What Kind of Table Do We Need? Reflections from The Sculpture x Policy Lab at Modern Art Oxford
On Friday 6 June 2025, I took part in The Sculpture x Policy Lab: Artists, Policymaking and Place at Modern Art Oxford, part of the I Find Myself retrospective of Barbara Steveni. We gathered around a boardroom style table placed inside the exhibition, in a space surrounded by archival materials from the Artist Placement Group (APG), which Steveni co-founded in 1966. It was not just a setting – it was an artwork, a context.
Steveni’s APG has been an enduring influence on my own practice – especially the idea that ‘context is half the work.’ To sit in that space, in dialogue with artists, curators, policymakers, and close colleagues of old and new, felt like a live reactivation of something foundational to my thinking. The presence of Steveni’s son, JP, in the room lent a profound sense of continuity.
I was sat alongside Daniel Baker (Old Diorama Arts Centre), Gareth Bell-Jones (Flat Time House and co-curator of I Find Myself), Mark Davey (Futurecity), Lucrezia Gigante (University of Glasgow), Federica Lucivero (Ethox Centre, University of Oxford), Anita McKeown (Future Focus 21c), Yara El-Sherbini and Davina Drummond (YARA+DAVINA), and Ruth Pineda (Adur & Worthing Councils) – with the session generously convened, held and guided by Policy Lab’s Stephen Buchanan.
The Sculpture x Policy Lab was convened the event as part of its ongoing MANIFEST programme, placing artists in policy environments to explore whether, and how, artistic practice can bring new forms of learning and insight into policymaking. I’ve followed Policy Lab’s work for years with admiration. It’s the kind of programme that quietly but radically reshapes the centre of gravity , from evidence-as-output to understanding-as-process.
Reactivating APG: Artists, Agency and the Material of Policy
The Artist Placement Group was never about decoration or public relations. It was a fundamental reimagining of both the role of the artist and the possibilities of institutions. The artist, as the ‘Incidental Person,’ entered the system not to deliver a pre-agreed outcome, but to change the terms of engagement. Not a consultant, not a service provider, but a person who, by being present in the system, creates the conditions for new thought.
It’s a model I’ve long championed in placemaking. Not parachuting artists in to deliver a vision pre-authored by others, but embedding them as critical friends, provocateurs, and partners in change.
What APG set in motion and what MANIFEST is now exploring in contemporary form is the idea that policy itself can be the material of the artist. And perhaps even more radically, that artists can be held in a third space, one that is not wholly of the institution or of the community but has agency and affective power in both.
This third space, as discussed around the table, is not neutral. It is charged. Socially engaged artists in place-based settings are often expected to carry immense responsibility, to unlock engagement, build trust, surface stories, hold trauma, resolve tensions... And yet they are rarely resourced or supported with the systemic power to act on what emerges.
MANIFEST begins to change that.
Learning With and Through Art: The Bentz Lens
As Valerie Malhotra Bentz describes, there are multiple modes of learning in relation to art: learning in, through, about, and with. These distinctions are more than theoretical – they are essential if we are to understand what’s happening in artist-policy collaborations like MANIFEST.
Learning through art allows policy professionals to engage with new insights, emotional truths, and systems-level complexities that art can illuminate, often more effectively than traditional data or consultation models. This is particularly visible when artists humanise policy processes, showing how decisions are felt in the everyday lives of people.
Learning with art, however, is the deeper move, and one I see as critical in placemaking and public governance. This is not about transmission or interpretation, but co-presence. Artists and policymakers – and ideally and essentially communities – learning together in real time. Relationally. Reflexively. This is where cultural intelligence meets civic infrastructure.
These modes are made real through the work of socially engaged artists operating in complex, civic-facing settings, from councils and housing providers to heritage bodies and urban design projects. But for this work to be meaningful and not merely symbolic it must be matched by shifts in institutional culture.
Extractive Practice vs Transformative Potential
In my work across place-based and cultural engagement contexts, I hear the same message from communities again and again: We are consulted, but nothing changes. People feel they are in an extractive relationship with institutions – their ideas mined and shelved, their participation instrumentalised to fulfil funding conditions or tick consultation boxes. It is damaging, and it undermines trust.
The promise of MANIFEST is that it offers conditions that can shift this dynamic. Its placements are long enough, and open enough, to allow artists to form relationships with systems and staff. Its structures make room for policy professionals to think differently, feel differently, and act differently. And its artists are not only skilled in the social, they are situated within the institutional, able to traverse and translate between council and community, data and dialogue, future and feeling.
The evaluation of MANIFEST’s first cohort bears this out. The contributions of the artists involved included:
Creating space for deep reflection within policy teams, disrupting default rhythms and sparking strategic re-evaluation
Humanising systems and surfacing the emotional undercurrents of policy, particularly in work relating to multiple disadvantage, disability justice, and foresight thinking
Enabling enhanced engagement with citizens and staff, not by ‘representing’ voices but by building platforms where stories and values could be shared
Acting as internal agents of change, helping policy teams advocate for new approaches, ethics, and ways of seeing from within
None of this is cosmetic. It is infrastructure. These are the cultural foundations of a governance model that could genuinely respond to the complexity of place and to the voices of the people who live there.
The Table as Method
The Sculpture, as first enacted by APG, is not just a format but is method. Sitting at a table in public, open to interruption, observation, and improvisation, generates a different kind of dialogue. Not extractive. Not performance. But presence.
To sit at that table in Modern Art Oxford was to enact an alternative way of working. One that prioritises curiosity, listens without rushing to fix, and honours the intelligence of the room and the rooms beyond the room.
It was a reminder that governance is not just what is decided – it is how we come together to decide. The table is not symbolic. It is structural. And the kind of table we build reflects the kind of society we hope to live in.
A Thought from Practice: Building the Governance We Need
As someone who has spent my career working across placemaking, civic systems, and cultural strategy, I see initiatives like MANIFEST as essential fieldwork for the kind of governance we are being sold through devolution and its community power narratives.
If we are to meet those promises, not just structurally but culturally, we need mechanisms that allow public systems to evolve. We need governance capable of feeling, not just managing. We need creative intelligence that goes beyond branding, and relational capacity that extends beyond ‘stakeholder engagement’.
In short, we need more practice like this.
Because if we are to build communities that are resilient, just, and creatively alive, then we must also build systems that are ready to be changed by the people and practices they engage.
And that, for me, is why The Sculpture matters. Why MANIFEST matters. Why the Artist Placement Group still matters.
Because they are not only models for how art can enter policy – they are maps for how policy can become public again.
And that is the kind of table we need.