Telford Community Arts was set up in 1974 by Graham Woodruff and Cathy Mackerras. It grew to a core team of six community artists, with many additional people working on shorter term projects. Each year between 1974 and 1989, groups of local residents met together once or twice a week to do community arts. They created theatre and video films, they worked with clay and textiles and on banners, they made murals, music, photography, books, magazines, sculpture, dance and silkscreen posters.
Our workshops emphasised group activity where individuals can share their ideas, experiences and ambitions, thereby learning from each other.
This wide range of activity involved some 4000 people in over 300 groups and many hundreds of hours of participation. There were, for example, over 100 performances of over 30 different theatre productions. The art created collectively through participation in workshops was both a reflection of and on the real world.
More often than not the artistic products say something about the subjects nearest to the hearts and minds of working class people, such as money, jobs, nurseries, schools, housing, social and health care, transport and community resources. On occasions, the workshops were linked to a particular community campaign.
A carnival ‘marrow’ float, for example, campaigned for allotments, a video challenged the Corporation’s plan to build executive houses in the Town Park, a banner argued for a 30 mph speed limit on the Sutton Hill perimeter road, and two of the plays were about the need for a Telford Hospital and a Sutton Hill Nursery.
A similar emphasis applied to our work with young people, whether in weekly workshops or the various summer holiday arts schemes we initiated.
Our Madeley Print Shop’s main concern was also to develop group expression in many forms. This included photography, magazines, newspapers, calendars, cartoons, posters and books of all kinds. The Print Shop was also an important resource for other community groups to produce low run advertising, papers, posters and leaflets. Wherever possible our objective was to work through the total creative process from the first exchanges of ideas and experiences to the presentation of the final product to a wider audience.
We developed many Community Celebrations and a programme of visiting artists, promoting the visits to Telford of over 100 outstanding professional companies and artists.
Our Community Celebrations enabled us to make contact with many more Telford people from both the old and new areas of the town and provided an opportunity for workshop groups to present their work to the wider community. Visiting artists gave opportunities for local people to develop their artistic skills through interaction with professional experts.
telfordcommunityarts.org 