Stephen Willats: Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs - Nottingham, 1971/2 (Rare edition)

Softcover | 14.7 x 21 cm | 28 pp

Nottingham Trent University | 2022 | 9781912253036

During the early 1970s, while living in Nottingham and teaching at the Nottingham College of Art and Design (now Nottingham Trent University), Willats began several interactive projects exploring the relationship between artist and audience, and people in private and public space. Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs (1971/2) saw him work with four tennis clubs in the city – all socially, economically and physical separate – with the idea of uniting different social groups within a shared process.

This booklet was produced for a 2022 exhibition at the Bonington Gallery in Nottingham that revisited the project archive.

This was the first of Willats’ project works to employ the question and answer book format, which he went on to develop further in projects in Edinburgh and West London, and one of the first to both use imagery taken directly from the environment where the project was located and to actually site the work within that environment too. This use of familiar visual references and the importance of location were to become common element in his works and he saw these as essential methods of drawing in an audience that were not necessarily accustomed to art, describing it as an audience which is external to the art environment. It is further interesting to note the influence of advertising techniques on Willats at this time.

The project ‘attempted to establish the environmental conditions which would enable members of Tennis Clubs in Nottingham to vary their perception of their physical, social environment, so that they could remodel the game of tennis around what they considered constituted their club needs. The project was not completed’ Stephen Willats

Stephen Willats
Since the early 1960s, Stephen Willats has situated his pioneering practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines such as cybernetics, advertising systems research, learning theory, communications theory and computer technology. In so doing, he has constructed and developed a collaborative, interactive and participatory practice grounded in the variables of social relationships, settings and physical realities.