In my nearly 20 years of creative work, I’ve developed a real passion for creating artwork with the input of others, either in group making or through contributions of stories. In this blog / podcast I’m sharing my piece of reflective writing that I share first in my Cultures of Care Group in June 2024. You can read my essay below or listen to the podcast if you prefer.
Gallery of co-creation projects here
The next Cultures of Care Group sessions in July, August and September are open for bookings now, and I would love it if you could join me then. The sessions are free.
If this reflective thinking sounds like something you would like to do, have a look at my Reflective Writing for Creative Practice course. It includes three months of prompts and advice for developing your own reflective writing / journalling around a creative practice, business or other creative work. We begin 28th June.
Play here
Download the full transcript here
There are as many interpretations of the term co-creation as there are artists working with it. It means different things in different contexts and there really isn’t a clear definition to this term in relation to artist practice. I first came across the idea in the museum sector, which I used to work in, where it was used to describe exhibition development alongside a community group or visitors with a specialist knowledge or interest. That’s really developed hugely in recent years and there’s some really impactful co-created, co-produced or co-curated work going on in those kind of settings – those terms can be used fairly interchangeably as far as I can tell. In artist practice there are two main strands of co-creation, I’ll explain them both and then focus on one. For many of us creatives, a major part of our income and creative practice is community work – this is usually projects commissioned by an organisation, charity or funder to work with a specific group of people to create something, could be an artwork, an exhibition, an event or really any number of things. How it often works is that the artist develops a concept and participants make elements of it, or in public art commissions, often the public share development ideas and the artist incorporates some of that into the final work. In practice this varies hugely depending on the group, the artist and the aims of the project. I’ve worked on many of these kind of projects in the last 20 years including ones where the community participants have total creative control of what they do and ones where the artistic direction is very closely controlled by me and all kinds of other outcomes in between, for good or bad. I have a lot of thoughts about this but actually that’s not what I’m going to focus on for this session, maybe I’ll come back to it another time.
What I want to really explore now is co-creation in the development of my own work – artworks that I exhibit as my own (co-created) work. There’s a fine line between co-created artist pieces and community co-created artist pieces but for me they are distinct. In a community project, the theme or the content is defined or developed by the funder or ideally, by the participants themselves. In artist co-created work, I define the concept and retain creative control but incorporate input from others in a range of different ways. Sometimes this is participant-made and sometimes it is participants sharing input which I make. In the participant-made model it can be hard to identify the difference between this and community co-creation, but it usually comes down to whether you are working with a defined community group in person or if it is a ‘send me your contributions’ type project. As I have said, I do a lot of both and both have enormous value but I strongly believe that the ‘send me your contributions’ model isn’t community practice in the same way, generally speaking (there will be nuances here).
Some examples might be useful here. Years ago, I attended a number of events in the city of Leicester to promote my then new sewing studio. I offered a simple sewing activity for visitors to make small elements which I assembled (with volunteer help) into a garment. It was not intended to be an artwork but it turned into one and I went on to exhibit this piece in a number of exhibitions with the clear labelling that it was made by multiple participants not just by me. It was at the time, quite a departure for me to include this in exhibitions of ‘my work’. It was also significant that the galleries chose to share it in their main exhibitions rather than relegated to the ‘community corridor’ where so many projects end up. I really loved how democratic this was, how non-hierarchical it was, how powerful it was for those non-professional makers to have their work in an exhibition. I loved it! I also realised that I should have kept the details of everyone who participated and kept them informed of the exhibition. That’s something I have continue to fail to do and am full of good intentions but apparently not full of administrative efficiency. I’m not proud of this.
Failings aside, that project created, almost accidentally, a new way of working for me which I found really exciting. I have since then collaborated with other people in many different ways on a dozen or so projects and have more in development. I’m going to mention a few and instead of describing them in detail, I will create (at some point soon) a gallery on my website of some of these projects.
Looking back at my project, I can divide them into loose groupings of the kind of input others have in these artworks.
Words
The one I use most often is the gathering of stories or narratives which I include in my work, usually in the form of words. In my 2015 exhibition Narrative Threads I collected textile memories which volunteers stitched and printed onto cloth. In my 2018 Emotional Repair exhibition I asked for the names of loved ones who had died young and I stitched them into a collective memorial which was an incredibly moving process and very impactful for the contributors. More recently at the end of my criminal quilts project I came up with the idea of Words about Women, a collection of positive and negative words used to label women from the 19th century prison documents to personal experiences today. I’ve got another similar concept in development for an exhibition next year which I hope many of you will contribute to.
Interactions
Something I have really enjoyed is gathering interactions to my work. This really only works in exhibitions where the gallery is on board with the idea of altering or changing work through visitor engagement, and so it hasn’t happened as much as I would like. My Beauty of Stains series are tablecloths stitched with the marks of cups of tea and glasses of wine at gallery events and cafes. I have tried similar engagements since but it’s actually quite tricky to find the right set-up and also it relies on the public understanding your idea and engaging with the process. This concept of having an artwork which the public can interact with and add to is not unique, it happens a lot, particularly in textiles, but it usually requires the artist or a facilitator alongside to encourage engagement. The beauty of my Beauty of Stains piece is that it was just a tablecloth in a cafe being used, there was no requirement of engagement or creative skill. I think about this way of working a lot and it’s something I will come back to in the future when the location / audience is right.
