Common Ground Arts project received £60,000 from the Bring the Power Youth Programme to deliver high-quality artist residencies to 7 Birmingham Special Schools, engaging over 1100 students. Teachers and artists share their professional knowledge and practices in their respective disciplines to create meaningful and accessible artist residencies with meaningful student art outcomes.
These artist residencies take a student-centred approach by personalizing artistic practices in line with the individual SEN needs of students. The resulting student art experiences and outcomes from all seven schools are shared and celebrated during a public exhibition at the Midlands Arts Centre in the summer.
Hipkiss and Graney’s practice explores ideas around collectivity, community, and counter-movements through socially engaged workshops, large-scale interactive installations, and performances. Their performances discuss political and environmental issues, often incorporating elements of magic realism and fictional organizations.
Their practice is rooted in public workshops and co-creation, designed to remove artmaking from a workshop context and deliver it in more traditional social settings such as village fêtes or pub quizzes. They explore ideas of collectively, community, and counter-movements through socially engaged workshops, large-scale interactive installations, and performative outputs. Their performances delve into political and environmental issues, often incorporating magic realism and fictional organizations.
They collaborated with Special Educational Needs school Dame Ellen to develop teaching practices in environmentally focused arts within the school’s outdoor environment while enhancing student engagement and creative exploration, with a focus on eco-printing. Dame Ellen is a primary special educational needs school that supports students with cognition and learning needs, primarily those with severe learning disabilities and/or autism. These students face significant barriers to mainstream arts opportunities due to their emotional regulation needs and sensory processing challenges.
The residency involved painting, eco-printing, relief printing, textile art, and found objects. The classes aimed to be non-verbal, with Hipkiss & Graney demonstrating processes such as “pushing” down on stamps, accompanied by widget cards. Widgets denoted tools and materials such as “paint” and “brush,” with additional widgets used to express creative natural elements like “leaf” and “acorn,” as well as differences between these materials, such as “big” and “small.” Children experienced art-making as individuals, social connections, and self-expression, as well as co-creation of large-scale artworks with others.
“[This project] was a really valuable education, that made us consider the accessibility of our work.
Jonny Graney, Hipkiss & Graney, Artist
Artists strive for everyone to be able to engage with their work, but learning about SEN through this project has highlighted that myself and many other artists do not have experience of SEN children. This means there’s many experiences and identities missing from our collective culture and voice which the Common Ground Arts directly finds and amplifies”
