Introducing: Jess Hunt & East Durham Creates
Each month as part of DUAS Loop we are introducing a local creative, based in the North East. For our second edition we present Jess Hunt, project lead for East Durham Creates. Originally from Hartlepool, Jess completed an art foundation at the Northern School of Art (then CCAD) and then studied Visual Communications in Birmingham, specialising in Illustration.
Amana: Jess, tell me a bit about yourself.
Jess: I’ve always been very arts-driven, interested in drawing and painting and being creative. When I left uni I worked freelance doing graphic design and illustration and also began delivering sessions for a few years before getting involved with art being delivered in different contexts – so in mental health settings, working with older adults and in a community setting as a project co-ordinator, and then later leading the EDC project.
So what made you take that step from being simply someone invested in community that’s around you and then wanting to pursue it in you work life?
I suppose volunteering as a young person made me more aware of the issues that existed from a relatively young age, understanding that gap between arts provision and access to art for people from more deprived communities. It always interested me, but I suppose when you’re just out of university you don’t necessarily know what you want to do with your life. I was interested in doing art for my job, but when I came to do it – purely from the point of view of creating and illustrating – I suppose it took the fun out of it. Just through chance – doing sessional work with people – I started to see the impact it could have on people’s lives... that’s kind of what led me to be involved with East Durham Creates. I was socially aware when I was younger but as I started to work I became more interested in the social aspect as opposed to the practical making of art.
Do you have your own personal artistic practice?
I’m an illustrator and designer by trade, primarily working either digitally or pen and ink with a special passion for comics and graphic novels, but I also do a lot of creative writing and poetry. I wouldn’t call it an artistic practice because I’m not putting on exhibitions at the moment or anything like that, but it’s just a mental health thing of being able to do a drawing from scratch.
Because of work and a young family, I don’t get a huge amount of time to do much of my own thing so I’m really fortunate that I get to be creative in my work. My parents both studied art at university and they were the first people in their families to go to university. They didn’t get to use art in their working life that much, so I’m fortunate to have that.
What is the East Durham Creates project and how did it come about?
We are one of over 30 Creative People and Places Projects funded by Arts Council England – these projects work in areas typically classified as low engagers in arts and culture. The Arts Council did a massive national survey called ‘Active Lives’ and identified these areas – anyone who found themselves in the bottom percentages were invited to apply to become CPP projects (originally this was 10% but has steadily risen to include the bottom third) – East Durham was ranked 4th from bottom in this list of hundreds of places.
CPP projects work in phases generally of around 3 years with a 10 year overall vision, the intention being that each project will have a longer term legacy and develop capacity in their local communities to engage in the future – essentially building an arts ecology and infrastructure in areas that are lacking in provision.
"Our overall aim is purely to provide people in East Durham with more opportunities to engage with and create great arts and culture. "
One of the major driving forces for ours and many other CPP’s is that we work in areas with significant socio and economic challenges and accept that poverty and deprivation, as well as all the other issues they present, has a significant impact on whether people can access arts and culture. We also generally happen in areas where access to arts and culture isn’t equal, often this is primarily geographical – for example we work across the former mining communities of East Durham. This means the majority of our communities are colliery villages with small populations that are physically dispersed.
Our overall aim is purely to provide people in East Durham with more opportunities to engage with and create great arts and culture. We do that in a really broad range of ways from taking people on Go and See visits to things in the wider cultural offer, to commissioning artists to work with the local communities to upskilling local artists and community champions to be confident about programming arts and culture themselves. The initial phase of our project was very much about learning what did and didn’t work, including the danger of airlifting high-end art into an area of low engagement.
Can you run through some of the projects that have taken place as part of EDC?
We’ve done loads of amazing projects that are great for different reasons – our Cultural Hubs for example provides support and training for a network of community centres based in these smaller communities so that they can programme arts and culture confidentially.
When I originally started on the project, I ran a series of Go & Sees, visits to arts and culture venues in the North East. I had some amazing experiences taking kids to the Baltic for the first time, and even older adults to the theatre or cinema for the first time.
"Everything from the plates on the walls to the lampshades that made up the installations came from the community and told their stories and that was really special."
My favourite project was a major commission we did in 2019 called ‘If These Walls Could Talk’ with artists Sally Southern and Nicola Lynch. The project worked with Older Adults over a period of sort of 8-9 months to respond and explore the magic of their everyday lives and the small, individual stories that matter to them. It culminated in the transformation of 5 bus shelters overnight into rooms and spaces that meant something to that audience – a working men’s club, a kitchen, a lounge etc in a major thorough fare in the colliery village of Horden. It had an audience of almost 6000 but it was shaped and made by hundreds of local residents. Everything from the plates on the walls to the lampshades that made up the installations came from the community and told their stories and that was really special. It helped that the weather was glorious and we had around 30 volunteers, many involved in the creation of the work, who manned the shelters, shared their work. The thing that mattered most in that was that the narrative was about people who until then probably thought their stories didn’t matter or that nobody cared about the things they did on a daily basis – but they did and the piece of work is still talked about with pride by the participants who were involved. That’s what made it magic.
