I was asked by the Rotherham Children's Capital of Culture team to facilitate a mural painting session with a group of female identifying young people in Bramley.
The young people at the group wanted to create an art piece reflecting the challenges of walking by yourself as a woman and represent the anxieties that surround this. Together we created a large mural of a woman walking alone in an alleyway, the participants chose grey scale colours to reflect the fear and unsureness of walking alone. At the Women of the World festival (WOW), the group invited people to add colourful handprints to the mural, showing solidarity with every woman who feels alone and afraid, brightening up the dark alleyway.
You can read more about the project here:
Photography by Sam Mcqueen and Ai Narapol
As part of Rotherham Roots Festival, an event celebrating nature and Rotherham’s connection to it, I was asked to run a series of workshops within the community. At these children and family drop in workshops on the run up to the festival, we had to create artwork that could be carried in the procession.
Since the theme was nature, and specifically the River Don, I decided to facilitate a catch your own fish workshop. Using acetate sheets and opaque pens, I asked participants to “catch a fish” by drawing around vintage English river fish illustrations. I encouraged the participants to add patterns and textures as the scales, or create their own fish using heads of one fish and tales and scales of another. The workshops themselves were really successful and worked well as a drop in activity. It was a relaxing and mindful drawing exercise which was approachable to any artistic skill level or age.
I used the acetates created in the workshops to create cyanotype prints on fabric, including everyones fish. As cyanotype is blue, the finished flag could be waved like moving water, representing the community of Rotherham that helped create it and their connection to the River Don running through the town.
The final flag was carried by the community in the Rotherham Roots Festival procession.
Commissioned by Flux Rotherham, in conjunction with the Rotherham Children’s Capital of Culture Team and Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council events team.
Ysgol Bryn Alyn in Wrexham contacted me in 2022 to conduct a workshop and paint a mural in their entrance hall. The workshops were with Year 6 students with additional needs who were joining the school the following September. For a lot of these children, they struggled with anxiety surrounding the transition of primary school to secondary school so the staff wanted to explore how they could ease the process and get them excited for the years to come.
I produced several leaf shapes and colours and the Year 6’s could write, draw or collage any response to the theme of “How will I grow” on their own leaf. They then helped me create the tree, with the schools values and mission statements on each branch, before adding their own leaf to the school tree which connects and supports them all.
Bloom is a community garden for women in Sheffield, focussing on wellbeing through therapeutic horticulture. They grow an abundance of beautiful flowers and sell them across Sheffield. I was asked to run workshop to design a mural in their brand colours that the attendees of their open day could help me paint. In total, around 15 women helped me create this mural for their garden on the side of their old potting shed.