Engaging older people in creative thinking: the active energy project

The Active Energy project has involved a participatory arts approach to empowering and stimulating older people’s active creativity. Participants have drawn on their own life experience to propose technological innovation based on local knowledge and real need. Specialist input has then helped turn their ideas into reality, with art installations and exhibitions bringing them to public attention. Themes have included a scheme for powering London with tidal energy generated through the flow of the River Thames, while a seniors’ group in Pittsburgh has addressed the increasingly pressing issue of Alzheimer’s disease. This linking of personal interest to public value has resulted in the work holding particular meaning for the lives of those involved, providing benefit to quality of life and wellbeing. The project raises questions of how the interdisciplinary and person-centred methods of participatory arts can be utilised to make a greater contribution to the health of our nations

Practice-based teaching in MA Art and Social Practice and BA Fine Art Social Practice

This article addresses the practice-based methodologies employed in the teaching of socially engaged art in the Faculty of Arts and Creative Industries at Middlesex University

Active Energy: Communities countering Climate Change

This long term project commenced as a response to research into why older people’s experience was failing to inform development of new technologies. Loraine Leeson met an East London based seniors group called The Geezers, who wished to work with tidal power. Between then they enlisted engineers and developed a prototype turbine for the River Thames, held two exhibitions, ran workshops with young people to produce a wind turbine for the roof of the seniors’ hall, contributed to three university research projects, conducted joint public presentations, collaborated online with seniors in Pittsburgh, and produced floating water wheels to provide aeration for London rivers, the latest installed in 2019 in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

Our Land: creative approaches to the redevelopment of London’s Docklands

Large-scale re-development of post-industrial sites can easily railroad over the needs or wishes of its existing inhabitants, or at best involve them in peripheral consultation. However, when a community is highly organised and also collaborates with others to gather expertise and develop effective means of communication, it has the ability to re-envision a future that can meet the needs of all concerned. The Docklands Community Poster project engaged with a cluster of waterfront communities in the 1980s, which used the arts to influence the regeneration of the London Docklands.. Close collaboration between local people, activists and artists led to a range of interventions implemented over a ten year period that included a series of large-scale photo-murals, travelling exhibitions, initiatives and events such as the People’s Armadas to Parliament and the People’s Plan for the Royal Docks. The article makes an argument for why art can be an effective tool in social transformation and highlights its role in documenting and making visible the intangible cultural heritage of the communities it serves

Make a difference: collaboration and participation in arts-led research

Loraine Leeson discusses the way that creative process can effectively lead research enquiry. Thinking about art as a process and not just a product of research can offer a means of bringing the imagination more fully into play and serve to release the creative energies of others in order to spark the momentum that enables an arts-led intervention to take effect in the wider world

Art Practice and the Community

ART AS SOCIAL ACTION will be a general introduction and textbook to the field of social practice art and include valuable lesson plans offering examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both the college and high school levels. With contributions written by leading social practice artists, teachers and thinkers it's content will be arranged thematically to around such themes as labor rights, environmental justice, urban policy, the rights of women and girls, inequality, migrant's rights, Black Lives Matter, the rights of prisoner's and the global nexus of art/labor/capital among other areas of topical concern. Some lesson plans will be written by the students, alumni and faculty members of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum. The book will consist of two main parts. A set of introductory materials focused on the concept of teaching socially engaged art (with some of these essays having an associated 20 minute podcast created for classroom use online at: http://www.socialpracticequeens.org/ ). Part two of the book will consist of two dozen actual lesson plans

Citizen innovation: DIY design and the Thames water turbine

“When electricity prices prevent older people from heating their homes, and the River Thames is just down the road, why are we not using it to power our city?” was a question posed by a member of the Geezers Club at an AgeUK centre in East London. The Geezers are a group of older men aged from 55 to late 80’s, who meet weekly in Tower Hamlets. For the last five years they have been working with artist Loraine Leeson, engineer Toby Borland and others to realise their dream of using the River Thames to provide energy for London’s riverside communities. The project was initiated by an art commission responding to the Democratising Technology research project being carried out by Ann Light and others at Queen Mary University of London that questioned why the extensive life experience of older people was failing to inform new developments in technology. Members of the Geezers group were able to recollect developments in tidal and wave power from years earlier, many of which were brought to a premature end in the 1980’s. Though research into energy from wind turbines did re-commence, the power of the Thames remains relatively untapped to this day. During the life of the project Active Energy has involved a practical proposal for installing tidal turbines at the Thames Barrier, renewable energy workshops at a local school, a wind-driven public light-work for the roof of an Age UK centre, prototyping workshops at University of East London and art exhibitions in both the UK and USA that have brought these issues to public attention. The most recent phase of the project has been to create an ultra low-cost turbine to produce energy from the river and prompt a debate on the use of the River Thames as a source of energy for the city. The process of creative facilitation that has driven this work and fostered citizen-led innovation by older people has gained international attention, whilst the small scale turbine that has been designed specifically for slow moving tidal rivers is thought to be the first of its kind and capable of low-cost replication for developing nations overseas