crossing the line

272 Crossing the LineSarah Bennett

JADE 19.3 ©NSEAD 2000

The paper charts the progress of the ‘WindowSills’ project in Exeter, UK which brings togetherartists, art students, cultural organisations, andthe community in a plan for urban renewal.Seeking to loosen boundaries, it uses the idea of‘thirdspace’ to question the notion of public andprivate space, using the city’s and its river’sconstant changes as an analogy. The windowand the window sill become the interface wherethe project seeks a transformational act in thelives of those involved by locating the experiencein the local and the personal, although the impli-cations cross much wider boundaries.

Abstract


IntroductionThe title of this essay refers not to the reactionaryact of crossing the picket line, but to the act ofcrossing from one place to another, crossingthresholds, boundaries, all of which are sites ofdifferentiation. I am writing this piece as a practi-tioner, crossing into new professional territory bywriting about a collaborative art project called‘Window Sills’, initiated in 1998 by Staff from theExeter School of Arts and Design (University ofPlymouth). ‘Window Sills’ investigates the spaceof the window – as the interface between ourpersonal experiences and memories, and thebroader cultural and historical realm in which welive. The project examines changing cultural divi-sions between public and private space and thebarriers between public artwork and its publics.

The act of crossing a boundary may be politi-cal, or transformative, or an act of transgression,but boundaries are integral to the process ofcrossing, in that each defines the possibility forthe other. Conventional thinking sees this as abinary problem; however, Edward Soja [1] intro-duces the idea of ‘thirdspace’, which opens newways of thinking about spatial practices, and activates a space of the ‘between’. It is the transi-tional space of the in-between, the fluid andoverlapping space between shifting margins, thatis the focus for this project, not the polarised positions of ‘either side’ that propose a set ofoppositions that are no longer clearly delineatednor desirable. Estella Majozo [2] when preparingher contribution for Mapping the Terrain (whichtakes its subtitle from Majozo’s own text ‘tosearch for the good and make it matter …’) wasmeditating on the theme and, found herself think-ing about territories, both public and private,about political turf and definitive lines, those thatexclude and those that include. I began to reflecton the earth and all the redrawn borders that wewho are involved in public art must bring to themap if there are to be positive new directions forthe world’s cultures.

But have the redrawn borders provided newspaces, interstices between the old definitions?

‘Window Sills’The ‘Window Sills’ Project aims to develop collab-orations between contemporary artists, residentsof Exeter, fine art students and professionals andorganisations in the public and cultural sectors. Ittakes its lead from the model of ‘new genre publicart’ in the USA [3] and from strategies developedby groups such as Common Ground, The Art ofChange and Platform in this country. Individualssuch as Alison Marchant, whose project ‘EastLondoners’, was commissioned by the LondonBorough of Newham, in 2000 have also devel-oped process ways of working. These arefrequently ephemeral and often related to localrather than global narratives. The project’s inten-tion is to foster understanding and identifycommon ground between different organisationsand residents in Exeter in order to encourageinclusive and sustainable social change throughart. It is process-based and increases opportuni-ties for people to participate in the representationand recording of their own culture. The opportu-nity for dialogue and exchange between theartists on the project and residents of St. Thomasand Exwick in Exeter arose from the initial idea ofthe window space as a boundary between publicand private realms.

What currency, if any do the terms public andprivate hold in a new century? Categories anddefinitions previously taken as given are nowseen as mutable; seepage has occurred in thesocial ordering of space, and whilst the termpublic once related to all that was fair and demo-cratic, and private to the capitalist project, nowthe private sphere, notably the domestic space ofthe home has been politicised through feministdiscourse, [4] whilst much of the public has beenliterally privatised through government policy. Nolonger can one be privileged over the other. Whattakes place in public settings can be of a privatenature, whilst we tolerate the most public ofspaces in our private homes in the form of televi-sion, and advertising through the internet turnsthe whole world into consumption. Our relation-ship to the spaces of the city has become the

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subject of much academic interest from fieldssuch as architecture, geography, linguistics, soci-ology and cultural studies; as Jos Boyd states:

