The Process
Belfast artist, Helen McAleer, worked with schools, youth groups, history and ecology groups as well as women and representatives from all local groups and organisations. The arts activity was delivered between September and November and was aimed at encouraging people living and working in the area to help create a vision of how they would like to see local spaces developed.
This is an excellent project, which encourages the local community to take an active part in the development of their area. The arts are a tremendous way to allow the local community of Newbuildings to express themselves creatively and have their ideas and thoughts acknowledged through the publication of their Vision.
As part of the process, the artist worked with each group using visual art to gather and develop ideas from the community. Helen then found inventive ways of presenting the ideas of children, adults and organisations in a feedback day so the community could look at the diverse and imaginative ideas within their community ranging from footbridges, sculpture, a village square and even a caravan park.
Helen initially worked with each group individually using different approaches to draw out ideas and aspirations. With the young people, images of local spaces were projected onto large-scale paper and the youth added, subtracted and enhanced the local space, which led to large-scale drawings of the main road area. Through collage and discussion the women’s group looked at the open green spaces and the creation of a village square, the historical society looked at how they would develop historical sites in the area through drawings and written work and the local bands discussed their plans for public art work in the area and ways of expressing their cultural heritage.
Young people in the area made a DVD of a typical evening in the area when it wasn’t their night to attend the local community centre. The youth group followed a typical night’s events, which included a trip to the local chip shop, hanging out on the footpaths outside the local shops and travelling down unlit alleyways to hangout beside the church centre. The group also took pleasure in showing how many could fit into the local phone booth on a rainy night. The artist held an information night where all the suggestions and proposals created through the art workshops were displayed, the ideas were also written up on cards and visitors could put a sticker onto the ideas they agreed with or liked the best. This gave a great indication of the support or lack of support for particular ideas. The artist then collated these ideas into a sculptural format resembling a board game or map of the area with the changes indicated.
