Secret artists

The Cultural Pathfinder programme, funded by the Scottish Government, created 13 projects to examine ways in which cultural activities could be promoted in different communities. Dundee has a very active community sector and an increasingly high profile cultural sector but links between these two sides of the city appeared weak. Our Pathfinder was designed to carry out action research to examine the notion of culture that existed within several neighbourhoods on the periphery of the city and the barriers (either real or imagined) to accessing cultural opportunities. The project was a relatively modest intervention.  It employed two workers for a period of 18 months, working in two communities, each with a population of around 4,000 people.

One of the more surprising findings was that within each of the target communities there were trained artists who, by the nature of employment opportunities, had found work in other fields or were unemployed. These were people who were not known to their neighbours and friends as artists, but who had never given up their interest in photography, painting, writing and other forms of expressive art. Given the opportunity and a little encouragement, the team organised exhibitions of work which had never been shown in public and which provided a platform for these ‘secret artists’ to be rediscovered within their own communities. The wealth of talent which exists within Dundee’s so-called ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods was showcased to packed houses who enjoyed a pot-pourri of entertainment ranging from performance art to Highland dancing.
Our Cultural Pathfinder fundamentally changed the aspirations of the two communities within which the project took place. The management committees of the local community centres are now committed to developing an ongoing programme of cultural activities. They have been able to use their new links with formal cultural agencies in the city such as Dundee Contemporary Arts and the Dundee Rep Theatre to take forward their ambition for a more varied and challenging programme.  For example, as part of Dundee’s traditional music festival, Fest ‘n’ Furious, these local management groups, working in partnership with the Cultural Agencies Network, organised a series of six simultaneous ceilidhs around the city, creating a platform which involved community representatives in a celebration of traditional music and Scotland’s Homecoming Year. The bar has been raised and the challenge is to continue to work with these communities to offer a range of high quality, cultural events at neighbourhood level while promoting access routes to the cultural sector for those whose appetites have been whetted.