Making
This is the most common input method in my work and one which I return to regularly. There’s some overlap with the words input, as often I’m asking people to make the words, but not always. The making element has two distinct parts as well, there’s a straightforward contribution where I give defined parameters and ask for the participant to make an element – Words about Women was like this – and there’s amore creative variation on this. I call this Interpretation & Making engagement. In this model, I give a brief or a task for the participant to interpret and develop their own ideas and then make into a piece. I used this model in my Criminal Quilts project & set it as a challenge to make a quilt square using a data set rather than visual imagery. I stopped sign ups at 100 and fortunately only 30 or so delivered a finished piece, which was just as well or it would have been huge. The result though was a wonderful collaborative quilt with a mix of nuanced, complex stories and more straightforward interpretations with a lot of different techniques and ideas expressed in my defined colour palette. The piece was incredibly popular in the touring exhibition and indeed all the collaborative pieces in that project were so much appreciated. It’s a real pleasure to have initiated such a creative and joyful collaboration. Not all projects can be as successful as this one, there’s always a risk of getting nothing back and no interest but on the whole my connection with my audiences means I get really good feedback and engagement which makes these projects so worthwhile. I tried it again with my genetics project, sending out hundreds of Petri dishes all over the world and receiving them back with personal interpretations of genetics in tiny artworks. The contributors to this range from primary schools to professional artists and all the works are displayed together, without hierarchy and without caveats or patronising labelling dividing the professionals from the ‘others’.
Another example of this way of working with a totally different outcome has been my Maker Membership online exhibitions which I have done the last couple of years. Members are invited to create a piece of work following a brief I’ve set which I share in an online group exhibition. For some it was the first time they had ever exhibited or shown their work, the first time they had to take great photos and write about it, while for others exhibiting is their professional practice and all these artists works are shown together, a co-created space full of support and empowerment.
I’ve mentioned intention and purpose and impact here and there throughout those examples. In preparing this talk I’ve really looked closely at all of those factors and asked myself the question “Why do I do this kind of work?” It’s not straightforward, it’s not easy and it poses an admin challenge which I am totally ill-equipped for! But I love it, so much.
The cynical side of my would say that it’s a clever way of achieving my community engagement targets required of public funding. It is a very good way for that. It ticks boxes. But what I realise now is that I came up with the concept from entirely non-funding route, from a self-publicity route and then realised that it had so much more value. Also I think there’s nothing to be ashamed of for creating ways of ticking those public engagement boxes if the projects themselves are of value to the participants and to the exhibition / project overall, and added bonus if they are also of value to me (which I have no doubt that they are). Looking back I started doing this kind of work in projects with schools, realising that the co-creating method was far more engaging to me and the students than a simpler “I design, you make” model. I wanted to take that creative process into more of my own artwork rather than just when I made with schools or other community groups and left the artwork on their walls!
I have included a co-creation element of nearly all my funded projects in the last few years, not just because it ticks their boxes but because it ticks my boxes too. It is a way of working which is manageable for my health, in comparison to running workshops and it is so inspiring to see what people come back with and how they engage with the ideas I’m putting out. What I’ve seen over the last few years since my Narrative Threads exhibition is that while this way of working is creatively-inspiring to me, so it is to the participants and contributors, in a variety of different ways.
Funding aside, I love this work because it is a caring way of working and fits into my model of a care-based practice where curiosity leads to connection which leads to care. Looking at co-creation through this lens, the curiosity is my interest in other people’s stories, ideas, interpretations and creative practice, the projects themselves either create or deepen connections and engagement with the subject or the people themselves and the care element is the feelings that this work produces some of which I have mentioned: the democracy or lack of hierarchy, the highlighting of personal stories and experiences, the empowering of others to explore their own creative practice in a professional context and the sense of community and belonging that being part of a project can create.
My work only has an impact if others engage with it and through co-creation there is a deep engagement with my messages, creating a network of curiosity and connection. Co-creation is about valuing diverse stories and contributions and celebrating the strength of those varied ways of living, working, thinking and making. Multiple voices combined are much stronger and more powerful than just one voice. It creates a network of engaged and empowered people who share the project and the message more widely. Co-creation can highlight unseen stories and make messages accessible to others, participation can inspire and empower, it can raise self-esteem and open new doors to creative expression and new ways of thinking. It demystifies the artist process and demonstrates an openness to sharing ideas and making work in a democratic way. By relinquishing full control of the outcomes, I am open to new ways of seeing, it refreshes and energises my creative practice. The care goes both ways. I am nourished by the engagement and contributions of others while they are nourished by being seen and heard and valued. It is not remotely a box-ticking activity for me, it is deeply caring practice which feeds my creative soul and shares that nourishment with others.
I hope it’s clear from this that there’s no secret or magic formula for building caring co-creation into a creative practice. I did not learn how to do this from a course or a book, I learned it through experience and experimentation, trial and error, but most of all I learned it from all the wonderful contributors, co-creators I have had the privilege to work with.
Ruth Singer 
Let me know what you think