Conference welcomes creative artists with a call to ‘sit in the rubble’
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
The Community Arts Engagement Conference 2024 kicked off last Friday night with a feast of creative expression, fellowship and fine food.
The conference was held from 16-18 August at the Treacy Centre, Parkville, Victoria. The weekend’s program was centred on being ‘Made to Create’ and featured talks by community enthusiast and social capitalist Peter Kenyon OAM and poetic summaries from conference Artist in Residence Joel McKerrow.
The Friday night event also featured an art exhibition, with paintings by Darwin Studio Off the Street artists, clothing, quilts and cartoons by Salvationists across the country. Melbourne Contemporary Choir also performed three songs, including an original by Worship Arts Coordinator and choir director Jason Simmonds, with Jared Haschek: ‘The Song We Shared’.
Territorial Commander Commissioner Miriam Gluyas spoke at the Friday dinner about what defined creative people, their focus, and their obsession with pursuing their interests. She told of how she had recently met Joni Eareckson Tada, an American evangelical speaker and author who, after experiencing a life-changing accident that left her unable to paint with her hands, later discovered how to paint using her mouth.
“She’s spent her life obsessing about ensuring that people just like her were able to have a better life,” Miriam said. “She’s focused and obsessed.
“It’s time to start obsessing. I’m giving you permission tonight to obsess.”
Poet Joel McKerrow performed ‘Welcome Home’, a spoken word piece dedicated to the artist and “those who have forgotten that they are so”:
“The child who put away their paintbrush, ballet shoes left dusty in the back bits of attics/To the cartoon scribbler in the margins of maths books/To the memory of crayons and drawings pinned up on fridges/To the childhood actors performing in loungeroom, backyard, front verandah theatres/To the students whose teachers took their own failures and transposed them upon you/To the burdened shoulders and the clipped wings and to those have never tried again … Welcome Home.”
TSA Head of Mission Lieutenant-Colonel Gregory Morgan brought devotional thoughts about the concept of being “blessed to be a blessing” through the story of Abraham in Genesis.
“Look around,” Gregory said. “Look across the table, and as you look, see God’s image expressed through artists and writers and composers and musicians and perhaps dancers and singers and all sorts of other creative pursuits.
“Tonight, our creative God looks on this room of creatives, and he says, yes, this is very good. Hear and feel the affirmation of God upon your life tonight.”
Conference attendee Denise Cook from Perth Fortress said she attended despite losing her husband Brian just 10 weeks prior, as she wanted to honour his legacy. As a former aged care nurse, she wanted to learn more about the Singing by Heart program.
“I know [Brian] would want me here; he knew how important this was to me,” she said.
Chief Secretary Colonel Winsome Merrett and Head of Mission Support Matt Reeve presented three awards to Worship Arts leaders Phil Jennings and Jo Ineson, who pioneered the Just Move and Singing by Heart programs, Joanne Brookshaw for her art contributions to TSA and Cliff and Rhonda Maddigan from Arndale Corps, for their contribution to the Just Brass program.
“It’s all about the kids,” Rhonda said when presented with the award, emotion in her voice.
Keynote speaker Peter Kenyon, who presented at the main sessions throughout the weekend, spoke of his experiences running his not-for-profit community and economic development consultancy, the Bank of I.D.E.A.S. He said the main thing he wanted conference attendees to take away was that the goal was not to help people.
“We are here to create a community for all of us, and that’s very different from the mindset that we’re here to help people,” Peter said. “I want people engaged as coworkers, co-designers, co-producers of what’s going on in our communities, and not as recipients of what that community can do for them.”
This was referenced later in the evening by Joel McKerrow in his poetic summary, who joked, “I never thought I’d come to a Salvos conference and be told to stop helping people.”
“I can just see the next Salvos ad on TV: ‘We don’t help people’,” he quipped.
His poem concluded the evening with a reminder to “stop feeding folks without getting to know them”.
“Friends, it’s time to step down from being the heroes who help/Let us instead begin to sit in the rubble/With those who sit in the rubble.”
The full list of artists exhibiting their work on the night was Joanne Brookshaw, Jenny Huang, Kai Wen Wang, Michael Wright, Francine Ogle, Erin Mains, Spencer Viney, Sharon Butcher, Eunice Woods, Joel Gibson, Peter Collins, Lindsay Cox, Robert Taylor, Vivienne Hancox and Jan Venables.
The rest of the weekend’s program featured sessions on Art in Disaster and Recovery Settings by Erin Mains of Salvation Army Emergency Services, Planet Muse, a new music therapy program by Dean Eaton from Camberwell Corps, Creativity and Social Change with Joel McKerrow and Just Brass workshops. The weekend concluded with delegates exploring how the arts can be used effectively at the local level in faith-infused arts-based community development.
To find out more about Community Arts Engagement, see here.
