Fantastic news, Rachel Ramchurn and I won our Arts Council Funding bid to carry out a Research and Development phase of our Project – a Pocketful of Treasures.
Over the moon! Thank you Arts Council England.
We have been collaborating together to develop this project over the last two years, alongside our own work. The idea had always been solid, but with other funding and organisations behind us it felt like it just had to happen.
It is a project investigating the individual stories, memories and moments behind pocket sized treasures, trinkets of little or monetary value that are very precious and meaningful to the holder.
We want to unlock all those unexpected stories hidden within the treasures.
Long term, we are looking into different creative ways to re represent the stories and treasures as a mass participation artwork, through visual, auditory and interactive artworks. Hopefully reflecting back to viewers and those who participated common human themes that we all share.
First up we are working across three different community groups to start this process, who have kindly and bravely agreed to be part of the project.
The Cultural Women’s Group, Nottingham Refugee Forum
The Speakeasy Aphasia group, Bury
The Inspired Peoples group for over 60’s Manchester.
We wanted to work with three very different and diverse groups to really hone how we work with people and gather their stories. We wonder if people’s stories and treasures will show shared common themes of humanity.
After creating The Chandelier Of Lost Earring, with Lauren Sagar, an art work where peoples lonely earrings were collected to created, an unexpected outcome was the amount of stories people sent with their earrings. People really wanted to tell their story and have it captured somehow within the artwork.
After this I became particularly interested in how stories and narratives can be woven into participative public art works.
The new and exciting part of this project also is to investigate how we can use digital elements within artworks, develop an interactive format to incorporate the stories along with personal treasures.
This could be a steep but thrilling learning curve for us both.
