Becoming an ‘Irregular’ Art School: Collaborating with learning disabled artists to innovate inclusive arts development and education

A new project at the University of Leeds is seeking to boost the recognition and celebration of learning disabled artists. Working closely with Leeds-based disability art studio Pyramid, it’s investigating ways to better support their professional artistic development. Lead researcher Jade French outlines the innovative and experimental ways the project brings together the worlds of arts practice and social care support.

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I am Professor Simone Buitendijk, since arriving at the University

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I've been amazed by the passion, creativity and ingenuity of the

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It's about research that changes lives.

Welcome to this latest World Changers podcast.

In this edition, we will be exploring ways artists with learning disabilities

can be brought into the mainstream arts world.

The last two decades have seen a growth in inclusive arts practice.

Last year, collective of learning disabled and Neurodivergent

artists were nominated for the Turner Prize.

Despite that notable achievement, many learning disabled artists

still experienced barriers and inequalities.

Joining me to explore this topic is Dr.

Jade French, lecturer from the School of Fine Arts,

History of Arts and Cultural Studies at Leeds.

Jade is a world changer who's leading research around the development

of what she describes as an irregular art school at the University.

The aim of the research is to identify ways of supporting the professional

development, of learning disabled artists and to help them get established.

Jade, thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Hi. Thank you so much.

Hi. Thanks for being here.

Maybe I can start by asking you about

the definition of inclusive art practice.

Can you describe what it is and how it's done?

Yeah, of course.

So interestingly,

there's little kind of consolidated knowledge about

when and how inclusive arts practice came around.

But essentially, inclusive arts practice is a term used to describe

the artwork and creative practice of learning disabled artists,

and that is increasingly been taking place, particularly in the visual

and performing arts.

But crucially, this practice happened with the support

of professional facilitators.

So typically this means that artists without learning

disabilities support learning disabled artists to create that work.

And what that support and collaboration looks like can vary enormously.

Can you describe for me the kind of issues or maybe even stigma,

probably that learning disabled artists may face

and how that could be in the way of getting their work recognised?

Sure.

So learning disabled sources continue to face

a range of kind of obstacles and inequalities.

So just to give a few examples, learning disabled artists

often require the buy in and support of various arts and care professionals.

And this support can be challenging to put into place and maintain.

And it also kind of requires that the people supporting them

see the value of that art in the first place.

Also, lots of learning

disabled artists also have to create their art within an art group context

and lots of inclusive art studios, you know, they’re very group orientated.

And what this means is that artists sometimes struggle to develop their

individual practice or their individual profile beyond their studio group.

And finally, I can know the kind of core inequality

that I've certainly witnessed is around access to arts education,

so lots of artists that you might encounter

practicing contemporary art have been to art school, typically

within a university and studying art in higher education,

you know, it isn't just about getting that qualification in hand.

You know, universities offer cool places where artists experiment

with the practice and they generate peer groups of artists.

And these form kind of core networks that artists use for their careers.

I still collaborate with people that I met on my degree when I went to university.

So at the moment,

learning disabled artists do miss out on those kind of opportunity.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

I never really thought about that, but I do get it.

What do you think is the biggest impediment or can you not say that?

Is it either the fact that indeed their individual work

is not being recognised, which I can imagine would be a great

barrier to an artist's development?

Or is it the fact that they miss out on those opportunities that that non-

learning disabled artists

almost naturally gets when they're going through these programs?

Yeah, I think definitely more recently, it's a mixture between how support

and care packages intersect with being an artist and also learning

disabled artists, accessing those kind of established networks of artists.

Like I said, art schools being one of them within universities

and also artist led spaces

being another which is one of the things we're looking at for my research.

I'm really curious to find out how you got drawn into this

area of research, what's in your life, your background led you to

to research this particularly interesting area?

It's a question I really get commonly asked as well.

You know, how did you end up doing this work?

So when I left school, I, I really wanted to work in the arts.

I really wanted to be an artist.

So I went and did a degree in photography and art,

and then to kind of make ends meet while doing my degree

and just after my degree, I needed kind of flexible work

that I could do and I ended up getting a job

as a support worker for learning disabled people.

And at that time, I should say,

being an artist and doing support work, they felt worlds apart.

They felt completely separate in my mind.

Yeah.

And one day I was working in a day service,

which is a place lots of learning

disabled people go to spend their time during the day,

and one of the arts and crafts people that ran sessions didn't turn up.

And the care manager came over and said, “Oh, Jade, don't you study art.

Don't you have a degree in art?

Can you just do something with the residents? They're all here.

They're all gathered round, you know, in the room, ready to do something.”

And of course, you know, panic, panic, panic.

One earth should I do?

