Gill Horitz
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Women Live Magazine
Indoors: Symbolic Expressions
Collages
Art and Community
Indoors: Symbolic and Expressive Dimensions
of Familial Lives
‘Art is perhaps humanity’s most essential, most universal language. It is not a frill but a necessary part of communication.’ Ernest Boyer‘Indoors’ is an ethnographic study exploring the expressions of six women of their attitudes to engagement in arts and cultural activities, both within home, school and public domain.
It identifies the purpose and value they attribute to cultural activities undertaken specifically in their homes, and questions how arts professionals, used to working from an ‘administrative’ approach to audience development research, might develop new relationships in which audiences/ participants are provided with, and are the providers of, knowledge within the cultural domain.
The study was conducted through group and one-to-one meetings over a period of several months.
The research, undertaken as a dissertation for an MA (2005), followed the development and management of arts projects organized through a partnership between Bournemouth Borough Council Arts Development and Sure Start Bournemouth (now Kinson and North Bournemouth Children’s Centre) a Government agency, located in West Howe Bournemouth, which aimed to improve the health and well-being of children under 4 years and their families.