Outside In provides a platform for artists who encounter significant barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance, or isolation.

It is an important and rare example of an organisation with national reach championing the work of artists excluded from the art world. It was formed in 2006 atPallant House Gallery and won the Charity Award for Arts and Heritage in 2013and the Queens Award for Voluntary Services in 2022.
Outside In became an independent charity in 2017 and gained National PortfolioOrganisation status with the Arts Council England in 2018.

Outside Inprovides a digital platform for its artists to show their work and threeprogrammes of activity: artist development, exhibitions, and training. Theseactivities, supported by fundraising and communications, all aim to create afairer art world by supporting artists, creating opportunities, and influencingorganisations.

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Emma Stones (ES), Producer at Chorus Arts was joined by Marc Steene (MS), Founder of Outside In, met to talk about value, opportunity and narrative contexts.

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ES What is Outside In?

MS Outside In provides a platform for artists who encounter significant barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance, or isolation.

It is an important and rare example of an organisation with national reach championing the work of artists excluded from the art world. It was formed in 2006 at Pallant House Gallery and won the Charity Award for Arts and Heritage in 2013 and the Queens Award for Voluntary Services in 2022 and the director Marc Steene was awarded an OBE in 2024.

Outside In became an independent charity in 2017 and gained National Portfolio Organisation status with the Arts Council England in 2018.

Outside In provides a digital platform for its artists to show their work and three programmes of activity: artist development, exhibitions, and training. These activities, supported by fundraising and communications, all aim to create a fairer art world by supporting artists, creating opportunities, and influencing organisations.

ES How did you come to found Outside In?

MS It came from my own journey as an artist. How I came from a working class background. I went to three different comprehensive schools and my education, and my home life was pretty messed up and difficult, to say the least. But throughout my childhood, and my early life, drawing was fundamental for me.

My drawings were very private. I always had a deep connection with the value of the process and the purpose it had for me in terms of navigating and managing my life  

The only thing that fell open to me in my childhood was to go to art school.

But I never really fitted in properly into that whole system, not easily, because my work was always far too personal. And back in the day in the 80s, it was all very conceptual.

It was only when I graduated, being in London, trying to sell my work, that I realised that what I wanted to create wasn’t what people in the art world were looking for or understood. I did okay selling my work, but the commodification of it didn’t sit right with me.

I found the idea that when my paintings left me and went into that commercial space that my art wasn’t understood, it was a product detached from its creator. And the values and the reasons why people buy it are very different from what your intentions might have been. So I found that process very difficult.

My childhood and my experience of the art world eventually did eventually come to bite me and due to mental health issues, I left it completely. I found myself in a wilderness, where it was apparent that I had lost something fundamental to me and I didn’t know how to get it back.

During this time, I volunteered at a day centre where I came across some incredibly talented artists whose creative journeys were even more difficult than mine had been, they were struggling with creative neglect and a lack of understanding and appreciation.  Outside In sprung from this experience, it suddenly became very clear to me that the issues around the lack of inclusion and representation in the art world was widely held and manifest wherever I looked.

A friend of mine convinced me to interview for a job at Pallant House. The Director then was this rather flamboyant, eccentric guy called Stefan van Raay.

And he was really, really curious and interested in my experiences and my journey. He really believed that you should do what you feel is right and not do what others think you should, or their agendas.

Over my time there, I evolved several projects, one of which was Outside In,

Our mission was to make the gallery more representative of its creative community and more fitting as a community resource that actually met the needs of its community.

Working with mental health teams, day services, social workers, occupational therapists, and care homes for the elderly, I reached out to find people in the community who were making art but weren’t included in the Gallery.

Gradually momentum picked up and people just started turning up. And the people at the reception just hadn't really expected it to have an impact. But also for the people to be coming through the door who never would have come in.

You know, so you had people who were homeless, people who were using BSL. You had people with learning disabilities all dropping off their work and coming in. It grew and grew.

ES You talk about the notion of value. The value that an artist puts on their own work as well as the value other people put on work. Worthiness of being in spaces.

MS Yes, as if there is an accepted aesthetic scale of what counts as good or bad art. I truly believe that Outside In is disrupting these notions. By allowing people to form their ideas of what they like and don’t like, and in a way slowly and quietly subverting these accepted norms.

There is still a long way to go with really prioritising inclusivity and community involvement in art galleries. We are working to change attitudes. Attitudes that I have found are often implicit not explicit.

Such as the way people talk about art, especially art professionals and those in control, how they have learnt through formal education and art history to define art and how to talk about it.

It's a relinquishing of power and control that people find deeply challenging.

ES It feels that the tides are turning though. There is something in the water.

How has the mission of Outside In changed since that first iteration at Pallant House?

