A post by Alison Clark-Jenkins, Director of Arts and Development at Arts Council North East

I’m chairing a session at State of the Arts tomorrow. It’s called Artists and the future environment. Could there be a bigger, more important subject?

 Can I make an admission?  In my world view, it’s not top of the list.. 

Of course when I see it written down, that looks ridiculous. The very words have an inalienable potency. How couldn’t THE FUTURE ENVIRONMENT trump everything else? Future environment, it’s not you, it’s me. 

Part of my struggle is its sheer scale. Intellectually I’m there; emotionally I’m not. 

What drives any activism I have left is linked inextricably to my background and geography:  parochial, perhaps, but feminism, class politics and economic/ educational equality can be scaled up as well as down. 

The evidence shows it’s not just me: demographics, as ever, raise their insistent head.

So, what can art, and artists do?  Raising awareness, of course.  And  the a resurgence of artist activists is right, and timely. But I think there’s something tied to the fundamentals of art too:

I went to see Third Angel’s ‘What I heard about the world’ last week. At its simplest level,  some stories about some people in some places. In reality, a beautiful piece of  theatre with a deep, connected, emotive narrative. When something is this good, it stays; gently applying pressure to recall as you slow for an amber light, or look out of the window in a long meeting.  So, something is activated, I’m connected.

And this is where artists have primacy – agents of connection as much as agents of change. The world re-imagined as a set of human connections has a scale where I can imagine my impact. 

So revisiting MMM’s (mission models money)  re-think programme  with my shifting perspective, the definitions are more resonant:  To make the leap to a liveable world, we need to find ways of activating and strengthening the kinds of values that will help us create more sustainable ways of living.  

Art activates values: sustainability becomes a wider reality?

Creative Commons image by Hannah Nicklin, from Third Angel’s What I heard About the World: Research Map