Deliver for everybody, reach everywhere

Arts Council England’s new strategic framework promises to support excellence, deliver for everybody and reach everywhere. Achieving excellence – whatever that means – is in itself a huge challenge, so how do you also deliver on that promise of making sure it reaches everybody, everywhere?

There are few British artists better placed to answer this question than Bristol-based Luke Jerram. Surely one of Britain’s top arts exporters, Luke has had more than 1,000 exhibitions in over 70 countries across the globe, with his Museum of the Moon piece alone being seen by more than 30 million worldwide. At the time of writing, he’s opening at new exhibitions in four different UK venues with three different works at the Saatchi Gallery, Southbank Centre, Royal Museums Greenwich and with our CDF Network partners in Wakefield at the CDF-funded cultural venue, Wakefield Exchange.  Ahead of these openings, Five10Twelve’s Jason Jones-Hall reached out to Luke to talk about how work with global appeal still manages to connect to individual people and places, support local cultural infrastructure and how the success of Luke’s touring model has helped him support and reinvest in communities at home and abroad through the Jerram Foundation…

Jason Jones-Hall (JJH):
With a lot of the work that we talk about through the Cultural Placemaking site and work we do through the CDF Network, we look at how the work responds to a local place, a very specific place – often very, very hyper local. And some of your work absolutely does that. I know the piece you’ve got coming up with the Southbank Centre is in that vein, but some of the pieces like Helios or the moon, and Gaia are much more global – no pun intended. So how do you see your work fitting in that wider placemaking perspective?

Luke Jerram (LJ):
I try to make artwork that has multiple doors of entry. When developing a new artwork I ask myself how would a 4 year old child experience and interpret this artwork? How would a dustman, architect, curator, artist or scientist or interpret it? I try and make art that has multiple doors of entry, so they can be accessed and interpreted (and dare I say sometimes even enjoyed) in different ways, depending on what people bring to them.

The second point, I suppose, is I like creating artwork that leaves space for other people to be creative. So projects like my street piano project, Play Me I’m Yours, the  Museum of the Moon and the earth artwork Gaia and the sun artwork Helios also leave space for other people to be creative. They act as this installation for people to enjoy in a passive way, but also they provide opportunities for the local host to programme a whole range of activities that can take place around those works.

And in that way, the artworks then express something about the local place and the local creativity, the aims and ambitions of the arts organisations who are hosting the artwork. And for me, I think that’s really fun and really enjoyable.

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LJ (cont’d): Those events can be as simple as someone reading a story to children beneath the Moon, or someone running a yoga lesson under the artwork. We’ve seen absolutely everything from Jedi Knight training underneath the moon at BlueDot Festival, to the artwork being presented for contestants to dance beneath on Strictly Come Dancing. This August, we’ve got the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra that will be performing underneath Gaia at the Royal Festival Hall in London. I really like that sort of openness. And that’s when I think art projects get really interesting, when you leave space for other people to be creative, because I’m never entirely sure what you’re going to get.

Cultural Infrastructure

JJH: I’m looking at now at Wakefield Exchange, for example, and there’s around 15-20 different activities, everything from yoga to astronaut training, pop-up planetarium, creative drop in sessions, all sorts of stuff that’s programmed around it. That feels really important for two reasons. As you say, it’s important for the communities to engage with the artwork and to create their own things from it, but also for those venues. It’s essentially supporting that cultural infrastructure and giving them other opportunities to bring people in, to create revenue opportunities through it and to programme around the work. To what extent does your work essentially become part of the cultural infrastructure in that it’s providing that platform for these things to happen?

LJ: I like the fact that my artworks are presented by arts organisations right across the country and are generally free to visit. And for me, I think that’s important to try and make artwork accessible to everybody. Not just the elite in London who can afford, 30 quid tickets. But actually, by having companion ticketed events underneath my artworks, they can act as an income stream for those venues. Arts organisations have been struggling because of funding cuts over the last couple of decades. So if you can create an opportunity for an organisation to raise their profile, connect with large brand new audiences and make money, then you’re really in business, aren’t you? It’s really exciting.

What I’ve also noticed is that if you invite people to an astronomy lecture in a local church, you might get 10 people turn up, whereas if you have an astronomy lecture underneath the moon in the same church, you’ll suddenly sell 300 tickets, so that’s also been quite interesting and useful for the organisations and the performers that might do a concert underneath the moon, for example. It’s very special, so that’s really fun.

