Skip to main

Impact case study database

The impact case study database allows you to browse and search for impact case studies submitted to the REF 2021. Use the search and filters below to find the impact case studies you are looking for.
Waiting for server

Drawing as collaborative tool in community visualisation

1. Summary of the impact

Barker’s work on drawing practices and community story telling has impacted on international emerging artists through his drawing blog and his social media project, ‘Aphorisms for young artists’, where this has changed understanding and produced a resource for other practitioners.

The communities of Chapeltown, Leeds have benefited from Barker’s research, where he has created a platform where their stories can be heard, helping raise awareness of the importance of life events and the environments that shape them. He has also created a new gallery space where local audiences and practitioners can see his work.

2. Underpinning research

The nature of the research insights or findings, which relate to the impact claimed in the case study.

Insights gained from Barker’s research are related to the interrelationships between drawing, narrative and community. Drawing can be used to develop a deeper understanding of difference and of mutual interests of various residents within a multi-cultural community. Drawing can also act as a catalyst to help the wider community approach issues of contemporary urban life and associated political and social issues. (Barker, 2017A). Drawing can be used in various contexts in the gradual development of community-led concerns such as designing out crime, visualising future possibilities and developing games to allow others to join in with creative play (Barker, 2015). A specific example can be found in the case of Chapeltown, Leeds, where the graffiti ‘talks’ to Barker, a member of this community, giving rise to drawings that embody the experience of ‘the sentient street’ (Barker, 2018A). Drawing practice allows Barker to explore the contemporary relevance of allegory within fine art practice. It also provides an avenue for contemporary political and social issues to become part of an ongoing dialogue, between both art practitioners and wider audiences, on the possible role of art as a means of facilitating political and social awareness within a poetic framework. (Barker, 2018B).

An outline of the underpinning research produced by the submitted unit.

The research is practice-based research, situated in local communities and drawing upon storytelling. (Barker, 2015). Barker’s work has developed out of a long-term relationship with the Chapeltown community within which he lives. For many years, he has walked through the community making observational drawings in order to attract passing conversations with people in the street. These conversations then become the starting points for various imaginative reflections by Barker that are woven into complex drawings of the streets and environs of the area (Barker, 2018A, 2017A, 2017B). These drawings and associated work are first of all shown in the community and then, once they have a community approval, are exhibited to a wider audience. Some result in technical drawings made to facilitate communications with local authority professionals, such as street planners.

Barker, as part of his research into how his local community develops a ‘voice’, has also written specifically about what he has called ‘the street texts of Chapeltown’, the tone of voice being one that has deeply informed his own practice (Barker, 2018A). Sketchbooks are an integral part of Barker’s practice, both as a way of collecting observational information within the community, and as a way of developing ideas in the studio for allegorical drawings, as well as installations and ceramics. (Barker, 2017B).

Any relevant key contextual information about this area of research.

For the past 15 years Barker has been working on a continuously evolving body of work that has attempted to engage with what Stephen Willats (2000, p. 11) called ‘the territory of art in society’. Willats’ criticism that ‘in operating within the delineated territory of ‘art’s social environment’…art ‘has largely restricted the area of function of art practice to its internal fabric of norms and conventions,’ is a statement that Barker has attempted to question and explore the consequences of when working within a community environment.

3. References to the research

1) Barker, G. (2018A) Drawing and the street texts of Chapeltown Drawing: Research, Theory, Practice Intellect Volume 3, Number 1, 1 April, pp. 75-85(11) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/drtp.3.1.75_1

2) Barker, Garry (2017A) Drawing as a tool for shaping community experience into collective allegory. In: Collective and Collaborative Drawing in Contemporary Practice. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 192-215. https://lau.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/17315/

3) Barker (2017B) ‘Rabley Drawing Centre SKETCH 2017’ first prize. Touring exhibition of selected sketchbooks of observational drawings done whilst walking through the Chapeltown community and talking to local people about their world views. https://lau.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/17374/

4) Barker, Garry (2018B) Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize: 2018. [Show/Exhibition] Barker, Garry (2018) Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize: 2018. [Show/Exhibition]Trinity Buoy (2018) Wharf Drawing Prize 2018 Catalogue, Wunderkammer Press. (21 September 2018). https://lau.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/17375/

5) Barker, Garry (2015) Drawing as collective narrative. In: Drawing Conversations Symposium, December 2015, Coventry University. https://lau.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/17473/

Evidence of the quality of the research must also be provided in this section.

  • All outputs are peer-reviewed

  • Barker was first prize winner of the Rabley Drawing Centre SKETCH 2017

  • Ainslie (2017) has written a review of Barker’s work.

