Creative Listening, Community Practice & Stephen Willats

Returning To Stephen Willats & Community Arts

Visiting Nottingham gave me the rare chance to engage closely with Stephen Willats' Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs, exploring both the original work from the early 1970s and its recent restaging in the 2020s at Bonington Gallery. With curator Abi Spinks as my guide, I came to appreciate how deeply this project is connected to Nottingham and its communities. Seeing these moments side by side revealed the evolution of Willats' thinking on participation, understanding and agency, principles that now shape my own approach walking alongside the Creative Agents programme.

This reflection is rooted in my ongoing contemporary community textile artist practice, work that has spanned the West Midlands and, more recently, Derbyshire. Starting anew in Derbyshire made me more aware of how building trust and relationships change when you are an outsider. In these contexts, careful listening and patient presence are not just helpful; they are essential.

Nottingham matters to me not only because of its role in Willats' practice, but because it feels like a sister context to my own work in Derbyshire. Geographically close, both places carry layered post-industrial histories shaped by labour, loss and collective resilience. There are shared cultures of making, organising and quietly getting on with things, alongside similar patterns of what is valued and what is overlooked. Spending time with Willats' work in Nottingham allowed it to be read not as something distant, but as operating within a landscape closely related to the one I am now working within.

Why I Was Drawn To Willats' Community Practice

Before this visit, most of what I knew about Willats came from second-hand references to cybernetics and systems thinking. Those ideas made me expect something cold, controlled and distant. Though I must mention the wonderful opportunity to meet Stephen in the Summer and chat over tea, which gave me a glimpse behind the work's cover (a bit like Dorothy finding the Wizard of Oz behind his velvet curtain.)

The expectation of something that felt machine-generated and mechanised melted away. The archive was full of visible scissor marks, worn photographs and diagrams with handwritten corrections. Nothing was slick or perfectly resolved. Instead, the project was alive with labour, uncertainty and decision making. This was both unsettling and deeply relieving. It invited me to approach the work with patience, not as a puzzle to solve, but as a process to respect.

Encountering Stephen Willats' Work Through The Archive

The Tennis Project revealed itself as something built slowly and deliberately. Framed working documents, photographic collages, diagrams and notes sat alongside each other, showing ideas developing through use rather than resolution. These were not neutral records. They functioned as tools for thinking, reflection and return.

Hand-drawn maps traced relationships between clubs and people. Years later, those same maps proved vital again for locating communities when the project was restaged. That continuity made it clear that documentation was never an afterthought. It was a form of care.

Being guided through the collection by Abi Spinks was part of this understanding. Her generosity, enthusiasm and deep embeddedness in Nottingham shaped how the project was read. Conversation moved easily between context, intention and consequence. Stories of the project's afterlife, and of the careful thinking behind its restaging, revealed a body of practice that remains in dialogue rather than fixed in time.

Alongside this, I kept thinking about my own experience of hand-drawing the lines in my Willats-esque diagrams. I remember how anxiety provoking it felt, knowing there was no undo, no edit button, and a sense that the lines had to be right the first time to count. Sitting with Willats' material, it became clear that this expectation was misplaced. His working processes were not flawless or fixed, even if the published pages suggest otherwise. Subtle amendments, hesitations and decisions made along the way are no longer visible in the books that document the work, but they are present in the archive.

Meeting Stephen Willats

The meeting with Stephen Willats, which I mentioned before, now carries greater weight than it did then. Only after spending time with this collection and in conversations with Abi Spinks about the project's reception and legacy did the significance of that encounter become fully apparent.

That visit did not offer instruction or answers. What it did reveal was the seriousness with which Willats approached participation, understanding and responsibility. Seen in hindsight, it has shaped how the Tennis Project is read now, not as a historical case study but as part of a lived and evolving practice.

What lingers most strongly is generosity. Not generosity as performance, but as a willingness to share time, thinking and supporting material without gatekeeping. The same quality runs through the volume of practice given to Nottingham: letters, maps, booklets and documentation that were never treated as peripheral.

The Tennis Super Girls In Stephen Willats' Social Resource Project (1971–1972)

Seeing the Tennis Super Girls' photographs up close changed how I understood them. At a distance, they had felt formal and posed, but in person, they were anything but: informal, attentive and full of quiet conversation.

The figures are young women, and one appears to be of mixed heritage, which feels significant given tennis's classed and exclusionary history. At the same time, there is an awareness of how easily contemporary frameworks can be imposed retrospectively. The images did not read as exploitative or sexualised. If anything, they felt careful and respectful. Still, the knowledge that interpretation shifts over time made it important to acknowledge discomfort rather than smooth it away.

Willats' decision to centre these women reads as quietly radical for the period. They are not positioned as winners or symbols, but as participants within a shared activity. Visibility is offered without spectacle, allowing an often overlooked group to be seen without being turned into an object of display.