And eventually I ran a session and I absolutely loved it.

And it's that moment where those pieces kind of clicked into place for me.

I was like, okay, this is what I think I want to do.

It's a wonderful story that's really great and it just shows

how serendipitous and lot of those choices are for everybody.

That's that's brilliant.

So that was a while ago.

Yeah. So that was around 2006.

And critically at that time in 2001,

there was a big white paper in the UK

called Valuing People, and that was the first white paper

from the UK government that really looked at

thinking about support for learning disabled people in new ways.

And a big a big part of that was personalisation.

And that really looked at how do we personalise services

for people and how do we make sure people are leading their own services, too?

Yeah, that's that's clearly key how people and leading their own services

and that's also part of your research, isn't it.

So this may actually be a good point to tell me a bit about the research

you're doing and and what you're hoping to achieve with it?

As you mentioned in the introduction, the project is called Irregular

Art Schools and which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

So we began the research in February 2021,

and the project essentially is thinking about

what does professional development look like and feel like

for learning disabled artists living in the Leeds City region?

What did they want and what did they need in order to develop

that creative practice?

So for the project, we wanted to explore how the typical routes

for artist development work or perhaps don't work for these artists.

So looking at artist led spaces, routes of publishing,

higher education, but also thinking about how social class support intersects.

And with all these sectors and supports as well.

Crucially, the project actually came around through conversations I was having

with a local inclusive art studio called Pyramid, which is one of the oldest

inclusive art studios in the UK, which I feel makes Leeds

a particularly vibrant place for studying inclusive arts.

I didn't know that about Leeds.

That's actually really, really interesting.

And why do you call

it a irregular arts school?

Why irregular?

Yeah, a great question.

So there's already interesting

book by Professor Roger Slee who was actually appointed

as a Diamond Jubilee chair in Disability and inclusion here at Leeds.

And his book called The Irregular School,

which is kind of like a provocation where he questions

why they're continuing to think in terms of the regular school

or the special school obstructs progress towards inclusive education.

And I guess I came across that book and I shared it with Pyramid,

who I work with for the research, and we kind of like the idea

of how we might make the University of Leeds

and other cultural spaces in Leeds irregular.

And how are you going to do that?

I really interested in figuring out what you're going to do

with the University of Leeds to make it more irregular.

I really like a concept, I think it’s brilliant.

Yeah, so the research will explore different

approaches and contexts for professional development

with four learning disabled and neurodivergent artists

who are Ria, Liam, Alfie and Victor along with Pyramid staff

Alice, another Alice, Pete and James.

So the project is split into various strengths and crucially it's

an action research project, which means that we're working together

to think about problems by actually trying things out in real life

and in real time and to feedback from what we’ve learnt.

So the first strand is we're actually collaborating with Assembly House,

who are an artist gallery and studio space based in Leeds in the Armley area

and Assembly House are a really kind of important type of space

in most kind of cities and towns in that they're an artists led space.

So the really important part of the arts ecology, I've been working with Pyramid

and Assembly House since January and essentially we've been supporting artists

from these quite different studios, quite contrasting studios, to work together

to think about how studio environments might be more inclusive.

And then the second strand of the project is going to be based in the school

fine art history of art and cultural studies from this September.

I'm really excited that we're going to be welcoming those four artists

to work alongside our students in our studios at Leeds,

and we'll also be doing some workshops with our students to think about.

Now, what does it mean to practice in an art school?

And you know, as we're going through curriculum redefined,

I feel like it's a really kind of valuable opportunity to think through

know pedagogically how do we teach art?

How do we study art? And how can we do that to include a broader range of learners?

And so I'm really excited about that.

And I'm wondering.

What your take is on this kind of art production

and the study of this type of art also possibly, probably

I don’t know, being beneficial for non learning disabled artists.

Because I notice you mentioned curriculum redefined.

I noticed as an educator that often when we're doing things

for learning disabled students or other students,

those interventions are often quite beneficial.

Also for students who don't have those particular issues,

is that your expectation?

Jade that's when we put particular measures

in place to remove barriers for learning

disabled artists that those interventions

would also benefit artists who may not need them as much?

Yeah, so interestingly, lots of the artists that I work with

don't always read and write in the traditional sense

or even sometimes use like spoken language.

So that of course raises some questions about what it means to study art,

to even do assessments and participate in kind of education.

And I think really interestingly, this is a great thing

because I think it enables us to kind of unsettle and to readdress

what are we actually teaching, what are we actually learning and

what are the ways that we can best assess that within the university context?

So I think this will benefit a huge range of learners,

not just necessarily the artists from Pyramid.

So it tends to be that lots of subjects, not just art,

is quite text based and often involves lots of reading and writing,

but pedagogically that might not always

be the best method depending on what it is

your studying.

