• 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…

  • The power of art

    Last night, Streetwise Opera replayed the film of their 2016 production, The Passion, on YouTube, for a world in the grip of a pandemic. I first saw it broadcast on BBC television on Easter Sunday in 2016. It was a stunning, unforgettable experience, and I have often spoken about it since: it was one of the…

  • This is what we’re working to protect

    Everyone knows the theatres are closed, along with cinemas, concert halls, museums and galleries. Yesterday, the 2020 Edinburgh Festivals were abandoned, like the 2020 Olympic Games and, perhaps most damaging of all, the COP26 Climate conference in Glasgow. The consequences for artists, actors, musicians, technical staff and all the others who work, mostly freelance, in…