Social Media: A conversation

The following is a conversation from a social media channel after a positive conversation / comment from a local councillor who has been involved in this project since the beginning, in particular helping to negotiate the use of the land . . .

Person 1

It's a great idea Paul!

Person 2

That is a fantastic idea!

Person 3

You want to get on cross flats park and stop them wankers letting off fireworks.

Cllr Paul Wray

Someone else has just sent me a message about this - what has happend?

Person 4

I wish Hunslet had loads of trees like this dotted about. Including big tree trunks made into seats for us to sit on ...you can't beat carved tree art. It's regrounding and it captures children's imagination so much .. and adults too.

I don't think anyone gets bored of tree art

It's widely appreciated in so many places...

Person 5

what a waste of time and money there is more important things than this piece of SHIT that no one is interested in except this idiot

Cllr Paul Wray

This was paid for privately and has turned a bit of land used by drug users and rough sleepers into a small park where people go and have their lunch and meet their friends. The artist has also been doing free stone carving lessons for local children. I'd say the artist hasn't wasted their time.

Person 6

not a waste of money. The artist who lives opposite the land paid for it privately. The land which was a dumping ground for needles, bottles and cans has been made into a nice area to sit in now and kept clean. Such a negative view for a very positive and community building thing.

Bruce | BasementArtsProject

come down here and learn how to carve with us. It’s free. We are teaching people next Monday (and on various Monday and Thursdays throughout Sept/Oct. Feel free to come and join us.

Person 7

I want to say so you can learn to chisel out a smile & a wee bit of joy, but that would be childish…

Bruce | BasementArtsProject

Oftentimes, I feel it would be very easy for me, as a person who works in full time employment, to say I’m too tired to do anything now, I will put my feet up, watch tv tonite, go to bed, wake up tomorrow, go back out to work and repeat ad infinitum until I shuffle off this mortal coil. But, whether it is good for my health or not, that is not me. I cannot do that. I have worked with the artist on Jacob’s Ladder for 3 years now, with a year where we could not do it because we were locked out of the quarry due to Covid.

Yesterday whilst working with passing members of the community who we enlisted to help us carve, youngest 13, eldest 50 something, I met one guy who told me he was a recovering alcoholic and that he could not believe that there was art stuff going on like this on his doorstep. He was not going to have a go, but I took him to my house - that overlooks Jacob’s Ladder and from which I also run an art project (BasementArtsProject)- and showed him our current exhibition by another artist from York. When he came back out to the land he threw himself into it and took up tools with us for at least the next half-an-hour or so.

Another guy who had a go with us lived a few streets away and he was telling us all about his brother who is a successful sculptor living in Germany. He already knew how to carve.

Whilst the piece was lying down as we worked on it between May 2021 and May 2022, a young girl used to come and sit each week and watch the piece taking shape. One day she told us about her dad being unwell and how she had been looking after him but he had since died. She said she had enjoyed seeing the progress as the work had changed from a piece of rough rock into a sculpture and that she considered it a monument to her dad. A month or so later the same person was sleeping rough in a tent on the site. After a week or so she packed up her tent and disappeared and we have not seen her since.

Over the last year we have had so many conversations both uplifting and tragic, that I can tell you from experience that people do care about the sculpture and the area. Not everyone is bad and useless. I have to say you are the first person to refer to it as ‘a piece of SHIT that no one cares about’. That is your opinion and you are entitled to it, I can say though that your view is not as widely held as you suggest. My evidence for this is far from anecdotal.

So far we have paid for it ourselves, despite the fact that we cannot really afford to, but we are trying to recover as much as we can through private funding. What we have raised so far has not come from any local council budgets but from private organisations who have elected to support us and put money into this community that it otherwise would never have got.

The land, which had previously been covered in human poo, needles, used condoms, litter and large piles of fly-tipped rubbish is now essentially a park in which people sit to have their lunch, to contemplate in a quiet, leafy environment away from the hubbub of Beeston, and, if they want to, have a go at stone carving with us when we are there. Since doing this work we get relatively no new litter; A crushed water bottle and some fag ends in 6 days has been the height of it this week.

A note on the council funding of cultural things: It would not be wise to be too obstructive of the idea of the council funding cultural things such as public art. Councils are allocated budgets that have to be spent on art things. If it does not get spent it goes back to central government unspent and the budget is taken away as it seen as surplus to requirement. Crucially it does not get spent on new nurses or more police it just gets taken away from us. In Rishi Sunak’s government this likely means that places like Tunbridge Wells will get an increased budget for cultural spending and we would have none.

Bruce | BasementArtsProject

Thanx for all yr input over the last three years Cllr Paul Wray it was good to see you and discuss the project yesterday in between yr engagements with Food Banks and such like. Yr input is much appreciated.

Cllr Paul Wray

Bruce Davies I'm always happy to support the arts - they are needed.

Person 8

wow. Don't mince your words, tell us what you really think. Bet you're a right laugh at parties.

Person 9

I love this local art, I lost my young husband to cancer a year ago and for me it brings comfort, I think of the stairway to heaven and walking him home. How lovely to have a beautiful visual that I see at least weekly when I'm doing my shopping.

Thanks for making the area better, this is just the same as why so many invest their spare time in our area, making it look better, the bloomers and the womblers. Visually all these things make a huge difference creating a ripple effect of positivity creating a more positive community little by little.

Thanks for everyone who gives their time to make Beeston a great place to live.