This has lead to a very fruitful unravelling of older,enlightenment ‘ways of seeing’ based on theflawed logic of binary oppositions; to valuablecritiques of the limitations of modernist identitypolitics (including those earlier feminist studies ofthe built environment) which remain in binaryordering in both their analyses and plans forchange; and to a series of reconceptualisationsconcerned with framing a ‘thirdspace’, beyondthe simple dualisms and oppositions found in somany western socio-spacial concepts. [5]

The concept of thirdspace was related to the caseof Barcelona by Malcolm Miles in a recent paper.[6] Miles developed the idea of the in-betweenspace in which the semi-public sphere iscustomised by the private individual. Such aspace could be signified by the balcony, particu-larly in Mediterranean countries where it extendsthe interior space of the home into the socialspace of the street. As Steve Pile writes; ‘Thehome is not simply an expression of an individ-ual’s identity, it is also constitutive of that identity’;[7] and perhaps what is meant by home includessuch transitional spaces, or the space of thewindow sill, which was the initial starting point forthis project. [8]

The identity of the residents of St. Thomas andExwick depends on difference, but this differenceis not of the kind found in a metropolitan city,because Exeter is not such a place. Yet there arestill issues of diversity even in a place where thelabel of ‘community’ seems easy to affix (but is nomore appropriate here than elsewhere). As LucyLippard points out, ‘Like the places they inhabit,communities are bumpily layered and mixed,exposing hybrid stories that cannot be seen in a linear fashion.’ [9] The ‘communities’ of St.Thomas and Exwick are set apart from the rest ofExeter by geographical demarcation, historicallyoutside the city walls, and on the other side of the

Exe. ‘Down in St. Thomas’ refers to the elevatedviewpoint enjoyed by much of the rest of the city,set as it is on a hillside, once a Roman fortresswith an outlook to the river and sea beyond. Thearea contains a mixture of housing, someVictorian, some suburban, large housing estates,two or three shopping precincts and numerousparks and playing fields reflecting its past as acentre for market gardens in the alluvial soil of thevalley. The geographical boundary, representedby the river is here intertwined with the social andhierarchical boundaries of power. Such bound-aries are culturally constructed in order to set onething apart from another, for example; theUniversity from the city. The School of Arts andDesign is set apart from the city having moved amile and a half from its original site in the centre,south of the city (down river) in 1974. How, then,can we dip our institutional toe into the waters ofthe city, be they river, pond, fountain or flood, orretrace our steps back across the lines that differ-entiate us from our locale? There are someprecedents for working across cultural boundaries– for example ‘River Crossings’, [10] organised byCamerawork and Darkroom in East London in1992 engaged a broad public in the debate aboutthe changes being made in docklands during thelate 1980s, the river Thames itself becoming ametaphor for communication and exchange. The(mainly) photographic works occupied sites oneither side (and underneath) of the river Thamesand were accompanied by Richard Layzell’s‘performance in transit’ taking place on a rivercruiser. In Creative Camera, Helen Sloan, co-organiser of ‘River Crossings’ stated that:

The works in the exhibition approach issues of the effects of urban development on localcommunities; historical methods of transport andcommunication; and look at the more genericimplications of communication networks in theglobal/local context. [11]

‘Window Sills’ creates an interface between theUniversity of Plymouth and the residents of St.

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Thomas and Exwick. Students from both theundergraduate Fine Art: Contextual PracticePathway and Integrated Masters Programme inFine Art are collaborating on the project. Some ofthem live in the areas of St. Thomas and Exwickwhere the project is taking place. The undergrad-uates on the Fine Art: Contextual PracticePathway have since 1986 [12] worked off campusin numerous different locations in the city andregion, addressing issues of audience, site andcontext. As Sally J Morgan observes, ‘these off-campus projects … put developing artists intouch with a palpable audience.’ [13] Her papermakes the case that such activities have becomealmost mainstream within fine art courses.Students are encouraged to question the bound-ary walls of the institution as well as theideological restraints of modernist, studio basedart practice, seeking a more accountable range ofpractices. It is equally the role of the staff throughtheir own practices, as well as broader researchto, in our case, navigate upstream to the city andto contribute to sustainable regeneration throughcreativity, dialogue and partnership. This processalso provides opportunities for students to collab-orate on ‘live’ projects with professional artistsand the public, so contributing to their future roles

as professional artists. Because some of thesestudents are already from the area, after gradua-tion they will return to the locality with specialistand transferable (key graduate) skills. Indeed, asresidents, they never actually leave the place theycome from, but as artists they do cross into insti-tutional and cultural territories. What is seldomasked is what happens when they return.

