Sara Jane Mason is a participative arts specialist, using mixed media arts practice for creating, learning and expression that is rooted in painting, drawing, and sculpture. Sarah-Jane is passionate about the importance of creativity for everyone, and places an emphasis on both her roles as a Creative Educator and a practising Artist. Currently, Sarah-Jane splits her time between the UK and Lanzarote. In the UK she works as an Artist Educator for spaces such as Leeds Art Gallery, The Tetley and Yorkshire Sculpture Park and also for Arts charities such as Skippko.
Here, Sarah-Jane shares her insights about participative art and issues related to accessibility for people with disabilities, which she believes must be given more equitable attention and support, not only for audiences, but also for artists with disabilities as well.
My name is Sarah Jane Mason. I am based in two countries. I have a bit of an unusual life. In the UK I’m based in a small ex-mining town called Bolsover, which is in Derbyshire, and my work is mainly in Yorkshire because that was where I lived when I set up my, my practice. And then I also live in Lanzarote, where I run an artist led festival called Lacuna Festivals, which is an annual festival, mixed disciplinary. It lasts a whole month in the summer. And I’m a creative practitioner and facilitator, and I have a fine art degree and a master’s level qualifications in arts education.
Currently, I’m actually not working on anything because I had COVID-19 in March 2020, and I was really severely ill with it. So I’ve had eighteen months of not working, so I can focus on recovery. I’m hoping to be back at work towards the end of this month, or the beginning of next month. It’s a very tentative and slow recovery, where I’ll only be doing a few hours each month. But coming up, I’ve got some interesting things to look forward to. I’m working on a research project with Maggie from the University of Leeds, and I’m also working on a series of pop-ups, which in a way, are a form of research too. It with an arts charity in Leeds called Skippko, and they’re very much based in the community that they’re working with.
Before we go live with the project, we go into those communities and do some hands-on practical research. We run arts activities, with the idea of using those activities to talk about, and to explore some of the issues that are important to those members of that community. We aim to co-design a project that feels like it’s going to be really relevant and appropriate for those people, rather than just flying in with something.
I don’t have a specific definition of what participative arts is currently, though I feel like I can be swayed in many directions. I have these conversations with colleagues quite a lot about what we want it to mean, and what we don’t want it to mean. Who it includes, who it excludes, and are the principles that we use okay? At the minute, I don’t have firm boundaries on it, probably because I’ve been out of practice for such a long time. But when I’m practice connected, I will have a better idea. I feel like I’m deciding from the outside at the minute. Hopefully, in a few months, I’ll be able to answer that with a bit more of a definitive statement.
In May 2023, I attended the Stockholm Supermarket Art Fair, which is a non-commercial art fair. It was set up originally in direct opposition to a commercial fair, which took place at the same time but in a different building. It was trying to show that art is a bit more than just a commodity, or something that you can purchase. That there is so much more vibrancy and dynamism to art than commodities to be bought and sold.
It’s been running for many years now, and part of their programme involves meetings and discussions on different topics, which are for artist-led practitioners. The art fair is focussed on artist-led spaces, and the meetings are small, between five and ten people. You can have quite intimate discussion about a topic of importance. They had three umbrella themes this year. One was sustainability, one was Pedagogy or Art Education, and the other one was Care. And I was moderating a talk under the Care umbrella, which was about accessibility and the artist-led scene.
We spent a large portion of this hour-long meeting talking about accessibility as a term. A lot of the participants had come thinking that it meant something else. They didn’t expect it to be focussed on the experience of people with disabilities. They thought it was about making the artist-led scene accessible for the audience or for other professionals, who perhaps are still working within the kind of institution or establishment in some way.
There was quite a big conversation about what accessibility actually means, and who’s using that word, and to what extent it has been appropriated? It was a similar kind of conversation that we have about participatory arts, about whether that term has been taken and is being cashed-in by other people? This appropriation often means that the original community that it was originally intended to serve, is no longer served in this conversation. At least a quarter of this meeting was taken up explaining why we were there, despite the title of the talk and the description of the talk being about the experience of disabled people.