Derbyshire Supergirl As A Learning Phase In Community Arts Evaluation Practice

The Derbyshire Supergirl phase emerged as an attempt to translate ideas drawn from Willats' Tennis Project into a contemporary, place-based context. Encountering the Tennis Super Girls photographs clarified the origin of that impulse. Willats' framing had felt like an act of quiet elevation, and it fed directly into a desire to acknowledge courage and presence within everyday community life.

Derbyshire Supergirl developed in my position as Creative Listener for the Creative Agents Project, from a wish to honour resilience, particularly the courage required to stand up within one's own community and attempt change from within. Initially, the figure operated as a signal of possibility, drawing attention to acts of commitment that often remain unnoticed. It was not conceived as a conventional heroic narrative, but as a prompt to recognise agency already present.

Public sharing complicates that intention. Responses from within the community made it clear that the presence of a singular figure risked reintroducing hierarchy, even where that was not the aim. Rather than supporting collective agency, the image could suggest representation over participation, or imply that change belongs to one person rather than to the many who together shape the work.

Listening carefully to that feedback proved pivotal. It exposed the limits of hero framing within a contemporary context, where emphasis has shifted towards shared ownership and distributed agency. What initially felt like recognition turned out to be a constraint. This was not a failure of intent, but a necessary moment of insight that only became visible through use.

Seen now, Derbyshire Supergirl functions as an essential transitional phase. It allowed Willats' model to be tested under current social conditions and revealed where adaptation was required. Letting go of the figure was not a rejection of his thinking, but an evolution of it. Attention moved away from representation and towards facilitation, from symbolic recognition to creating conditions in which people might recognise their own capacity.

This shift now sits at the heart of the Creative Agents programme. The work does not need heroes. It needs space, care and support for ordinary people to see themselves as capable of shaping change within their own communities.

Community Research Through Local Tennis Club Booklets

Research for the Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs drew on correspondence, mapping and observation, but local tennis club booklets appear to have played a particularly influential role. Already used to record scores, tournaments and everyday club activity, these publications offered a familiar and trusted structure within club life.

Rather than introducing specialist tools, Willats worked with formats that already existed. His own booklets can be read as a reworking of these publications, shifting them from record-keeping to reflection and insight development. Designed to be handled, returned and added to, they operated as living documents rather than finished artefacts.

Alongside these booklets, letters sent to local stakeholders demonstrate careful preparation. Intent was explained, existing structures acknowledged, and relationships considered before any intervention took place. Study and dialogue grounded the project from the outset.

While Willats was not embedded in Nottingham in the way contemporary practice often expects, these materials reveal an approach marked by attention, consent and method. Mapping, writing and publication were central to how participation and agency were negotiated.

This provides a useful point of comparison for the Creative Agents programme, where extended presence replaces correspondence, but the underlying principles remain consistent.

Revisiting, Play & Contemporary Relevance

Experiencing work from the original project alongside its later restaging made clear that it was never intended to settle, but to be reactivated, revised and re-understood over time.

When the Tennis Project was restaged decades later, it evolved. There was more recording, an audience, revised rules, over twenty players and a tone that edged towards the absurd. Documentation of this reimagining conveys an atmosphere that feels playful, generous and free.

That evolution matters. It suggests the project was never meant to be fixed. The restaging did not preserve it as a historical artefact, but reopened it, allowing it to respond to a different moment.

Writing on the restaging of the Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs for Art Monthly, Hugh Nicholson describes Willats' work as proposing a radical recalibration of the artwork as 'active data', shifting it away from objecthood and formalism and towards lived participation. What struck me was Nicholson's emphasis on mutual agency and on Willats' desire to work beyond the studio, directly within social environments. Reading this now, alongside the Creative Agents programme, it feels less like a historical observation and more like an open invitation to continue adapting the model.

Local responses to the restaging also mattered. Writing for LeftLion, Esmé Rose Marsh reflects on the project's renewed relevance and its playful disruption of expectation, noting how the work opens space for alternative forms of participation and attention.

These responses underline how the project continues to generate meaning beyond its original moment.

Fear Of Failure, Learning & Permission To Try In Community Practice

Alongside this, attention turned inward. Questions surfaced around the Creative Agents programme itself. What if it does not work? What if outcomes resist being named as success? Returning to Willats' writing, and learning that the Tennis Project did not meet all of its original aims, proved unexpectedly reassuring.

Willats writes about the importance of interventions that help people learn about a problem and about themselves, even when objectives are only partially realised. That framing made room for uncertainty, partial outcomes, and not knowing. It allowed for valuing understanding as an outcome in itself, rather than treating it as a consolation.

In his writing on insight development models, Willats suggests that social change is more likely when shifts occur within a community's own frame of reference and when people actively participate in shaping those changes. He also stresses that such projects take time, intervening lightly within everyday routines, and that learning about the situation is as valuable as achieving predefined objectives.

At that point, my attention shifted from properly understanding Willats' work to questioning my own responsibility within the Creative Agents programme. Not to arrive with answers, but to notice what was forming, what was fragile and what might otherwise pass unrecorded. The realisation that uncertainty could be held, rather than resolved, reframed how I understood my role. It made the work feel less about interpretation and more about care.