JJH: Thinking about Wakefield Exchange, I know that all the activities they’ve programmed around it, they’re all free activities, but of course, they can generate revenue from people spending money in a gift shop or in the food outlets they have around the venue, for example, but fundamentally, the artwork itself is free for the public and activities around it are free for the public.

LJ: I think that’s really important. I want to make artwork that’s accessible to everybody. I grew up without access to art museums and high culture. I was 17 years old by the time I got to go to a contemporary art gallery. It was another 10years or so before I felt I could really afford to buy a ticket to an art exhibition in London.

Revenue programmes

JJH: It’s that thinking about organisations and particularly the venues that you work with, so they think of other ways to generate revenue without having to actually charge people to see the artwork. In a sense, these works are also creating a platform to help support host venues and the local creative and cultural economy?

LJ: In January, I had a spare Helios sun artwork and loaned it to the local community-run swimming pool who used it to raise £50,000 for their new solar panels. I’m helping charities and arts organisations reach their targets and it’s very rewarding for everyone involved. We put the Earth artwork in Hull Minster and worked with the Woodland Trust.  We filled it with trees, but we also gave away over 1000 little trees to visitors for them to plant in their back gardens. So, there’s a really nice legacy there.

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JJH: I’m sure there are also public engagement and participation opportunities for host organisations based on the kind of visitor numbers and footfall your works generate?

LJ: Arts organisations and venues often get measured on their impact. They get measured on the press coverage and their reach into the community and audience numbers. The artworks I’ve been creating commonly have 50,000 – 100,000 visitors come and see them. And so it’s been very useful as a way of drawing in new audiences that wouldn’t ordinarily perhaps go into a cathedral or local arts gallery or museum. When you study the audience numbers, we sometimes find 30-50% of the population of a town or city will have seen the artwork. As well as connecting with and serving a community, a venue can make serious money, just from the donations they receive.

JJH: That certainly chimes with what we’ve heard from some of the CDF Network partners that have exhibited your work. I know anecdotally in Barnstaple, for example, that when they exhibited the Museum of the Moon in Pannier Market – funded through the Cultural Development Fund revenue programme – they massively over-achieved on their community engagement targets for the whole three year programme with just that one activity.

LJ: Yeah, I’m really proud and it works every time. We had 83,000 people visit Hull Minster to go and see the moon there, which was the largest audience that they have had in their 750 year history. So these artworks draw in new audiences and give them a new purpose and place in those communities.

Delivering for everyone

JJH: To what extent you get involved in developing those ideas or incentivising or promoting or working with the host venues to create these kind of opportunities?

LJ: When it comes down to programming events beneath the artwork, we generally leave organisations to it. We create suggestions and share ideas of things we’ve done before with that kind of work, whether it’s a silent disco or a yoga lesson or a science talk or whatever it is. And then we leave them to think about what they might like to do and they’ll come forward with a programme of events. Just last week, we had the Inspiral Carpets who made a music video with Brian Cox underneath the sun in Victoria Bath House in Manchester. These kind of weird, unexpected things can happen and its exciting. But we do have some rules as we don’t want people using the artwork as just a backdrop to promote a commercial product, or selling things that are bad for the environment. We don’t want the art being used for greenwashing or art washing, and for me, that’s important.

JJH: So if it’s making commercial revenues for an arts organisation or for public good – absolutely fine. But not if it’s being misused, let’s say?

LJ: Public art can be used and read as a political tool. We often have politicians (sometimes uninvited) turning up to help launch my artworks. I don’t allow certain countries to present my artwork and to be seen to be democratic and giving it to their community, when they’re bombing other countries or have oppressive regimes. I’ve turned down several opportunities to present my artwork in Israel for instance – opting instead to present my installation in Palestine.

Reaching everywhere

JJH: The interesting thing about a lot of your work is that you don’t seem constrained by saying this has to be in an art centre or gallery, for example. It’s everything from churches to art centres, science centres, the Pannier Market in Barnstaple or outdoor spaces. It’s a very open approach to what the infrastructure is – or what infrastructure is or isn’t available – and what you can use, to position this work and present the artwork.