Hybrid placesDoreen Massey [14] speaks of places as ‘hybrid’.Relating to the historical boundaries definingplaces, she asserts that places are never ‘pure’and if we accept this then we can ‘think of placesas essentially open, porous, and the products oflinks with other places, rather than as exclusiveenclosures bound off from the outside world.’The act of returning, ‘transformed’ through learn-ing, is perhaps one of the keys to re-thinkingpedagogic methods and processes that willreopen the links between the locality and theuniversity.

The space of the river is constantly in flux, it isa place of fluidity and transformation. It trans-gresses its borders and floods the land. The riverseeps and creates new watery places. Thememory of floods, (a frequent occurrence in St.

Figure 1: above

Dunsford Hill Tulip Fields’, Sclater’s Nursery, early 20th century. Courtesy of Gerald Sclater, St. Thomas, Exeter

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Thomas until a flood prevention scheme wascarried out in the 1970s), has been central to thedialogue that Edwina Fitzpatrick, one of the‘Window Sills’ project artists, has establishedwith residents (co-artists) of the St. Thomas areaof the city during the early stage of the project.Mapping memories through traces, stains andwatermarks, Fitzpatrick facilitated a space forreminiscence about the floods. Through therepresentation and recording of their own culturethe co-artists, residents of Lucerne House, someof whom are very elderly and suffer from shortterm memory loss, made collaborative artworksthat reflected their personal memories throughimage and text. The value to the residents of thisprocess of drawing upon their memories hasbeen noted as of great significance to them,enabling a sense that not only are people inter-ested in their personal histories but also that aprocess of exchange has taken place betweenthemselves and younger people. One participantsaid during the interim evaluation process that ‘itis important for memories to be heard so thatother people can learn from them about the areaand older people’s thoughts.’ [15] Lucy Lippardelucidates on this point when she suggests that,‘… one reason to know our histories is so that weare not defined by others, so that we can resistother people’s images of our pasts, and conse-quently our futures.’ [16]

Both the history and the future of the City ofExeter and the area of St. Thomas, located as it isclose to the quay, are inextricably linked throughtime and space to the river. It laps up against thewalls of the empty warehouses on the quay, thedownfall of which was precipitated by the short-sightedness of the City Council in previousgenerations, notably during the 19th century,when it wouldn’t financially support the buildingof a rail link from St. David’s station to the quay tofacilitate the transport of imported goods (until itwas too late). The demise of the import andexport business followed and the present coun-cil are currently planning the future of the westquay by finding new commercial and leisure uses

for the maritime buildings, which will inevitablydisplace present occupants. On the east side ofthe quay is a piece of public sculpture by RogerDean titled ‘Armillary Sphere’. Privately commis-sioned as a personal memorial, with only a smallamount of its cost along with the site next to thecustoms house being donated by the CityCouncil, it commemorates the maritime historyof Exeter. It is one of very few pieces of public artin the city, the others comprising a commemora-tive fountain by the same artist commissioned bythe City Council, which is a memorial to the Exeterblitz during the Baedeker raids, an insipid figura-tive sculpture of a family group by Carole Vincentcommissioned by Devon County Council as acontribution to the ‘year of the pedestrian’ in1989/9, a piece commissioned by Sainsbury’s atone of their ‘out of town’ sites by Ray Smith,mosaics by local artist Elaine Goodwin, and asmattering of poorly executed murals. This is asfar as it goes in Exeter, not because the Councilrecognised the folly of 1980s wholesale visualpollution of public spaces, but intrinsicallybecause they have not valued the contemporaryvisual arts in ‘their’ city previously. In contrast tothe experiences of other cities whose publicspaces have been colonised by impositionalartworks, Exeter is perhaps more in tune with thetraditions of ‘community arts’. A proliferation ofleisure activities under this banner has flourishedin the city. It is now vital therefore, to show howthe contemporary arts have developed processesas in new genre public art that can contribute tothe cultural development of a city, recognisingthat cities are hybrid places of diverse publics.