Walking Alongside As Creative Listener & Community Textile Artist

Within the Creative Agents programme, my role is that of Creative Listener. While Creative Agents undertake the work within their communities, my position sits embedded within the adventure, walking alongside rather than directing or intervening. Proximity, trust and shared time shape the work.

From this privileged position, attention is given to how agency, learning and change take shape. This operates as a form of creative evaluation, not to measure outcomes, but to understand process, relationships and what is quietly emerging through practice.

A background combining long-term community arts practice and professional training as a qualified psychotherapist informs this approach. This does not turn the work into therapy, nor does it place expertise over others. It supports an ethical attentiveness to complexity, ambiguity and what is often unsaid: shifts in tone, hesitation, moments of recognition or withdrawal.

This combination of skills is not common within community arts contexts, but feels increasingly necessary when working at this level of relational, ethical and methodological complexity.

Objects That Hold Stories & Concluding With A Bowl

Time in the collection as a fan and Creative Listener brought some sadness. I recognised the effort invested in holding communities together through documentation and action, and also how easily such labour disappears when it is not actively cared for or prized in some form. In the modern revisiting of the Tennis Project, the gallery sought out the original participants and anyone who could remember the event. No one was found, though someone remembered a distant club president who might have been around then but had since retired. Working-class knowledge, commitment, and creativity often evaporate precisely because they are ordinary, often fleeting, and often without pomp and ceremony.

One element of the revisited project lingered strongly: the commissioned trophy made from cups and bowls. No record exists of a trophy being produced for the original project in the early 1970s. Made by a local silversmith, the new, improved response in the form of a trophy was presented to the club that held the final informal tournament and now sits in the trophy cabinet, holding the story of the project and prompting its retelling. Could this be the tangible item that keeps the project's memory alive this time? I am not sure that this was the intention behind its creation, but I definitely recognise this as a precious by-product: a carrier of the story and knowledge.

Thoughts drift back to the carrier bag that held feedback gathered when community stakeholders came together in November. Notes, fragments, questions and observations sat together without hierarchy. Around it, I had been introduced to The Carrier Bag Theory.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (to give it its full title) was devised by science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin. In it, she sees greater value in the quiet, cumulative act of gathering and carrying than the achievements of the heroes, whose stories tend to be documented, remembered and shared, whilst the former are lost to the wind.

She argues that the first cultural tool was not a weapon but a container, a bag, a basket, a bowl, used to hold and sustain life. This perspective has shaped how I read the trophy created from cups and bowls during the restaging of Stephen Willats' Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs. The object wasn't about winning, but about holding stories and provoking memory within a local community.

I have a similar carrier bag to the one that held the community feedback. It sits under my desk, intended as a bin for all the scraps of paper and card scattered across the floor during the making of Derbyshire Supergirl (my creativity is messy, to say the least). The contents of the bag were intended to be thrown away as I thought I'd reached my resolution response pathway, but now I see things differently. Creative Agents and Listeners must be prepared to flow with the meandering of the community adventure in response to the feedback they receive, and notice the things that are often discarded: a look, a smile, a new friendship, a word. I'm now starting to believe that recognising the overlooked is more important than the grand project ending, whatever that might be.

As Creative Listener, I've become increasingly drawn to the idea of making a bowl from the offcuts, scraps, and printed paper fragments left over from my Derbyshire Supergirl phase. This bowl would explain the project, the attention given to the small, overlooked things, and the willingness to remodel when feedback requires it. It still holds the essence of Willats through every fibre, being made from the refuse of a response to his pure ideology.  It is not a reference to his work, but a reworking of its principles through different materials and contexts. Where diagrams, maps and booklets once held active data, the bowl gathers residue. It holds what has been noticed rather than what has been concluded. From a Creative Listener position, the bowl becomes a direct engagement with Willats' model.

We also retain a memento made from the project to hold the project's stories and tell them to future generations; the 'ordinary' is prized. Creative Agents hold stories, responses, small gestures, and acts in their community, with the intention that they be shared and that space be created for further growth. Value rarely sits only in visible outcomes. It often emerges in quiet shifts, overlooked moments and information that resists formal capture.

A bowl like Le Guin's theory honours the slow, soft, and collective over the sharp and singular.

Fluidity, Not Fixity In Community Practice

At this stage, the bowl does not represent a fixed destination. It feels relevant now, but remains open to change. Should something emerge that better serves those involved, the form should adapt accordingly. Community working is not oriented towards a single endpoint, but remains fluid, shaped through dialogue and relationship.

Belonging, Place & Public Return

It matters that the bowl is displayed within the community it came from, not behind institutional doors, but in everyday places where people come across it in the flow of daily life.

This is not about placing art into a community, but recognising that the community itself is the source of the work.

Ultimately, whatever form this project takes next will be determined not by intention alone, but by the people, place and relationships it continues to sit within.