The cruel irony of growing a creative space

Thursday, 22 August 2024

Dr Karen Seccombe is a stained glass artist and the founder of WAI – the Women's Art Initiative in Palmerston North. She also works as a learning and development advisor.

OPINION: There’s a space that sits between health and the arts. It’s populated by grassroots organisations – creative spaces – that provide community, studio spaces and resources for our most vulnerable people. Those who fall between the social cracks, who live with shame, stigma and trauma, and whose lives and experiences marginalise them. And those who have fought to survive, to share their authentic knowledge, to hold their heads up and be respected for who they are.

I founded WAI – the Women’s Art Initiative – in 2013 in response to a yawning gap in post-crisis services for women who have experienced violence and abuse. WAI is a creative space of solidarity, collective activism and advocacy, currently supporting 57 wāhine and 18 rangatahi.

For us, creativity has become not only a voice but a social action – a way of creating change, challenging the many negative stereotypes and myths that sit around who we are, and expressing the reality of violence.

In Aotearoa one in three women will experience violence across her lifespan. After the period known as the crisis, society expects us then to get on with our lives as survivors and put this traumatic time behind us.

But we walk back into a world that ignores, minimises and excuses what has happened to us. If we talk to others, we run the risk of being misunderstood, misrepresented, shamed, or even blamed for what has happened.

Our avenue becomes silence. If you don’t talk then you’re not judged. Sharing these narratives of violence is immensely difficult.

One artist says, “I have learnt that in the dark places where I sometimes walk, my art is my salvation. WAI has allowed me in all my mess to be, well, simply me.”

And one of the facilitators, Kelly Jarvis, adds, “It’s not just the making or the studio. It’s the time, respect, friendships, wisdom, enlightenment and freedom to be that makes WAI such a sacred, transformational space.”

For nine of our 13 years of operation, facilitators worked as volunteers. Funding was a hit and miss affair with ongoing insecure, short-term contestable applications. Every year we survived to do this mahi was another small miracle.

Then in 2021, WAI was one of 54 creative spaces to receive three-year funding from the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. This funding, along with support from Arts Access Aotearoa, enabled us to meet the needs and aspirations of our community.

WAI now pays five part-time facilitators and has a website that offers online membership, art videos and connection. We send out art resource packs to members across Aotearoa, run a weekly wāhine studio, have set up a trust board, and have opened a second studio that caters for isolated rainbow/takatāpui and Māori youth.

“This is the first time I can call someone a friend,” says one WAI rangatahi.

Across August 22 and 23 I will join 150 other creative space leaders, tutors and artists at the Ngā Wāhi Auaha Creative Spaces Conference 2024, in Wellington. The conference theme is Hāpaitia i ngā wāhi toi, advocate and amplify. It’s particularly relevant as we transition from a three-year funding contract back to the merry-go-round of contestable funding.

The cruel irony of our growth is that we have invested in our employees and membership. We have brought on board new people, set up new programmes, opened new studios and created opportunities. And now, we don’t know if we can even keep our doors open.

Our organisations are stronger but that means that we have more to lose.

For more information about WAI, visit waicollective.co.nz