Love, love, love, love is all you need.
A talk by Stephen Broadbent; Artist and Designer.
12th October 2010 Ellesmere Port Civic Centre.
A joint event between South Wirral Art Society and West Cheshire College.
A bit of a liberty I suppose taking Beatles lyrics and using them this way as a title for Stephen’s talk – but I have a defence that is based on Stephen’s Liverpool connections and on the core message of:
- LOVE – the chosen material and medium.
- LOVE – the place or person you intend to represent.
- LOVE – the ideas, concept and thinking that you put into your work.
Hence the title! But love is not the only thing you need and a number of other key ideas for me sprang out of the talk:
- Stephen talked about his early days and the tremendous influence that the ‘scouse’ artist Arthur Dooley had on his career. This fired up his natural desire to make things and helped him down the road of community and public art as his artistic outlet.
- Art can be seen as one of the driving forces of a community and this was illustrated by his ‘Reconciliation’ work which involved the young people of Belfast, Glasgow and Liverpool at a time of great community conflict, coming together to create a sculpture. The same concept was used again, but this time for the communities of Liverpool, Virginia and West Africa in response to the slave trade of previous centuries.
- Boldness and not being afraid to make mistakes. This was illustrated by the work he completed outside the town hall in Chester. Where you might expect heroic figures or statues of civic dignitaries we find a semi – abstract creation born out of engagement with the community, making comment about what it means to be a citizen.
- Surplus of meaning. It is a difficult concept to understand, well at least I found it difficult, but this is what I understand it to be and maybe that is all I need and you, dear reader will have to make your own mind up! I think it is about the meaning an artist puts into their creation, but that creation will have more and other meanings to those that view it. In this way the work stays alive and continues to give – spilling its surplus of meaning into the community.
- Research your ideas/environment/subject. This has to be the starting point before moving onto the doing.
- Sense of place. This is another concept that emerged from Stephen’s talk especially as his career has moved more towards wider works on whole environments. He talked about taking time to look for the visual clues, and to hear the voices of a locality in order to unravel the story and then to use that to inform your artistic response. This will help to leave a legacy relevant to the area that will continue to engage people.
This might seem a strange write up for me to produce, but if we are to gain as artists we need to give time to thinking about just such topics, and concepts. I could have produced a list of Stephen’s projects with some comments, but his own web site on:
http://sbal.co.uk/
does a better job than I would have done, and I firmly believe that time spent doing a bit of thinking about art could do us all good! So how about taking one of our practical evenings for a chat/discussion on such topics and how we might use them – and soon while this is all still fresh!
I will finish (is that faint cheers I can hear?), with a couple of final thoughts that came out of the talk.
Artists are part of the culture of the community and should help to formulate and ask the questions of society.
View your art as a gift to another.
Thank you to all those that attended, and an especially big thank you to Stephen.
Peter Appleton.
Secretary.