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One of the aims of the ‘Window Sills’ project is toshow how inclusive strategies such as thosebeing developed by the artists with the projectteam can contribute to sustainable urban futures.These futures will not be helped by pieces ofpublic art parachuted into the city, or commis-sioned wholesale with subjects or treatmentswhich may mean nothing to many residents.

The localThe ‘local’ is key to the project. In the early stages ofthe project in 1998 when our research team wantedto initiate a collaborative art project with the resi-dents of a street in the city we walked aroundlooking for a place, a location that evidenced theway in which people represent themselves withinthe threshold of the window space through thedisplay of objects, images, curtains etc. We spenttime looking at our own neighbourhoods becauseas individuals our identities as artists/educatorscoexist with other multiple identities such as beingmembers of neighbourhoods in which we and ourfamilies are stakeholders. When artists, through

their own practice, reflect on their own sense ofplace, wherever that may be, this may become auseful starting point for inclusive strategies towardsa truly public art, through the exploration of thethemes and concerns of residents of the city usingtheir own experiences as central to the process.

David Harding [17] argues that a ‘transforma-tive experience’ is available to both artists andnon-professional artists, i.e. the public, throughcollaboration. This is at the core of the ‘WindowSills’ project, which seeks to create a sustainableforum for creativity, decision making and activitywithin localities of the city. Whether one is local ornot has emerged as a theme with clients ofHatherleigh Road Day Centre in St. Thomas intheir discussions with project artist BrendanByrne, and may result in a signpost outside thecentre pointing to the towns where they wereborn, for example, ‘72 years, Eva, 52 miles west’,and ‘79 years, Gerty, 1.5 miles north east’.

Meanwhile ‘mapping home’ is the outcome ofa collaboration between artist Neil Musson andgroups of both the young and the elderly in the

Figure 2: opposite

‘Children’s personal history books’ workshop facilitated by Rebecca Eriksson at the St. Thomas event, December 1999. Photograph courtesy of Liz Ellis, Buddle Lane Family Centre.

Figure 3: above

‘Memories of the Exeter Floods’, text and water print, made in collaboration between Edwina Fitzpatrick and residents of Lucerne House, Alphington, November 1999.

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area, and they will be producing sound record-ings triggered by sensors placed at points on theboundaries of individual’s home ‘territory’.Rebecca Eriksson, with student Kathy Woolnerand 21 residents of St. Thomas and Exwick, havebeen collecting 21 photographic ‘moments’ basedon the window spaces of their homes, and thesewill be presented in public spaces such as thelocal newspaper, bus shelters and communitynotice boards. The market gardens that used tobe in the area have become the focus forresearch by Edwina Fitzpatrick with a range ofresidents and they are planning to locate scentdispensers and window boxes in the streets torecreate the smells of the flowers that once weregrown locally. A positive dialogue is gainingmomentum in Exeter about the role that the artscan play in the production of meaningful reflec-tion on people’s lives and personal histories, andthis can potentially lead to a climate of renewal.That the residents of St. Thomas and Exwick haveownership of the project is central to our strate-gies. As Miles suggests, in relation to the role ofthe citizen in urban planning:

Perhaps dwellers are also experts on their city andif so, their expertise begins in their awareness ofthe spaces around their bodies and the lattices ofmemory and appropriation they assemble as apersonal reading of the city. [18]

Several recent government reports point to the‘arts’ as strategic players in the processes ofurban renewal, local and regional development[19] and social inclusion. [20] These reiterate whatthose of us who have been involved in art anddesign education have always known, that ‘theNation benefits artistically, socially and economi-cally from having a healthy and vigorous culturallife involving as many of its people as possible.’[21] That partnerships are useful to this processis developed by Ken Robinson in All Our Futures,the recently published DfEE/DCMS commis-sioned report on creativity, culture and education.The role of partnerships is highlighted as a key

strategy for the future; ‘New working partner-ships are now needed involving schools, higherand further education, local education authorities,local authorities more widely, cultural organisationsand local commerce.’ It suggests that, ‘each part-ner could contribute funding and other resources,and the total activity would contribute to the vital-ity of education and cultural life in the locality.’ [22]The School of Arts and Design at Exeter is devel-oping partnerships with other agencies, both artsand non-arts organisations such as the FamilyEducation Development Trust, the Royal AlbertMemorial Museum and Spacex Gallery, (withwhich we already have strong links), to contributeto a creative future for the city. This future needs toengage all the city’s citizens, not only those whocurrently take part in cultural activities. It thereforeneeds to investigate those transitional or hybridspaces which are the sites of important acts ineveryday life. It is these in-between places, whichseldom figure on a city map, with which the‘Window Sills’ project is concerned.

