Carl Chinn sits down in conversation with Jayne Murray, artist and director of Place Prospectors, who went to Druids Heath in 2017 to run a small arts project and ended up holding the missing history of an entire Birmingham estate. A resident had kept carrier bags full of pamphlets, newsletters and posters from decades of community activity. It took Jayne months just to put it in chronological order. What emerged was a credit union set up to beat the loan sharks, a green space saved by residents, a neighbourhood action group that fought a housing transfer, and a resident's essay from the late 1970s.
Jayne grew up in Lincoln and Sleaford, the daughter of a Glaswegian father and a Lincoln mother, and she was making little exhibitions out of museum postcards before she was eight. She talks about the GCSE batik practical that told her what she wanted to do with her life, the theory teacher at Derby who taught her how to look at an image, the 1995 weekend she spent teaching people the internet in a launderette with borrowed computers and a washing powder sponsor, and her conviction that art is not something you have to be good enough for.
Jayne is passionate about making art accessible and social justice.
Jayne Murray (artist) - https://www.instagram.com/jaynemurrayartist
Place Prospectors - https://prospectors.org.uk
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