Art sale and definitions/descriptive language, the person and art.

Hi everyone, thank you for a great day yesterday, quality not quantity was the name of the day, we had a steady stream of visitors and supporters and we are all becoming art collectors i reckon, such a wonderful range of art for sale and we sold well, eating cake, drinking tea and listening to some fantastic music.
Zoe took some good photos with her new camera so photos coming soon or next term. Thank you to everyone who helped and make it happen.
It's in the Shallal calendar now and we will shape it differently each year but the open mike session is firmly established and a chance for us to appreciate talent and have fun.

I am often interested to see where the morning emails lead me, i had no intention of doing much but sending a quick message this morning but ended up on http://www.disabilityartsinternational.org/
and found myself writing this:

Hi, 

I have just been on your website, your link was sent to me by our chairperson. I have been involved in working with people with various support needs all my career and am saddened to find the Disability term still put before the art. We work in a rural but highly artistic area, in West and mid Cornwall. The population is not dense and so we have been a mixture of artists from the beginning although we grew from members of a local Gateway Club. From the start we had a mother involved and then local artists went on to ask to join us, currently we have a real mix and are finding more people with chronic health conditions working with us than before.

We feel very little identity with the term disability except in people's support needs, we resonate with "We know that many artists do not wish for their work only to be seen in one narrow context"

We do not at present make political work, to see people working together is a political statement for inclusion and fairness. The Community Dance Foundation also use Deaf and Disabled artists. I feel sad as i would not want to promote our work through these established avenues, as i feel it would not be supporting the artists i work with by defining them by their support needs before their person.

Many years ago there was a People First campaign, where did all that go?

too often it is the people with the loudest voices who define movements and those gentler, less angry ones do not get heard.

It is a fascinating website and it looks as if some wonderful things are happening for people, but please drop all the labels and just add them when and if necessary after the person /artist, or as the artist chooses to define themselves and don't lump everyone together.

I realise this is the tip of the iceberg in a long historical arts debate but i just want to add a voice, as I have worked in this field for approx 30 years, and been refining and observing my use of language and description over that time.

I don't suppose it will make much difference and have written to Community Dance Foundation in the past as well, but we can only hope and stay true to our experience and what we believe in. Some people in Shallal are happy to use labels around their support needs and some aren't, when we started one of our founding highly talented dancers Tim was not, so his perspective combined with Diana Morris's well worked out ethos and politics and our feelings and observations of how we wanted to work together defined our ethos. We have had difficulty keeping labels out of press write ups etc, ( and haven't always succeeded) but that is our policy. We will use them in funding applications if necessary ( though we prefer not to) as we often need double the support within sessions to provide a safe environment, and other enabling factors such as transport. We request that people come to our sessions with 'adequate support' and this is individual.

I will stop now, this is a dense multi perspective area/debate and i haven't set out to write an essay on it this morning, but just to wave a flag from the corner of Britain and say we don't all feel an alignment with the language and culture being promoted and please listen to, look out for and include the other voices.

( The other problem with early morning " where do your emails lead you" is my poor sentence construction etc, so an apology as not enough re reads in any of the above! resulting in poor writing).

Another sunny Cornish day rises to greet us.

BIg thank you to a Foundation which wishes to remain unnamed for funding a really exciting new Wardrobe Project, more soon!

and a quick photo i meant to add yesterday... 

La Mer at Godolphin House
Photo Ian While

final word is i am now off to write that original message email!