This article offers an analysis of community arts to develop an argument about the power of vernacular literacies. We draw on Paul Willis' work about grounded aesthetics and everyday symbolic creativity in common culture, and Scollon and Scollon's notions of geosemiotics, to analyse a community play written and performed in a council estate in Nottingham, England. In particular, we argue that Scollon and Scollon's idea of the "semiotic aggregate" offers a useful analytical tool for understanding and evaluating the significance of participation, recognition, representation and place in multimodal texts.