Inclusive Arts Practice

Inclusive Arts Practice and Research interrogates an exciting and newly emergent field: the creative collaborations between learning-disabled and non-learning-disabled artists which are increasingly taking place in performance and the visual arts.

In Inclusive Arts Practice Alice Fox and Hannah Macpherson interview artists, curators and key practitioners in the UK and US. The authors introduce and articulate this new practice, and situate it in relation to associated approaches. Fox and Macpherson candidly describe the tensions and difficulties involved too, and explore how the work sits within contemporary art and critical theory.

The book inhabits the philosophy of Inclusive Arts practice: with Jo Offer, Alice Fox and Kelvin Burke making up the design team behind the striking look of the book. The book also includes essays and illustrated statements, and has over 100 full-colour images. Inclusive Arts Practice represents a landmark publication in an emerging field of creative practice across all the arts. It presents a radical call for collaboration on equal terms and will be an invaluable resource for anyone studying, researching or already working within this dynamic new territory.

Alice Fox is a Principal Lecturer and Associate Head in the College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton, researching Inclusive Arts Practice and education. Alice is also Course Leader and founder of the pioneering MA Inclusive Arts Practice, and Artistic Director of the Arts Council England-funded learning-disabled Rocket Artists. This group has been awarded significant funds from Arts Council England to deliver their programme of high-quality exhibitions and performances. During 2013, the Rockets worked in partnership with the Southbank Centre to deliver the Side by Side project – an international exhibition and symposium of Inclusive Arts that this book builds upon. In 2008, Alice collaboratively directed and performed Smudged, an inclusive performance with the Rocket Artists at Tate Modern, and in 2010 performed and exhibited Measures of Bodies at the Brussels Medical Museum. Alice has published in The New Museum Community, 10 Must Reads: Inclusion, and co-authored Community–University Partnerships, Access to Art: From Day Centre to Tate Modern, and Art in the Woods: An Exploration of a Community–University Environmental Arts Project published by NIACE (National Institute of Adult Continuing Education).

Dr Hannah Macpherson is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Brighton. Her interests include feminist, post-structural and new-materialist theories with a research focus on the physical and imaginative spaces of disability, landscape and arts practice. She enjoys creative, collaborative research and writing projects that intend to make a positive difference in the world. Her work has appeared in a range of peer-reviewed academic journals including Environment and Planning, Cultural Geographies and The Senses & Society, and she has published numerous book chapters. She coordinates the disability ethics and aesthetics research group at the University of Brighton, and has just completed an Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded research project on visual arts practice for resilience.