And there's lots of movements across higher education

which are looking at things like the un-essay

where we're trying to introduce, you know, different ways of assessing work

and also supporting students to define their own assessments too.

And that's something that I think in my experience,

the kind of artists that I work with are extremely adept at.

They don't navigate the World all the time through lots of text or lots of reading

and are always having to come up with really new

and different ways to express themselves.

And I think that would benefit lots of people who are at university.

And maybe even students in completely different subjects,

you can totally imagine engineering students or design students

or probably many others who could benefit from different ways of assessing.

Have you already seen any outcomes of this collaboration yet?

What's your timeline?

When can we expect to to be able to see?

Or maybe use and touch what's coming out of this?

Yeah.

So in August

this year, we're going to be having a kind of informal exhibition

at Assembly House which will share the first strand of the research

and what we've learned from collaborating with Assembly House.

And then from September, the artists from Pyramid

will be working with us in the art school until February,

and we're hoping to have some kind of open studio

or maybe exhibition or event at the end of that period to share

kind of what we've done and what we've learned.

So that that's something I'm looking forward to as well.

That's really brilliant.

Yeah. I can't wait.

I’m definately going to come and take a look.

So another question I had is this about funding

and the support that is needed to make these things happen.

And one of the issues

that you've identified in your research and in your work is how art

and the social care sectors connect to support learning

disabled students.

But I can also imagine that on occasion these systems are

too separate and it's actually not working.

Where do you see barriers to funding or maybe other issues

that could be in the way of making these initiatives a success?

Yeah.

So the ideal model for personalisation is that a person's

car is led by them and that does require quite a lot of time and investment.

So that's increasingly difficult I think, to do in the kind of current landscape

that we're in.

But I also think there's challenges in how being an artist is understood

across different contexts, across all on social care.

And this was kind of brilliantly described by one of the artists,

as she said “Art isn't just something that I do on a Tuesday morning.

Being an artist is who I am.”

And I think here we can kind of see these quite different

ideas of what it means to be an artist,

which has implications, of course, and how that practice might be supported.

I can totally see that's a really important point

and as as a world changer, because that's what we call the people

who've written me these brilliant essays, and you're one of them.

And what what could be the wider ramifications of this research?

How could you see it go beyond what you're doing right now at the University of Leeds?

For me, I would obviously I'd love to see the higher education sector

become more inclusive for learning disabled people.

Of course, recognising we already do, of course, have disabled staff and students.

But there are of course other disabled people because if they have many more

significant support needs aren't able at the moment to study at university.

So I would love to see that

maybe a project like this can show that there are real benefits

actually to really try and challenge who's able to kind of study at HE.

And although this would kind of be quite a significant investment

in disability and maybe more broadly in support services, I think

actually the outcomes of that would be those really exciting

pedagogical questions which, you know, we discussed.

And I guess in terms of research, I would really like to see

learning disabled research as being much more prevalent.

Often learning disabled people are seen as participants in research

rather than as leaders of research with their own agendas.

And that's something that I hope that this project was very much came

about through the conversations and the urgencies that Pyramid

had as an inclusive art studio, and they very much came to me

with their challenges to collaborate with me as a researcher.

So hopefully like to see more of that happening as well.

Yeah, that's so wonderful.

What a great vision.

And then can, can I ask you as as the final question,

where you think the whole area of inclusive arts may be heading?

What is your your grand vision for the future?

In the ten years that I've done inclusive arts,

you know, when I first started, you know, there were lots of studios around

supporting this type of work, but people didn't really know they existed.

And that artwork wasn't often exhibited in galleries or museums.

And now that's certainly changed.

And learning disabled artists are winning major art prizes

and are exhibiting at biennials and things like that.

But where I would like to see things go now, I think is

I would look to see different leadership models in the arts sector start to emerge,

which are inspired by inclusive arts practice.

So I would like to see learning disabled people

being paid curators, gallery programmers, managers, directors.

And this would again

mean we would need to unsettle what we think leadership should look like.

And I think that would mean generating different models, perhaps co

leadership models or introducing facilitatory roles.

But you know, in my experience,

inclusion always necessitates radical transformation.

Those are, I think, great finishing words for this

really interesting conversation.

Thank you so much, Jade.

And huge compliments on the work you're doing.

And I'm really proud that you're part of the University of Leeds

and I'm sure you will have many successes in years to come.

And I mean, I want to come and visit and see what's happening.

So thanks a lot.

This was a really great conversation.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for listening to this podcast from the University of Leeds, to find out

more about the work of our early career researchers and to read essays written by

World Changer researchers, please go to the World Changers page on the University

website, details can be found in the information that accompanies this podcast.