François Matarasso

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  • How can community art continue?

    In the first days after everything stopped, I had a series of emails and calls about work I was expecting to do over the spring and summer. Workshops, talks and projects – they all evaporated like water on hot stone. I wasn’t surprised or unduly concerned. Everyone agreed that we’d replan ‘when things get back…

  • Arts and homelessness during Covid-19

    ‘Stay home’ is good advice, but it depends on having a home to stay in. Across the world, millions of people do not, and their situation, already bad, has only become worse as life has gone indoors. The casual work on which many depended has gone, while shelters and outreach services are closed. In some…

  • Kevin Ryan: community artist, photographer, friend

    Kevin Ryan, a pioneer of community art in England, died in hospital on Wednesday, 22 April 2020. He had been diagnosed some months earlier with asbestos-related lung cancer, but never stopped working and caring for others. We met in 1982, through East Midlands Association for Community Arts, which connected people involved with the dozen or…

  • The ethics of community art, Part 1

    See all posts on A Restless Art about ‘ETHICS’ A necessary concern with ethics is one of the ways that community art has always been separate from fine art. The latter was substantially the creation of philosophy, and its ethical concerns, where they exist at all, are philosophical: ‘art for art’s sake‘, an idea that…

  • What did you do in the pandemic, daddy?

    On Tuesday, I’d planned to go to Leeds to meet Alan Lane of Slung Low, and learn at first hand about their work in one of the city’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Among other imaginative ideas, the company – which makes theatre in unusual places – has made an agreement with the members of a struggling…

  • It’s still A Dead Good Life

    At the beginning of the year, The Lawnmowers premièred the movie that we’ve been working on. I wrote about how it came about here if you want to know that story. Today, I want to do two things. First, to share this brilliant, funny, moving film, which is as good a piece of community art…