Process Colours

Analysing and Re Evaluating the Assignment of Social Value in Art and Labour

There is increasing socio-political division around the world most noticeable in the wake of the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the United States Presidential office. The purpose of this practice-led research is to investigate and analyse similarities between working-class and academic art communities to re-evaluate ways in which social value is assigned for various cultural outputs. By means of autoethnography, the exegesis utilizes storytelling as a theoretical framework to first contextualize the project among various artists exploring themes of labour, industry, and class against the lived experience of growing up in a working-class community in Western New York. Explorations centred around three unique bodies of work employing printmaking, painting, and found object/curation are enacted first to provide further context to the nature of working-class studies, secondly to address a constructed hierarchy between mental and manual labour, and lastly to examine the qualifications of context versus content in order to disrupt the revealed hierarchy. Through a re-evaluation of the language used to assign social value to individuals based on their cultural output the study finds that it is possible for an arts-based research academic to elevate a working-class labourer to the status of the artist through nuanced shifts in the perspectives used to view communities and individuals. The paper suggests applying these perspective shifts can be a way to enact progressive collaboration in society, however, further work is required to establish a more complete intersectional view of class and labour that is needed to develop the research and test its application on a broader community scale.