Uniting communities through art

“Some of the projects that we do are cross-community, so we would work with children who come from hardcore Loyalist areas and hardcore Republican areas and get them to develop projects together.”

Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast focuses on bringing divided communities together through art projects, as well as providing an accessible gallery space with free exhibitions to engage the locals. Peter Richards, Deirdre McKenna and Ruth Graham explain the gallery's community outreach work, including an effort to use Belfast's infamous 'interface' walls for art.  

Video Transcription

Peter Richards: "We're a gallery, this is our 10th year. We've developed a commitment to profiling high-quality contemporary art in Northern Ireland, relating that somehow to activities and engaging with the local communities."

Deirdre McKenna: "It's open to everybody, it's free, the exhibitions, the gallery space is free. It's good place to meet and talk with your friends, or just have a look and spend some time doing something that doesn't cost a lot of money."

Peter Richards: "The outreach projects are ongoing. We have a staff of four, and two are committed to that task. But we also try and program annually so as to include elements which will have a strong relationship to issues that are happening in the community anyway."

Deirdre McKenna: "We were originally set up in North Belfast, and it's part of the city which has seen a lot of trouble during the conflict here. Our whole agenda for our outreach is to get non-traditional art audiences interested in art, but we want to be responsive to what it is they would like to do creatively."

Ruth Graham: "Recently we've been trying to work with projects that look at interface walls and how the arts can engage with interface walls."

Deirdre McKenna: "One street here is Republican and Irish and Nationalist, and on the other side you've got Unionists or Loyalist or Protestant British identity kind of communities, so they're areas for conflict. In Belfast you'll find a lot of peace lines. It's not unlike the peace line that's been built in Israel. Some people call them interfaces."

Ruth Graham: There's a whole lot of debate about that, and we were trying to start off involving the community in the debate about interface walls, whether they can be used as art sites. At the moment it's very mixed, but we're just trying to explore that at the moment, basically."

Deirdre McKenna: "Some of the projects that we do are cross-community, so we would work with children who come from hardcore Loyalist areas and hardcore Republican areas and get them to come together and work in the gallery, or in Flax Art, and develop projects together. And it's good because it makes that connection on a human level, and it's great because you see friendships and romances and interests blossoming between people, and just the common interests of being a young person living in Belfast today."

Peter Richards: "From the very beginnings of the gallery, it always seemed important that we engage with the local community and we don't just be this gallery in the middle of nowhere where an art audience travels to. We actually try to become relevant to the communities which surround us, become something they can dip into if they want to."