LJ: The artworks resonate slightly differently depending on where you put them. If you put the earth in a swimming pool, you can swim out underneath it and that’s amazing. But also you can put it in a science museum, you can put it in a cathedral, put it in a contemporary art gallery, or environmental conference and the context changes the interpretation of it. I’m quite interested to see how that works. I generally turn down opportunities to present installations in shopping malls, which are really awful, commercial, oppressive spaces in which to try and present work.

JJH: Cultural infrastructure is something we look at very closely with a lot of the work we do, both through mapping of the cultural infrastructure across the UK, but also the importance of it – particularly in towns like Grimsby or Barnstable where perhaps cultural infrastructure or access to it might not be perceived as being so strong.

LJ: My daughter has put together a map of all the exhibitions I’ve had across the world. I think art should be accessible to everybody. Art in the UK shouldn’t all just be happening in London. If anything, art and culture is even more important in places like Scunthorpe, Doncaster and Sunderland. I’m proud that we can take an artwork and install for people in Grimsby before it travels to Paris, London or Tokyo. This open approach also allows us to scale costs accordingly – so in places like Dubai allow us to charge a little bit more to present the artwork, which helps us to keep it affordable for an exhibition in Doncaster, for example.

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JJH: That’s a great illustration of those three pillars in the new Arts Council framework – promising to deliver excellence, reach everybody and reach everywhere. That’s a pretty hard thing to do, but this is an example of perhaps how it can be done.

LJ: And it’s interesting that, isn’t it? From an artistic perspective, you might think that once you’ve presented the earth or the sun or something, maybe five times in different venues, maybe, you might think artistically, you’re done. You don’t need to do it again. But then, the moon, for instance, has got such a symbolic importance for every culture around the world. If I get an inquiry from Mexico, who am I to say, sorry, I’m not interested in presenting the artwork to Mexico because I’m bored? When the artwork is in Mexico, it has an extraordinary impact and we have a couple of hundred thousand people come and see it.

Touring model

JJH: So essentially, it’s touring visual art in the same way that you might tour a theatre or music or a dance production?

LJ: I’ve got systems in place that allow certain artworks to be able to tour successfully. Some artworks are harder to tour than others, but certain artworks are suitable for tour because they don’t take up much space, they’re relatively easy to install and they’re quite adaptable in their design.  I think we’ve had something like 400 moon presentations now in about 40 countries. I’m not sure there’s been a single artwork in history, that has been presented so many times? My touring works have given me economic security which has then enabled me to subsidise the development of new projects. I’ve also set up the Jerram Foundation which gives funding to arts departments of schools across Bristol, for example, to pay for all the materials and school trips – all those things that have been cut because of government austerity. I’ve got a programme that supports young artists in the city through the fellowship programme and other work I’m doing internationally. A lot of these projects also, they help organisations raise money.

Equity and reinvesting

JJH: That’s really interesting in light of what’s happening in the cultural funding landscape at the moment, with money being stripped back from both local authorities and arts budgets generally being cut. The Hodge review proposed that the Arts Council perhaps should set up some new style of investment fund that essentially takes equity in its investments and looks to get that paid back in order to have this constantly replenishing fund to re-invest. Or a more commercially-focused fund that can generate revenues to help support Arts Council’s charitable objectives. That’s not a million miles from the model you’ve established with the Jerram Foundation.

LJ: The equity model is an interesting one, but it can also be problematic. I’ve done that before with a couple of arts organisations taking equity in my projects and it’s actually quite a pain, to be honest. The problem is it can put other arts organisations off wanting to present that artwork, knowing that they’ve got to pay me and they’re also essentially having to pay someone else too. It can act as another barrier, both financial, but also there can be a load of bureaucracy that goes with it. It feels like a kind of an ongoing form of tax from my perspective and a barrier to touring rather than anything else.

JJH: What are the typical barriers that might get in the way of your touring model?

LJ: I’ve got a project with rowing boats with stories attached, which is very nice. But we, could only get about 200 people through a day at most. And then you’ve got to employ lifeguards and it suddenly becomes a logistical, bureaucratic headache. So some artworks like to be toured and others really don’t.

JJH: When you approach a new artwork, a new commission or a new piece do you come at this from a touring first approach? Or do you think about the work first and then think, well, can this tour afterwards?

LJ: I always think about the work first. It’s got to fit with the organisation that’s commissioning it – that’s got to be the priority. I’ve designed this artwork for the Southbank Centre. We’re installing that in it this week. It’s very site specific. And we’ve got web cameras on the roof that track people and can work out where they’re going to be standing to trigger the music. So it’s a very site-specific thing. It could work in another venue, but it would be quite hard to tour about, I think. Whereas my Moon and Earth artworks, you can install them in a couple of hours on a good day.

