By Rachel Wunder
Published in June 2011
Walking past The Working Centre in downtown Kitchener you may not notice the art installation on the Charles Street side of the building amidst the construction that is transforming our roadways and city blocks. Fixtures that were once new gradually become unnoticed as we keep our city in a constant state of flux. Buildings and roadways are brought forward from the past to be changed or altered in response to shifting social dynamics and needs, so as we navigate our journeys in these engineered landscapes, we must ensure that the projects that keep our communities enriched and connected do not become fragmented or forgotten.
The Tile Project, a community-based art venture facilitated in 1996 by Carol Bradley as part of the City of Kitchener’s Artist in Residence program, proposes a tool to make our journey an opportunity to learn from each other, and create dialogue among its participants and audience. The Tile Project, which found its home at The Working Centre in 2006, can be seen as a process of reclamation where participants were given room to discover and claim their individual and collective identities as a way to recast themselves as meaningful members in the community.
The concept was wonderfully simple: each participant was given some clay which they rolled into a square tile, and then wrote, painted, or sculpted anything they wished onto its surface. The individual tiles would then be placed side by side to create a collective, quilt-like mosaic. The process began and ended over the course of several weekends in the fall of that year and saw over 260 pairs of busy hands working together to delicately shape pieces of their identity on a terracotta tile.
Carol Bradley notes that both the process and product of The Tile Project were of equal importance. The product of her efforts yielded an artifact of each person’s gifts and talents that could be carried forward to the larger community. The process became a display of the need for individuals to be given the tools to express themselves and develop partnerships with each other in a community context. The project called on non-artists to engage in a process with an outcome entirely shaped by their unique perspectives and experiences. In an attempt to bring out the silent, underlying issues that are generated in our society, this project was an artistic approach to give voice to some individuals who may have otherwise gone unheard.
The only constraints were that people had to visually represent their stories on a square terracotta tile, which would later be glazed in one of six colours. Some of the younger participants challenged the boundaries of this project by rebelliously writing “LSD” and other drug-related references on the surface of their tiles. However, these pieces were included alongside everyone else’s in the mosaic to celebrate each story in whatever form they were presented.
The Tile Project displays community art as a way of seeing, documenting, and engaging in critical reflection to stimulate relationships among participants and viewers. Public art therefore becomes a type of creativity that uses its immediate environment as an artistic medium. The community around it becomes its frame wherein viewers are invited to reconsider their everyday surroundings. In this way, art serves to integrate those who might otherwise remain strangers to one another by valuing the attachment to its location and encouraging people to feel that they belong together.
Interestingly, the old adage about life reflecting art holds true for The Tile Project. Similar to the journeys that the tiles represent, the project itself has been on its own journey. Upon its completion in 1996, the tiles were displayed at the Kitchener City Hall during the Festival of the Night celebration in December of that year, and in 2001 the piece was installed on the Schreiter building in three separate segments where it remained until 2005. Following this, the pieces of the project were removed from their hanging, and stored in boxes until they found their current home at The Working Centre in 2006. Here, the three segments were unified into one large and connected piece that was fixed to the brick wall facing Charles Street. The narrative that forms from this move, where the separated tiles of the piece are mounted on the wall of an organization that builds community, is a wonderful example of the beauty that can unfold when art projects are put to work in communities.
The arts contribute to the ways in which we experience our world and what it means to exist as members of a community. They are forms of dialogue that can respond more effectively to the ambiguous and often conflicting nature of what it is to be human. They also enable us to cultivate awareness and receptivity to people’s pain, struggles, and growth. For many people, accessibility to public space for creative expression is a rare opportunity. There are seldom neighbourhoods or communities that allow equal access to means for public communication, and therefore meaningful opportunity to document people’s stories. For this reason, art is a social asset that creates opportunities for dialogue and connection between individuals in our community.
What makes The Tile Project such a triumph is its ability, through a simple framework, to use the creative gifts that are so inherently human to convey each participant’s story. With many hands at work, carried forward from their own unique past and experiences, the participants collaborated to create a beautiful piece of art that would have been otherwise impossible from a single set of hands. The project shows us the power that each of our journeys can occupy when they are harmoniously placed beside those of other members of our community. This serves not only to form connections to those around us, but also to adhere the cracks that can form between ourselves and our surroundings.
Rachel Wunder has just completed a 9-month placement at The Working Centre through the Renison College Bachelor of Social Work program.
