ABSTRACT
The Design and Technical Aid Service (D&TAS) project on Provost Estate began in 1982, around the same time as the work on Goldsmiths. As on Goldsmiths, the Provost tenants association had approached Free Form for help with applying for money from the Greater London Council Community Areas Programme. A complicating factor on Provost was that there were two main factions on the estate, each centred on a powerful family and each wary of the other. Inevitably perhaps, the collaborative process of finding ways for those living on estates like Provost to tell their own stories in visual form also took the artists’ aesthetic language yet further from the received pronunciation of the gallery world. The aesthetic language the Free Form artists used for the Provost mural and the other ‘art elements’ so central to the D&TAS projects can be seen as developing out of an often intense collaboration between artists and residents.