How does the project work? How did it involve the local community - artists and creatives, as well as other residents of East Durham?
CPP is all about co-production and community leadership – everything we do is shaped by local people because one of the major barriers for arts engagement that we’ve seen is that feeling that ‘art isn’t for me’. But that’s generally because it’s created and exhibited in spaces that seem a million miles away from somebody who lives in a small former mining village. So we have a community panel and a youth panel, we have community members and champions and local artists who are now more confident not just to be venues or work on a project we give them but also come to us with ideas of their own. We then kind of act as support and guidance to make these projects happen – naturally as time goes on and confidence grows we can continue to step back.
"...everything we do is shaped by local people because one of the major barriers for arts engagement that we’ve seen is that feeling that ‘art isn’t for me’. "
The thing about East Durham in particular is we have a total lack of arts infrastructure – there aren’t any significantly sized galleries or museums, any theatres or music venues so there isn’t necessarily a natural space for what is typically called ‘outreach’ work by larger arts organisations to happen or anyone other than the local Council to drive forward arts and cultural provision – so the result is an area with really low arts engagement and opportunities. It isn’t necessarily a case that people here don’t want to engage with arts and culture, it’s just that there are so many barriers in the way that it doesn’t happen – what we do is try and remove those.
"It isn’t necessarily a case that people here don’t want to engage with arts and culture, it’s just that there are so many barriers in the way that it doesn’t happen – what we do is try and remove those. "
What is the next step for the project?
We’re currently wrapping up our Phase 2 and starting our Phase 3 of delivery – this is the final 3 years so very much driven by that long term legacy element – how do we make this viable without us, what will remain once we’re gone. We’ve coined a term which we call ‘Artification’, this in effect is about how we make our existing infrastructure more able to programme, create, have space for arts and culture in their lives – that includes our lead organisation East Durham Trust committing in the long term to provide arts and culture as part of the support they offer to the local community. We’ve made some great steps with that, centres, artists and organisations are getting their own funding to deliver arts and culture. Naturally Coronavirus has and will have an impact on this but we’re really eager to start moving forward.
The other side of that is what I call ‘communification’ within the Arts Sector – teaching the existing arts and culture infrastructure, which in itself is in a massive crisis, about what they can learn from this kind of co-production and the value of engaging with communities they probably don’t think about on a regular basis. Also, the ways in which arts and culture can have social value and improve other parts of people’s lives, how it can be part of answering the challenges associated with poverty and deprivation, the mental health challenges, the job crisis, environmental issues.
Are there any ways in which students can support the project or get involved in other ways?
Spread the word – what we want for East Durham Creates and the work that comes out of it to hold the same value as what you would see in major arts venues. What we do often steps outside the norms – we do it all in non-traditional arts venues, open spaces, miners halls, local streets so because it isn’t in those arts venues and it often gets labelled as ‘community art’ it somehow has less of a value – when it shouldn’t, it just represents something that is outside the established arts sector.
"What we do often steps outside the norms – we do it all in non-traditional arts venues, open spaces, miners halls, local streets so because it isn’t in those arts venues and it often gets labelled as ‘community art’ it somehow has less of a value – when it shouldn’t, it just represents something that is outside the established arts sector."
As we move into Phase 3 there might be other opportunities as well like volunteering or supporting projects that it would be great to get interested students involved in. The way CPP works is stepped down funding – essentially that means you get a lot the first 3 years and it steadily reduces so building capacity and utilising things like volunteers and external funding become steadily more important.
Naturally supporting our events (by attending them) and building that arts ecology where this is a place you come is also another way you can support us.
And finally, who is your favourite artist?
Hard question! There’s so many but I think in the spirit of Creative People and Places I’d have to go for Grayson Perry. Aside from obviously loving his work, the variety, the context, the crossing of media he does he kind of embraces that idea that art is for everyone and not for a select few. When he did the Art Club on Channel 4 during lockdown it really highlighted how many talented individuals out there are making art but aren’t necessarily considered ‘artists’.
A lot of the work he does draws from ‘normal, everyday people’ and he’s open to including them in the conversation, which I don’t necessarily think is the case for a huge amount of artists at his level. Admittedly the way we do it is an even more extreme version of that (to us essentially every person has the capacity to be their own Grayson Perry) but it’s a step in the right direction.
You can check out the work of East Durham Creates on their instagram or on their website. It is also possible to donate to the amazing work they do, by following this link.
Interview led and edited by Amana Moore
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