An important feature of Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art (http://bloomsbury.com/uk/culture-democracy-and-the-right-to-make-art-9781474258357/) is the wonderful set of illustrations created for the book by Jennifer Williams, founder of the Centre for Creative Communities. The final chapter describes how Jennifer worked on these, paying close attention to the metaphors and other turns of speech used by the artists who were interviewed for this book to describe the early days of the Community Arts Movement. Alison Jeffers writes ‘The images that she has produced create a sense of familiarity, partly because they are based on phrases that readers might recognize. However, in illustrating them the metaphor behind them is revealed which generates a slightly jarring quality, asking the reader to reconsider the apparently familiar. Jennifer’s method of populating everyday recognizable backgrounds with slightly disquieting little human figures is a tactic which invites readers to shift their perspective by stopping to think about how to interpret these common phrases in relation to the ideas explored throughout the book’. ‘In at the Deep End’(above) reflects the sense that many artists had that they were experimenting with new ways of working and making different kinds of connections with communities, with varying degrees of success!

‘Funding the Dandelions’ (below) refers to an image from the Seventies which Gerri Moriarty describes as ‘coordinated by Martin Goodrich of Free Form Arts Trust, who drilled a number of Association for Community Arts members and supporters in a Chinese Placard demonstration on the pavement opposite 105 Piccadilly Gardens, the offices of ACGB (the then Arts Council of Great Britain)Each of us carried an individual placard, which fitted together to make a huge image; on one side, there was a profusion of golden dandelions surrounding a single rose, dripping poison and covered in thorns (a reference to limiting public funding to a small number of ‘centres of artistic excellence’). On the other side a slogan read ‘Never Mind the Roses, Fund the Dandelions’.

Watch out for next month’s blog, when Alison Jeffers will discuss one of the key conclusions of our research into the early days of the Community Arts Movement.