MA we are required to organise and facilitate an action based research project, this enquiry is intended to be a vehicle for self-reflective investigation, refining our practice, while undertaking mutually beneficial work with marginalised community groups or individuals. *My vision was to organise an inclusive project for women with learning disabilities that would promote expression, equality and knowledge exchange between the participants and myself. I wanted to facilitate an environment in which they would play a key and active role in influencing the creative processes and direction - informing and contributing to the research as ‘active participants’ instead of ‘passive subjects’. The research was supported by Cupp which awarded us funding through the Springboard Grants Programme.

The project has been running since the beginning of September 2012, we meet once a week at the Phoenix Studios in Brighton to make art together. We have been using ourselves and our experiences as the starting point for much of the artwork, exploring together how the creative process can be a non-verbal vehicle for dialogue and expression. Our latest work has been a series of paintings on Perspex which are based on important people in our lives. Works such as the *important people *pieces are concept based, in which we center on a theme collectively and then portray it in our own individual ways. This method of working serves us to collaboratively explore different aspects of ourselves and our identities both as individuals and as a group. Within the sessions we also give ourselves the space to experiment with a more processed based approach, relieving us from the necessity of having to constantly ‘convey a message’ and work within a theme. We have a fabric tablecloth that we work on top of and reuse each week, it collects the drips of our paint and the rings from our coffee cups, we don’t protect it from getting smudged, stained or dirty. As well as being a medium that passively records our processes by collecting the marks of our art making the tablecloth has become the canvas for a collaborative process based piece on which we simply draw when we feel inspired to, without a specific direction or thematic constraint - it’s a continually accumulating, truly collaborative piece of which we can all claim equal creative ownership.

The project is exhibiting its work at the Phoenix Galleries in January 2013, we will also be holding a week long exhibition to coincide with International Women's Day at the Brighton Dome. Not only is it important that wider inclusion and access to the arts is provided to excluded minorities, but it is also key that the work created is supported to filter into the mainstream visual culture as the arts have the power to increase the visibility of marginalized groups in wider society, serving to challenge preconceptions and trigger social change.

Natalia Agote Urquia, Postgraduate Student, MA Inclusive Arts Practice