Dr Loraine Leeson will talk about some of the lessons learned through the span of her art practice that encompasses activist work from the 1970s/80s, projects with communities and young people in the 1990s, experiments with new technology and collectivity in the new millennium, and more recent engagement with older people and environmental issues.

Central to Leeson’s work have been processes of collaboration and participation that have lent cultural dimensions to activism and brought community-based knowledge into the public domain. She will discuss how early lessons learned from working alongside the trade union movement and the campaigning communities of London’s Docklands informed subsequent engagement with a range of groups, organisations and individuals, drawing on new technologies as they emerged to enable these voices to be heard. Lastly Leeson will indicate how these lessons now inform interdisciplinary research that draws on the arts to address issues of global significance.

Dr Loraine Leeson is a visual artist whose practice and research focus on the role of art in social and environmental change. She is particularly known for her work with East London communities from the Docklands Community Poster Project of the 1980s to the recent Active Energy with older people, which has received the RegenSW Arts and Green Energy award and the 2022 Times Higher Education award for Knowledge Exchange. Her monograph Art:Process:Change draws on forty years of her work to identify methodologies for creative approaches to social transformation. She currently teaches and conducts research at Middlesex University, London.