Spencer Hanna Howarth
2021 Wakefield Writers Festival
New Works Artist description of the project.

I’m an artist who paints portraits of people experiencing homelessness. In this collaboration subjects have significant, individual input in creating concepts and content. Together, our mission is to fight the dehumanization of homeless persons—to favour empowerment and incorporation over marginalization and societal assimilation. We intend for the work to reveal the authentic, idealized individual beneath the stigma of homelessness.

My goal is to reveal what homeless individuals have to teach society by exploring the human virtues inherit in the homeless experience. People living on the street share their home with an urban population who often subliminally dehumanize and demonize the circumstances of homeless individuals. Dehumanization is a facet of warfare and subjugation. Mandated subsistence can be felt as a form of societal and economic warfare on the homeless experience. My intention, however, is not to delegate responsibility [for what?], but to embrace it. [Not sure what you mean by this sentence.]

In my work I promote empathy with each subject and explore individual values and stories. My hope is that this collaborative depiction enables the subjects to influence how they are perceived—something that can get lost under the label of “homelessness.”

“The law, in all its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread” – Anatoli Frans

It is for our collective good to embrace homeless people and offer them wholeness as members of society. In this age of global pandemic, political upheaval and environmental disaster, our problems are increasingly shared. Any alternative to a unified objective could result in the uprooting of the global home of our species. It has never been clearer that a callous ethos will lead to common catastrophe.

​A lack of empathy projects a cynical history that contaminates the observer as well as the observed. The intention of this work is to promote reconciliation between individuals and what society perceives as our failures.

Law enforcement’s treatment of homelessness as a disease keeps an already displaced population in a state of perpetual dislocation so that nothing permanent can take root. I create portraits that explore permanence from both sides of the homeless issue, offering the subject a sense of enduring history. By affording each subject agency over how each piece is to be stored or displayed, I hope to create a sense of fragility with the mainstream viewer that juxtaposes with the recognized dependability of the subject.
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In mainstream society we may use our life stories to fabricate a persona that armours us throughout our careers and relationships. This is an unconscious performance we take for granted. A perceived label can supersede the deeds of one’s life, and the palatability of this label in the mainstream can make or break the human experience. With my work I hope to extend civility by highlighting the nobility of life outside conventional success. 

A note on money:
The folks I interview have a varying level of interest in the project, and this affects compensation. I find that some subjects are interested in the attention, others in the artwork, but many need to be paid as I work with them (panhandling is work, and I am a distraction). With others I risk doing them harm by putting money in their hands. These are problems I am figuring out as I go.