Systems and sectors
What institutions can build when they build it together
Schools, nonprofits, municipal departments, health services, universities and businesses rarely make anything with their own hands at the same table. A participatory painting gives them one. The guiding question, the budget and the composition are settled together, and every partner has to decide what it will contribute, what it will cede, and whose story goes where.
The painting is the medium and also the method. Negotiating surface area, layering colour over someone else’s marks and agreeing how funds are split make cooperation the operating rule rather than the stated value. Partners pool money, lend staff and space, and introduce each other to the people they each already reach. What is left afterwards is a public artwork, and a set of working relationships and funding pathways that siloed structures rarely produce on their own.
In depth
Connected in Chaos
London, Ontario, 2020. What was proposed as a painted mural became a hybrid project when the pandemic closed the city. Over a hundred people met online across thirteen weeks, working through weekly creative exercises, and made their pieces at home.
Around a hundred and fifty individual artworks came out of it, in thirteen different art media, gathered into thirteen themes. Each group took a theme and decided how it would unfold, what it would ask, and what it would look like. It is thirteen projects in one. The pieces were photographed and composed into digital ensembles, and two public events brought people to the wall itself, where community members repaired and painted it. Co-led with the artist Alejandro Zuluaga.
The project was funded through the City of London’s Neighbourhood Decision Making programme, which puts resident proposals to a public ballot. More than ten thousand three hundred Londoners voted in that round. The work existed because the public chose it before it was made.
Partners: thirteen community organisations · Co-artist: Alejandro Zuluaga · Participants: 100+ · Individual artworks: approximately 150, in thirteen media · Funder: City of London Neighbourhood Decision Making, by public vote · Unveiled: October 2020
Materials, siting and care
- Medium and fabrication
- Thirteen digital ensembles, composed from roughly a hundred and fifty individual artworks in thirteen media, printed on PVC board for exterior durability in an unheated underpass. The wall itself was repaired and painted by community members.
- Site and site-responsiveness
- The Richmond Street underpass, London, Ontario. A threshold rather than a destination: the panels were composed to be read in sequence by someone moving through.
- Public realm and circulation
- A pedestrian and cycle route under the rail line, carrying people between the university and the centre of the city.
- Intervention
- The work makes an inhabited place of a space people had only ever passed through, which was the proposal residents voted for.
- Permanence
- Installed October 2020 and in place since.
Related work
| Project | Year | Place | Partner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fostering Dialogues: Action ResearchLGBTQ+ older adults and homecare support workers picturing community care together, in a virtual arts and dialogue programme. | 2023 | Canada | Egale, published in Atlantis |
| We Are All OneResidents and staff of Participation House co-authoring a single image. | 2019 | London, ON | Participation House |
| Strategic Action Plan: One BodyA leadership organisation's direction worked out in paint rather than in a document, with Horizon Leadership and Mission Services. | 2017 | London, ON | Horizon Leadership and Mission Services |
In photographs
This line of work