‘Window Sills’ event/exhibition of collaborative artworks took place within the locality of St. Thomasand Exwick during the Exeter Fringe Festival inJuly 2000.

‘Window Sills’ project was developed by theauthor with John Butler and Gill Melling. It is fundedthrough the University of Plymouth QR funding,the Regional Arts Lottery Programme and ExeterArts Council (local authority funding).

A Symposium, ‘Divers[c]ities’, will take place in Exeterin November 2000 with the Public Art Observatory.Consultants to the project are: Catherine Bailes,Exeter City Arts Officer; Maggie Bolt, DirectorPublic Art, South West; Nigel Hillier, Consultant toFamily Education Development Trust; AlisonMarchant, artist; Sally Morgan, University of theWest of England; and Louise Short, artist.

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References1. Soja, E. [1996] Thirdspace: Journeys to LosAngeles and other real-and-imagined Places.Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell

2. Majozo, E. C. [1995] ‘To Search for the Goodand Make It Matter’ in S. Lacy (Ed) Mapping theTerrain: New Genre Public Art. Washington: BayPress, pp. 83–88

3. Lacy, S. [1995] Ibid.

4. Massey, D. [1994] Space, Place and Gender.Cambridge: Polity Press

5. Boyd, J. [1998] ‘Beyond maps and metaphors?Re-thinking the relationships between architec-ture and gender’, in R. Ainley (Ed) New Frontiersof Space, Bodies and Gender. Routledge, pp. 203–217

6. The paper was presented at the Public ArtObservatory which is an ELIA funded project co-ordinated by Professor Toni Remesar, Universityof Barcelona. The presentation is further devel-oped in ‘After the Public Realm…’ Journal of Art& Design Education 19.3, 2000

7. Pile, S. [1996] The Body and the City:Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. Routledge

8. The particularity of window sills was broughtto my attention by an exchange student fromBarcelona. A lesser known usage of the verb ‘towindow sill’ is to support oneself on the wayhome from the pub by leaning on the windowsills of the houses in the street.

9. Lippard, L. [1997] The Lure of the Local:Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press

10. Sloan, H. [1993] ‘River Crossings: Light andSound along the Thames’, Creative Camera,February/March: pp. 14–15

11. Ibid

12. The Orientation Programme was started byKaty Macleod in 1986. It later became ContextualPractice and is currently a named award withinFine Art co-ordinated by Judith Rugg

13. Morgan, S. J. [1999] ‘The Border-guardshave lost interest: The “problem” of Public Artand the Rise of Contextual Practice’, DrawingFire, 4, vol. 2, pp. 26–31

14. Massey, D. [1995] ‘The Conceptualization ofPlace’ in D. Massey and P. Jess (Eds) A Place inthe World? Oxford University Press, pp. 45–77

15. Bennett, S. and Butler, J. and Melling, G. [1999]Window Sills Evaluation Report, Unpublished

16. Lippard , L. [1997] Op. cit

17. Harding, D. [1997] ‘Public Art: ContentiousTerm and Contested Practice’ in D. Harding & P.Buchler [Eds] Decadent. Glasgow: Foulis Press,pp. 9–19

18. Miles, M. [1997] Art Space and the City:Public Art and Urban Futures. Routledge

19. Fleming, T. (Ed) [1999] The Role of theCreative Industries in Local and RegionalDevelopment. Government Office for Yorkshireand Humber and The Forum on Creative Industries

20. Policy Action Team 10 [1999] ResearchReport: Arts and Neighbourhood Renewal.Department for Culture, Media and Sport

21. Arts Council of England [1997] LeadingThrough Learning. London: ACE

22. Robinson, K. et al [1999] All Our Futures:Creativity, Culture and Education. NACCCEReport, Department for Education andEmployment and Department for Culture,Media and Sport

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crossing the line

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