  • Barker’s ‘Boat at Sea’ was selected for the Trinity Buoy Drawing Prize 2018

  • Barker’s drawing blog has been awarded a top 25 Feedspot award

4. Details of the impact

Impact on local audiences and practitioners of Chapeltown

Chapeltown beneficiaries include local practitioners and audiences. Under the umbrella of Chapeltown Arts, Barker also puts on regular exhibitions in the Workshop Gallery space which he designed to give access to his work to both the local community and the established Leeds based visual art scene [1].

The Workshop Press Gallery facilitates discourses around drawing. A local professional arts business planner and fundraiser commented ‘The opening up of The Workshop Press Gallery and printing press facilities in the basement of his house has made a very positive contribution to arts provision in Chapeltown and indeed, Leeds as a whole, providing an important platform for emerging local fine artists in a city where such opportunities are thin on the ground’ [2]

There have been series of well attended events to support the ongoing dissemination of Barker’s practice within a community context. These have included regular contributions to the Chapeltown Arts Festival 2014, attended by over 1000 individuals. Barker contributed to this event as one of the 30 residents that planned and delivered the festival. Barker also launched a book and an exhibition at Workshop Press Gallery, which he created for local practitioners and audiences. Feedback on the festival included ‘ A wonderful opportunity for local talent to showcase their creativity’ [3].

Barker’s event at the festival had impact by changing individuals’ understanding about Chapeltown. This can be seen in a practitioner’s blog, where it was commented that, ‘We got talking to him about the area as his work is very community based and he was saying that Chapeltown is a great place to live because there’s so much creativity going on in the area and most people living in the area are willing to help one another out. He said he felt sad that the area is given such a bad reputation for things that happened quite a long time ago now. His work is also very interesting. He creates surreal landscapes based on Chapeltown that toy with perspective perhaps mirroring the warped assumptions most people have of the area.’ [4]

Evidence that Barker engages communities through his drawing practice can be seen quote from a former local councillor, ‘ Barker is another anchor for this area’s creativity and regeneration. [He] can be found drawing (yes, standing drawing!) in the neighbourhood and drawing in neighbours and local businesses into his discussions and activities […] His work lifts and enriches me and my community.’ [5].

Impact on International drawing practitioners

Barker has created a new drawing resource which has had impact on a range of international drawing practitioners and educators. Barker builds impact through his drawing blog [6] which aims to contextualise drawing within an expanded field of practice and has now been kept continuously for the last five years, averaging over one post per week and which is now getting on average over one hundred ‘hits’ per day. Since the first post in May 2014 there have been as of 31st July 2020 264,926 hits [7]. The blog is used by drawing and teaching practitioners, using drawing within Fine Art contexts that are based in, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Thailand.

Feedback from a practitioner who worked in Vietnam and Hong Kong commented that Barker’s research ‘demonstrates that drawing can be utilized to solve practical problems, work out strategies, visualize complex ideas and even function as a catalyst for a conceptual or poetic lyric narrative. This is the reason that [Barker]’s work and writings have proved so valuable for me and countless others’, showing impact on practice [8]. Another practitioner in Thailand said Barker’s insights have ‘coaxed a few students into questions of visual and tactile perception that have moved their creative thinking and designing significantly forward. The Thai colleague with whom I teach has also seen ways of exploring his interests in atmosphere and what he terms ‘blur’ through drawing towards architecture. Certain implications of a drawing exercise that emerged in Leeds in the early 1980s’, perhaps even a decade before, have found new means of germination in the unlikely location of a small faculty in South East Asia in 2020, through Garry’s online blog. In a sense, the blog works through its own sense of becoming as process and movement, the latter of which is debatably where one would wish art and design-based students to acknowledge their creative involvement’, demonstrating impact on practitioners’ knowledge and understanding on drawing practices [9].

Barker’s research has also been disseminated through an innovative use of Twitter. Aphorisms for Young Artists comprises a daily tweet that contains an enigmatic statement alongside examples of Barker’s practice. As of 31 July 2020, there were 1988 contributions to the ongoing series. They impact practitioners’ understanding and awareness, making them think differently in response to text and image. [10]

5. Sources to corroborate the impact

[1] What’s on guide, Chapeltown open studios, Workshop Press Gallery.

[2] Testimony from a professional arts business planner and fundraiser.

[3] Evaluation Summary of Chapeltown Arts Festival, November 2014.

[4] Practitioner blog, 18 September 2014.

[5] Testimony from a former local councillor.

[6] Garry Barker, Drawing, blog.

[7] Drawing blog statistics

[8] Letter from an artist and educator at RMIT University - Saigon South, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

[9] Letter from an artist and educator at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.

[10] Twitter feedback on ‘Aphorisms for Young Artists’.

Additional contextual information