In the beginning

The exhibition celebrates the birth that year of a really innovative scheme to promote direct communication between artists and a wider public, and to raise the local profile of arts practitioners. It includes work by some of those artists associated with the first-ever Oxfordshire Artweek.

The man who introduced the open studios' concept to fellow members of the Oxford Artists' Group, meeting in a basement at MOMA, was the sculptor Piers Benn.

"I imported the idea from Cambridge, Massachusetts," he recalls. "People in Oxford were trying to make a living as artists but it was a different scene then very little public art money and not many other ways of earning money through art. There was a large audience out there that we weren't tapping. Bringing people into contact with us in our homes and studios would, we thought, enable them to see and argue with us in a different context from the formal gallery, with a different chemistry, and lessen any suspicion."

The artists themselves ran the whole show in 1983.

"A constant theme through the first ten years was a discussion about whether artists should put money in from their own pockets, or whether it was something the Arts Council might fund, and also whether artists should have to be administrators.

"Since then, there have been opportunities for people to get involved in sponsoring, which is good if sponsors are challenging the artists working for them, looking for new things," Piers said.

He is reluctant to talk about work not yet realised, but said, intriguingly, that his exhibit for the OVADA exhibition will be "a three-dimensional woven piece, probably of mixed materials, and probably something to do with bird-flu."

One of the central purposes of the original event was to help artists become more visible within their community. And, with this in mind, a spectacular first day was devised.

Another member of the founding group, Helen Ganly, has kept a series of notebooks and sketchbooks which act as creative stimulus and, incidentally, serve as archive material for event organisers today.

"I was sceptical to start with, worried about the public's reaction. I put this feeling into an effigy I made of myself, called Aunt Sally. People could throw beanbags and, if they hit her, she laughed.

"She came to the official opening at Oxpens, where we also had a giant puppet and someone catapulted out of a top hat bouncing on rubber cables from a crane."

The artists' hard work in drawing attention to the first Artweek was rewarded by an enthusiastic response from the public, who, in 2006, can choose to visit any of the 450 open studios countywide.

"The opportunity for artists to bypass commercial galleries is still important," Helen said. "You can avoid paying commission, which can be up to 50 per cent. And there aren't enough galleries anyway to handle the amount of talent around."

The work she is showing at OVADA relates to a long-term project developed from ideas in Italo Calvino's surreal fiction Invisible Cities, and will have particular relevance for Oxford. "It will be partly ephemeral, and based on paper," she said " I've always been passionate about paper for drawing and painting on, and as a medium in its own right."

Oxfordfshire Artweeks has inspired many spin-offs. Hugh Dunford Wood, another of those active in 1982/3, has been instrumental in widening its horizons both geographically and conceptually.

"I was living in Charlbury and took a stand for extending Artweeks beyond the city. Then I moved to the county boundary, and found that not many people came, so I started Hives of Industry', which was a sort of permanent Artweeks: a trail of two dozen artists and craftspeople from Burford to Moreton-in-Marsh. It is a valuable way of identifying who does what locally, finding that there is a furniture-maker down the road, or a calligrapher. It helps to humanise the environment."

"I'm keen to break down barriers. Those who think they don't know about art are intimidated, but most have a latent creative talent. I always try and collar the kids and say You can do this too!'."

In the same communicative spirit, Hugh has been involved in an art project with refugees, together with artists from their homelands, and has also set up a small charity providing art packs to homeless people in London.

His contribution to 1982 will use found materials' bits and pieces taken from hedgerows and farmyards. "I will be making a sort of arch or door lintel. The piece will be about getting in touch with all these people again after nearly 25 years."

Founder of Magdalen Road Studios, Diana Bell, who arrived in Oxford in 1982 and exhibited at her home in Boars Hill during the first festival, has been heavily involved in some of the subsequent public art projects.

"For me, for years and years, Artweeks was a forum for doing more challenging work. In 1990 we set up the Painting Park in South Parks," she said.

The Parks Department put up large boards and each artist responded individually. Mine was about power, entitled The Strong Shall Inherit the Earth. I've always made work about issues surrounding humanity. In 1991, we had a public Painting Park' for children and the adults that came with them, as well as the artists' work, which focused on philosophy and poetry quotations."

Her 1982 exhibit she has taken part in every Artweeks apart from1987 and 1988 reflects human links with the environment, focusing on wind, seeds and pollen.

"Wind-born seeds can be blown thousands of miles and are almost invisible to the naked eye: something's happening all the time which we're not aware of, but which is vital!"

The nature of Artweeks has changed since its inception, a consequence partly of the increased involvement of amateur artists. Roger Perkins, one of the professionals in at the start, supports its non-selective policy." Some people felt there was a lack of qualitative criteria, but I always thought it should be the visual arts equivalent of the Edinburgh Festival put it in front of the punters and let them make their own decisions."

Roger exhibited ceramics at the 1983 event but has since started to work in every kind of material and medium, as a sculptor and installation artist. He is currently artist-in-residence, with his partner Kay Sentance (a set designer) at Oxford Brookes Uinversity.

Focusing now on how people think about time, inspired by the trainee teachers' timetables all around him on the Harcourt Campus, he will be exhibiting a thought-provoking, and very noisy, digital clock at the OVADA show.

Closely involved with Piers Benn in adapting the American open studio model to the Oxford art scene, painter Andrew Walton's original vision for Artweek differed slightly from Roger's. "I hoped Artweek would be a kind of professional arts festival but there was a lot of interest at the time in community arts, so it was thrown open to anybody who wanted to take part. On the whole though, I think it is an extremely good idea. It brings a focus to the visual arts.

"Artists' skills are not necessarily at their strongest when promoting their work, so it is useful to have a platform where we're supported. Over the years, some of the Oxford institutions, like the Ashmolean, have come to take it more seriously and that's something that should be developed."

Andrew comes from a large family of artists and designers and was co-founder of the Oxford Artists' Group. His work at OVADA will consist of 200-250 A5-size paintings connected with landscape, maps and signs, based, as is all his art, on first-hand experience, such as walking through the countryside and looking at things intensely.

In past Artweeks he had shows at Trinity College with other artists, one of whom, John Trigg, was in the 1982 group and is exhibiting at OVADA, although he now lives in Cornwall.

"We were interested in the meanings of images in a not very obvious way: the human qualities of things. I've always been fascinated by sequences of images and at Trinity I had some large pieces where linked images were fixed into a grid, like a film storyboard. I'm returning to working with sequences in the OVADA show."

Artweeks has also been very influential nationally, spawning many similar ventures.

"It is astonishing the way Artweeks has spread around the country" Andrew said. "There's a secret pride that we initiated something that became so immensely popular."

1982 runs from May 12 until June 10 at the OVADA Gallery, 21 Gloucester Green, Oxford. 01865 201782