MS One of the earliest sort of adjustments to the program was the implementation of a training element to what we deliver. Because I always felt it is life changing and massively affirmative for someone to see their work presented in places of repute such as the Royal Academy Summer Show and Sotheby’s and this is something Outside In provides.. 

But things don't really change unless you enable people to participate in the structure itself. You know, so I always felt that and there's so much opportunity in the art world. And again, it always defaults to people who are articulate, well-educated and middle class, you know.

So, I felt, how do we, as well as getting the work there, how do we get the people we work with in there as well? So, we developed several training strands. We've trained a lot of artists to lead creative workshops who then become artist educators and work in other institutions and work for us. We've trained artists to work at museums and galleries, to explore and research collections, to use their expertise of a lived experience to provide a separate and different narrative about art.

And then more recently, we've trained our artists as curators, so they're now curating our exhibitions.

The other big part of our recent work has been the evolving our Artists Development Programme. So that is about not just the pastoral care, we need to provide for the people we're working with.It's about how we find and support artists to engage with us.

To do this we travel around the country on artist support days, working like I did way back in the day with all those wider networks, to find people and support them to bring their work into a safe space. And often that may well be the first time they've ever shared it with anybody. It might just come from a bin bag that they've kept on the street or under a bed, or they might have just shared it with their family.

And for the first time it's photographed, they get to talk about it, they get to create an online gallery, they get to write a statement. And for me, that's one of several validations that the charity provides. But that sense of being unseen and invisible, to being seen and visible is profound, you know.

ES And the transition to use the word artist to describe yourself, ‘I am an artist’, may be a hurdle that many of your artists may have to overcome. A change of mentality from believing what you are doing is not a hobby, it's creating art.

MS Exactly, or that it's just therapeutic or therapy. But actually, because the benefit and the sort of cathartic experience a lot of the art has means that it's not really valued as art because it's just therapy. But in essence, all art is therapeutic. All creativity is therapeutic. It's just that because these artists work in a different way, it's seen as lesser.

ES From working with so many artists, the stories that you have come across must be so varied, inspiring.  

MS So many. One which is quite a nice one is Manuel Bonifacio. He just works endlessly.

He has an idiosyncratic and personal way of creating, which is very playful and funny. It has Portuguese folk art elements to it which I can't quite pin down.

He first submitted a piece for an exhibition we had in 2009. He sent over an image of it, a little thumbnail because we select things online and it was this beautiful drawing of a mermaid. I was struck by its beauty and mystery.

The piece came in after it was selected and it was bigger and more impressive that I had imagined. It went onto win first prize.

But it was the emotion that came from his sister when he won. Full of sadness and happiness. This man, a middle-aged man, at this point in his life, had finally gained recognition that he was of value and his work was beautiful. Because she might have seen it, but no one else would because the context wasn't there for it to be respected in.

The mermaid drawing was bought by a gallery in New York, and that was the beginning. The beginning of calling himself an artist.

There is huge diversity in terms of artists we've come across. Somebody who springs to mind at the moment is Leila Kassab, who's an artist working in Gaza. And she has a particularly difficult life situation currently.

It’s really hard for her to get her work out. Difficult to smuggle her work out to get it to be exhibited. She entered to take part in a commission, which we have with Pallant House Gallery, a really prestigious commission.

And we managed to support her to do it. And her work was on show and she made a film. And she's then gone on to be in our collection and she sold other work.

And I think sometimes those sort of lifelines and those chances to just be present as an artist can just manifest in different people's lives in different ways and have different significance.

ES Does Outside In have its own collection?

MS We've always had like a body of work that we’ve accrued over time from the charities development. And it tells a story of the charity, but it has also grown to involve other works. More recently, we were gifted a collection of quite important Outsider art as well. We've been primarily using the collection as a learning tool.

It's important for artists to use it as a means to develop the skills for curation and research. As well as creating a narrative and context for where they fit in.

ES The Arts can feel very London-centric. How do you navigate this?

MS There is certainly a push-pull factor about London, but we actually have hubs across the UK. We create hubs in partnership with arts organisations in locations where a lot of our artists are. Like in the West Midlands in partnership with the New Art Gallery Walsall and in the North West where we have hubs.

Another growing need is the vast number of people who are non-digital. A lot of our artists lack the means and capacity to get online or to have a sort of online gallery. We work really hard to find and locate these artists and provide different means of communications to them so they can still take part.

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ES How do you see the arts landscape changing?

MS How I would like to see it changing is to see more diversity in programming and exhibitions. To see surprising, interesting and nuanced artists being shown whose story is not the ones we have heard before..

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Submissions for the Outside In 2025 National Open Exhibition are OPEN!
Head to their website to learn more about the organisation, and the opportunities available through them.

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