François Matarasso

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  • Guest post: Arts and older people in Wales

    David Cutler, the Director of the Baring Foundation (of which I’m a trustee) has been reflecting on the strength of art work with older people in Wales. Here he describes some of the work that has been developing over the past decade and suggests some reasons for its success; the original post is here.  Welsh magic: what’s behind…

  • Speaking of unspoken things

    Western medicine has pushed back the frontiers of disease, making death rarer, at least in the sense that it does not intrude into our lives with the brutality with which it visited the Victorians. In the 19th century death often came for the young and those in the prime of life. There can have been…

  • Enjoy the walk

    Today, I realised that I’ve spent six months writing the wrong book. Or at least writing what I thought someone else might want. I’d forgotten why, several years ago, I began to look for a new language in which to talk about people’s experience of art, in the various explorations I called Regular Marvels. Instead,…

  • I am not the milkman of human kindness

    If you’re lonely, I will call – If you’re poorly, I will send poetry Billy Bragg, The Milkman of Human Kindness (1983) I don’t remember when artists began to speak of ‘delivering’ projects, but it may have been around the time when delivery entered the rhetoric of politics. That was worrying in itself – after…

  • Keeping the art in focus

    Participatory art projects can fail for the same reasons that all projects. The bigger causes – inexperience, incompetence, lack of imagination, ego – lead to smaller and more specific ones, such as poor planning, inadequate resources and personality clashes. But participatory art projects can also fail for a reason that is specific to the practice –…

  • Co-creation and collective action, then and now

    It is a curious thing that the first official account of community arts in Britain should have been overseen by a classicist. Professor Harold Baldry (1907-91) had been Professor of Classics at Southampton University and Chairman of Southern Arts Association before becoming a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1973. The year…