This is a guest blog by Martin Daws.  Martin is a Spoken Word Poet and Community Artist.  Full-time freelance since 1999.  Young People's Laureate for Wales 2013-2016.  Check out his website and follow him on Twitter.

Martin came up with the idea of paying artists to work with communities instead of "investing" millions of pounds in "capital projects" such as arts centres.  We chatted about it back in 2016 a bit and he came up with some figures back then.  My take is similar but different to Martin's.  I favour a simple system based upon replacing infrastructure projects with 10 year funding for community artists based on a scaled system proportionate to the size of each city, town or village.  I recently tweeted this question: "Instead of a £50m art venue, a city could pay 200 artists £25k a year for 10 years to work with communities; do what they want.  What do you think?"  That's sort of my starting point.  Martin has kindly agreed to lay out his first draft in a guest blog to hopefully stimulate more discussion and debate about this brilliantly simple, yet potentially life changing shift in how we think about arts funding and how it is distributed more equitably.  I will respond in a blog post soon...

This blog post follows on from yesterday’s critique of Stella Duffy’s call for action towards the creation of a “new culture”.  It is a response both to François Matarasso’s thoughtful and challenging critique of my blog post and an attempt to answer the people who asked what my basis was for my critique, what my practice was, what alternative perspectives I might have.  I fear this post will prove unsatisfactory to many as I do not claim to offer singular nor even collective solutions that will ever be acceptable to “everyone”.  Nevertheless, here goes…

Always Outsiders is about playing and experiencing the presence of people, environment, nature.  It is a reflective piece about two pieces of cooperative work: amb ith Lee Mattinson; and orthernGame with Stevie Ronnie.  Both pieces are set in the North Pennines in South West Northumberland, an area I made home for almost eight years.  A space in which my wife and I often found a solace of sorts from the city.  A place where our children first set foot in the world; where they were immersed in nature.

The full title of my paper is the deliberately clunky, lways Outsiders: Map-less Social Sractice Art in the Ancient Landscape of a Global Geopark.  It attempts to fuse theory with practice, practice with theory.  Thought and unthought experiences are proposed as mediators.

This blog post includes my Royal Geographical Society 2016 Conference paper as well as links to the presentation and a PDF version of the paper for printing.

Smelt.  Clart.  Pitch.  Clay.  Pit.  Hit.  Bray.  Hob.  Hoy.  Words overheard on map-less meanders over still-chartered grouse moors.  Stories told and retold by blazing public house firesides.  Cautionary tales.

This is the abstract for my forthcoming paper presentation at the Royal Geographical Society 2016 International Conference in London on 2nd September.  The session is explores "The Nexus of Art and Geography: practice as research", is part of the Participatory Geographies Research Group activities and is convened by Cara Courage (University of Brighton, UK) and Anita McKeown (Independent Researcher).

Everyone has the right and freedom to a home, don’t they?  And yet, so many people are homeless in the UK, in Europe, across the entire planet; displaced by war, oppression, climate change and the imperialistic march of global capitalism.  The United Nations are concerned: deeply concerned.

heresa Easton's superb new book explores housing crises and homelessness.  She kindly asked me to write the introduction.  Here's the draft published with the author's permission.

This was my prosecution witness statement from the excellent Participation on Trial event organised by the lovely Chrissie Tiller and Goldsmiths from May 2015.

I think it remains as relevant to me as it did more than a year ago but I would say that I was a little over-generous in my support for socially engaged art - a term now so completely appropriated by the Institution of Art that it effectively is THE SAME AS participatory art.  Perhaps my views have hardened?  Anyway, I now have claimed socially engaged art is DEAD - twice!  Undoubtedly, I will do so again...

The (eventual) verdict was “GUILTY – BUT WHO CARES?”  Do you care?