“I remember making art works out of loaves of stale bread

I remember walking round the house looking at pebbles and tree and the pond as a performance piece

I remember the twins dancing ethereally in the dusk

I remember walking through fields of spring flowers watching horses pull ploughs and being immersed in the beauty and intensity of the land

I remember the first gathering and hearing names of countries I didn’t know existed – Estonia, Lithuania

I remember passionate conversations about racism with Eastern Europeans

I remember dividing into groups based on carving up Europe: the northern Europeans; southern Europeans, western Europeans, eastern Europeans

I remember the feeling of walking into the dining room at lunchtime – sharing food and endless conversation

I remember Byszewski – ‘To skomplikowane – it’s complicated’… everything is complicated”

In 1990 Lee Corner was co-ordinator of Art Link in the West Midlands. She first introduced the work of Jubilee Arts to Polish artists, and participated in the first workshops with Sylvia King in Reymontowka, near Siedlce. This was the former house of the family of Wladyslaw Reymont, the 1924 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, now used by the local state for artistic residencies.

Janusz Byszewski was a Polish artist who turned up on Jubilee’s doorstep in Greets Green, West Bromwich, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, who invited Jubilee to participate in summer workshops and create ‘actions’. Byszewski went onto to be a curator at Laboratorium Edukacji Twórczej, part of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. Jubilee cooperated with them over a number of years, making a number of ‘actions’. This work is documented on this website here.