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Competition -v- Collaboration

JJH: In the place-based world, so much of it is fundamentally competitive. City of Culture is probably the most obvious example of this, but places do tend to compete with each other – for audiences, for visitors or for funding, for example. It’s a very, very competitive process. So we’re interested in examples of where places have put competitiveness aside and collaborated in commissioning pieces or putting pieces together – particularly across different Local Authorities. I know that with the moon you worked with Norfolk and Norwich Festival at the start of that project to bring together a lot of different cultural organisations to produce that piece. I’m sure that was a bit of a headache, though – is it something you’ve done since?

LJ: It was! I have done it a few times. I needed to raise around £50,000 I think, to get that moon artwork up and running. And actually to go to one organisation and say, I need 50 grand for this artwork that may or may not work is quite tricky. Whereas if you can go to five or 10 organisations and say would you be willing to put in 5 grand to be part of this, it’s less of a big ask. And then in return for your 5 grand, you’re going to be credited for the duration of the lifetime of this project. So I reached out to a number of organisations – Norfolk and Norwich Festival, then applied to Without Walls for some additional funding, I reached out to the UK Space Agency, Bristol University and our local science museum. So yeah, it was both arts organisations as well as science organisations as well to make all that happen. And it worked very well.

JJH: So that supports a more innovative approach? More risk-taking?

LJ: Yeah, of course. A lot of these projects do start with a certain degree of failure. The first moon I made was helium filled. There’s a film of me on CBBC with my mouth open as this moon pops in high winds. Luckily, I raised enough money to make another one that was air filled. When you want to do ambitious new projects, you’ve got to be willing to step into the unknown and take some measured risks. Generally the risks pay off and things go to plan, but its also about learning from things that go wrong and improving on an artwork, in order to get to it to the point where its ‘plug and play’. An new artwork involves risk taking and a lot of endurance, stamina of dissatisfaction. An artwork will need rebuilding and redesigning, honing it down so you’ve got a very neat touring package with technical riders and budgets in different currencies, so everything is ready to go when the enquiry comes in. These are skills I’ve learnt over 30 years!

JJH: Given constraints on budgets – particularly in Local Authorities – the question I suppose is whether or not there is a model to have, say, a number of different local authorities band together from the outset and commission a piece up-front rather than retrospectively buy it in as a touring artwork? Sort of like seed-funding for the project?

LJ: That happens quite a lot. At the moment, I’m working with RHS Gardens and they’re commissioning me to make an artwork or a set of artworks that will tour to five of their venues around the UK. Without Walls is an organisation who commonly commission or co-commission artworks which then tour amongst the Without Wars network, of which there’s probably 30 different festivals. There are networks of light festivals which commission new work to tour as well.

JJH: So that can also help bring organisations together, so they’re less competitive perhaps?

LJ: … and more collaborative. That’s very useful, but it can also present its challenges. If you’ve co-commissioned an artwork, who’s going to be the first to present it? Who’s going to take the credit? Can they all be credited at the same time? And can everyone be kept happy all the time? You can also have a situation where one organisation is ready to sign the contract and keen to go, while the other one still has to fundraise. It can be really tricky to keep everyone happy. But it can be done.

JJH: I’m sure this can also sometimes go back to that first question of how do you ensure there is some sense that the artwork responds to the local people, local community or sense of place if you are doing a shared thing across different places – perhaps that might have different priorities, different agendas of people they want to reach or stories they want to tell?

LJ: Yes, if everyone from a network is presenting the same co-commissioned artwork, there is a risk that it can feel like a local curators power has been sort of stripped away from them a little bit. They may feel forced into having to have the same artworks that someone else has commissioned in an entirely different part of the country. For my street piano project Play Me I’m Yours, we put dozens of pianos around cities for people to play. Host venues programme local musicians and performances around the pianos but they are also free for anyone to play. In 2020 during the pandemic , I created In Memoriam made from giant flags made of NHS bedsheets and again, left an opportunity for events to take place underneath those giant flags. The artwork had a local flavour, local taste, and reflected local culture and priorities.

I’m proud of the artworks I’ve made over the years, which leave space for others to be creative and have engaged and entertained millions of people along the way. I hope to do more !