Forging justice through art

Big hART creative director Scott Rankin discusses how art can effect social change.

Big hART founder and 2018 Tasmanian of Year Scott Rankin. Picture: LUKE BOWDEN

SCOTT Rankin’s voice is getting husky from talking so much, but Tasmania’s 2018 Australian of the Year has had a lot to say during his stint in the spotlight.

When Rankin was awarded the honour late last year, organisers made it clear he could take it and run, no hard feelings, in acknowledgment of his work over 26 years as creative director of Big hART, the country’s leading campaigning arts organisation.

Or he could use the year-long platform it offered to shine a light on issues that mattered to him. Though he has been doing that through Big hART for decades, this was a chance to articulate his core concerns directly to new audiences.

Rankin leapt at the chance and hurled himself into an exhausting extracurricular schedule of travel and speaking engagements from local Rotary clubs to New York City.

“I wanted to do the award justice by using it to talk about justice,” he says.

“I wanted to talk about the kinds of communities we work in and issues of deep poverty that are missed.”

MORE CAFE SOCIETY:

REG GRUNDY: HELPING TOURISTS GO WILD IN WILDERNESS

EMILY SHEPHERD: NURSES BEING PUSHED TO THE LIMIT

YVETTE BREYTENBACH: IS HOBART GETTING TOO BORING?

DAVID BOWMAN: ACT NOW TO AVOID A FIRE DISASTER

BROOKE WEBB: ADDING A TOUCH OF SPICE TO THE TASTE

Rankin lives at Wynyard, near Burnie, and it is from this base in Australia’s poorest electorate that he has demonstrated the role creative projects can play in changing lives.

Holding forgotten people and hidden community issues to the light is at the heart of his mission and artistic productions. But it doesn’t play out in overtly didactic plays, exhibitions and other art forms, which can turn audiences off in a complex mixture of boredom, guilt and resentment.

His approach is more evolved than that. Rankin, a playwright and director, is attuned to which messaging is best kept behind the scenes, leaving the art unburdened to fulfil its storytelling and virtuosic potential.

Big hART may wear its heart on its sleeve as an organisation (its name is a bit of a clue there), but not at showtime.

“The campaigning goes into the process of making the work and the process that runs on from it, but not into the work itself,” he says.

We are discussing his approach over coffee and Vegemite toast in the breakfast room of the Astor Private Hotel in Macquarie St.

Not only has he stayed in this Hobart bolthole for decades, he used it as a live performance venue for the Blue Angel Project, about seafaring and slavery at sea, during Ten Days on the Island three years ago. The show unfolded in nine different spaces and the audience could stay on as overnight guests, receiving bedside visits from a singer of sea shanties.

Back up on the North-West Coast, Rankin works with local people of many ages.

In his work with young people, he has found a valuable new ally in University of Tasmania Vice-Chancellor Rufus Black, whose “whole island as a campus” approach he embraces.

With many in his home community generationally impoverished, Rankin says young people’s prospects can be stymied by parents who view them, even if only subconsciously, as their current or future carers.

“The idea of tertiary education is that it will steal my child away,” he says.

It is part of the gentle work of Big hART to tease out and question those limiting ideas.

“We give them sufficient time to make choices about shifting their social trajectory,” says Rankin.

“Ultimately it’s their choice, not ours, but you need more than a couple of opportunities. You need to hold them in a pattern, because they are actually doing serious identity work as they shift in their picture of themselves.”

That’s where the slow work of communal art projects comes into its own, building skills and confidence of participants along the way, as well as the space for them to start reimagining their lives.

“Then we use the content made in those communities to drive change,” says Rankin, leaping ahead.

“We take an invisible story, put it in front of people who make powerful decisions and drive long-term change.”

Often, he says, he only considers a project completed when it has culminated in change at a policy level. He never underestimates the transformative power of storytelling in pursuit of this goal.

“We use the phrase ‘it’s harder to hurt someone if you know their story’ as a kind of primary prevention.”

Cultural justice is a concept that has been much on Rankin’s mind this year, and he has refined his thoughts on it in a major essay, Cultural Justice and the Right to Thrive, which was launched in Hobart on Tuesday.

“Over the past few centuries, the high arts have claimed culture as though it’s their own,” he says.

“Artists like me — playwrights, theatre directors, whatever — have accidentally claimed culture and that has created a sense of exclusion.

“What I am saying is that culture is about the visibility of everybody. It’s about your story being visible in the discussion of ideas about who we are and who we could be in the future.”