I think that the artist-led scene is excellent at working with disabled participants, but I am not convinced that the arts sector is particularly great at supporting disabled professionals in roles where they can lead and facilitate. So we still had many people, probably half of the attendants, there for different reasons, which can be frustrating. However, it made me aware of this problem, and it’s not just arguing about semantics. It’s more than that. It’s a belief about what accessibility actually means in practice for the people who need it.
People often come with a particular notion of accessibility. There is also typically a sense of unease around the topic, which we found out when we started to unpick it a little. This is probably because of the sense of overwhelm that goes with these issues. When nondisabled participants feel like they didn’t know anything about the topic of conversation and accessibility in practice, it is overwhelming.
Moreover, instead of approaching this discomfort from a position of curiosity and exploration, with openness, there is frequently a defensive block put in place. With people asking, ‘like how we are meant to know all this stuff?’ Or they say, ‘you need to tell us this stuff,’ or ‘you need to teach us.’ So there is a weird expectation that the disabled participants, who were there to discuss the fact that things aren’t very accessible, are starting from the point where there isn’t equality and equity already.
Often there is an expectation that the disabled participants should take on the free labour of teaching everybody else what accessibility is, and what it means, and how we can change the world. It is a bit like some non-disabled participants were saying we’ll help, and we’ll make things more accessible, but someone has to tell them what to do. In my head, this has parallels with traditional household dynamics where the man says, oh, I’ll do whatever. You just need to tell me what to do, and totally disregards the mental load that the female is carrying, as well as the actual physical duties.
When I spoke to one of my black friends, she was talking about how this had some parallels to how she feels about racism, and how five years ago, ten years ago, people would approach conversations about racism with her, where they would say, just tell me what your problem is, and I’ll fix it. She is very passionate about people going and learning for themselves. Educate yourself and find out why this world is, is not just, and is not equal, and what we can do to improve it because we’re all missing out because it’s not.
I’ve moderated three meetings now at three distinct festivals or fairs. At Juxtapose Art Fair, held at the beginning of September in Denmark, (another non-commercial art fair – a biennial), the meetings were set up so that we looked at the same themes as at Supermarket Art Fair so that there could be continued conversations between professionals. There are some repeat professionals coming. And, and what was quite interesting, was that we had somebody attend who works for an organisation in London. Previously, they had worked in a co-creative way, to create a code of conduct around how spaces should be accessible. This was a standard policy approach, but was meant to be not just a piece of paper that gets stuck in a folder, but something that people can actually refer to and actually use. A lot of paperwork that we have is not actually that useful. It’s more box ticking.
This was meant to be like an active, an active guide. And she was talking about some of her experiences putting this together, and she spoke about one particular experience where she went to a gallery space, and she was saying to the people who ran the gallery space that it was not very accessible. The gallery was on three levels, and there was no lift or ramp. The immediate default hit-back of the gallery was, ‘but we don’t have money to put a lit in.’ ‘That costs hundreds of thousands.’ ‘We can’t do that.’ So, and that was the end of the conversation.
As far as that organisation was concerned, it was either or. It was that’s what we need to do, and that’s what we can’t do, so we’re not going to do anything. I don’t expect them to assign all of their resources to making their space accessible, but I do expect them to look at their books and go, ‘okay, well, we can’t afford a hundred thousand, but in our budget, we should be allocating an amount for this, and we should be doing something towards it’. A small step.
So instead of having all of our exhibitions on a second floor when there is no lift, maybe galleries should look at putting one programme on the ground floor, and putting in a cheaply sourced ramp, so that that is accessible. But this was a repeated kind of theme with the organisations that many disabled people find is the default. When challenged, the immediate hit-back is we don’t have any funding for it, so we can’t do it. That’s why we’re not doing it. Full stop.
There’s this tension when it comes to co-creating with groups because you would rather not expect disabled people to do lots of free labour, just because you don’t understand something. There’s definitely something in having open dialogue with people who are experiencing these issues. Yes. But there’s undoubtedly also something about rewarding people for their time and insight in some way.
Rather than going, well, you’re living this, so we’re just going to take all of that to free because otherwise things aren’t going to get better. It just feels really exploitative at that level. I think there is a place for open dialogue, but I think that the structure of that dialogue needs to be talked about. It needs to be really considered so that it’s ethical. I feel that that’s essential.
In July I was part of a conversation that had participants from all over the world. In fact, it’s quite an important point to say that all these conversations were international and mainly European. The Lacuna Festival. It was interesting to have that sort of international platform, to have this discussion, and that extra kind of factor in play at looking into festivals, which is different to Stockholm Supermarket, and Juxtapose. The Lacuna Festivals is an unfunded festival, and is artist led by myself and my partner Simon Turner. While we have no funding, we also have no outside commitments to other organisations. This means that the way we structure the festivals is quite different to how other festivals and fairs are run.
When we say artist led, we don’t just mean that it’s me and Simon directing things, we facilitate things. It’s led by the arts community themselves. So this conversation around Arts and Disability was actually suggested by one of our artist participants, and our whole events program was actually structured that way. We don’t say these specific events are going to happen this year. Artists say these are the events they can offer, or these are the events they would like to see, and then we facilitate those to happen.
Having this sort of ethos to the festival helps to frame the conversation differently. I think that people felt safe. They felt like if they were giving something of themselves. It was within a safe space. I’m not saying that people didn’t feel like that at the other art fairs. I don’t know how they felt. But at Lacuna Festivals, it’s a significant part of the ethos, and it’s a really transparent part of the ethos, that we are working by and for the community.
It’s all about the arts community. Our audience as Lacuna Festivals is the artists. It’s not trying to get audience members in to see our work. That’s not the point of it. The point of it is that we can connect, and we can share on a level that’s outside that commercial, hierarchical, money-based system. There’s something else. There’s an intrinsic value to our practice and to our lives. And if we come together, and we’re generous with each other, then we can get quite a lot out of that.
I think that because the whole festival is framed like that, it made this conversation in particular very, very open. People were very generous with sharing their experiences and their thoughts. People were very vulnerable. And so the conversation was quiet, quite meaningful.
I really want this to be a call to action. All of these conversations I’m having have been a call to action. Some of the actions that have happened so far, are that as a group, from looking at festivals, we’re applying for some funding to support a disabled artist network. From Juxtapose and Supermarket, we’ve already got a network forming, which can be emailed at disabledartistsatwork@gmail.com. We are sharing and pooling resources because we believe it is really difficult to find information about accessibility for artists themselves, even though there’s quite a lot of information and quite a lot of research.
We are trying to pull some information together that we can present to the Artist Run Resource Centre, and see if we can get it on their website. Every so often you do a call to action, and then everybody goes away and forgets about it. I just wanted to share this with an expectation that something will happen, and that together we can do more. I feel like the participatory arts sector has to be a welcoming and inclusive sector for disabled artists. Particularly going forward.
We have to anticipate mass disabling events. I’ve talked about earthquakes and volcanoes, and tsunamis, and contagions, and all sorts of things. The only one that people really connected with has been COVID-19 because it was more obvious that a pandemic has to do more for disabled people. Actually, however, everything happening in the past twelve months continues to illustrate this point. We are seeing more and more of these massive destructive events, and they’re becoming more and more common as climate change gets out of control. So we need to be aware that it’s something that is not going away.
We are going to have more and more disabled people in our societies. We have an ageing population. Disability, of course, isn’t static. It changes. Issues around mobility, around speech, and around our dexterity, they are all going to be more important. There are all sorts of issues that change with age, and with various health issues or traumatic events. It’s essential that our sector considered this as a critical issue going forward.
We have to consider who’s missing from the conversation, and how we can include them. To members of the ArtWorks Alliance Network, the questions are: how can we better support disabled artists in participatory arts? How do we get disabled artists into the position of speaking and facilitating our conversations? What steps are we already taking that can be showcased as best practice? There’s probably already plenty of good things happening, but we need to collect some case studies, and develop some guidance. Gather some codes of conduct, or anything that’s already in place in the different organisations in the network, and share that.
It’s about doing things together. It’s about shared responsibility, as well as rights. So we all have a responsibility to be informed about the societies that we are living in. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves and to keep informed and to be engaged. Then we can develop the capacity together and move forward and to aspire to things that are a bit more equitable for those with accessibility issues or challenges.
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