wigan

Ensuring inclusivity – Wigan SWAP residency

Posted on

I’m working with a group with a lot of daily challenges at the moment, and engagement in my weekly sessions at Wigan SWAP has been patchy since the summer. This is not just for my activity – attendance has been down for many of their sessions during September.

There are so many possible reasons for this. Sometimes it’s just raining, so women stay at home. I may see the same faces several weeks, and then not see them again for ages. Sometimes people seem to vanish – their circumstances may change in some way, or they may have been relocated by the Home Office without much notice. Something positive or negative may have happened with their asylum case.

Sometimes women are physically present in the space but not up for participating. There are babies and toddlers around. It’s a drop-in session where people arrive and leave at different times. It’s very multilingual, which presents its own challenges. People may want to join in with my activity, but only have 15 minutes to do so before rushing off to collect a child from nursery.

This all means I’m having to think quite carefully about how to make my activities inclusive. I need to consider how to make it possible for people who are participating for the first time to get involved – as well as those who have been present but patchy.

In socially engaged practice, it’s important to keep remembering that the process is the work. This is something I personally find quite difficult to keep in mind. But I do hope to make something out of all this eventually – so how can I come out with some kind of output in these circumstances? Crucially this needs to be something where the women I’m working with feel they’ve been part of something positive for them too, rather than it being an extractive process.

When I started attending these sessions in January, I noticed that many of the women seem to enjoy working with textiles – knitting and sewing seemed to be popular. I’ve thought hard about how to pull together the photography with this and came up with the idea of putting images shot/produced by group members onto textile items. My sewing skills are rudimentary so I’ve enlisted the support of Project Linus, a voluntary group who deliver sessions at SWAP once a month.

Over recent weeks I’ve run some cyanotype sessions where women could create materials to use on these textile items, but turnout has been disappointing. So the only way to ensure inclusivity has been for me to spend some time over recent days making a big pile of cyanotype pieces, so there will be enough materials for anyone who wants to do some sewing with them this week. I’ll put a message into the group’s WhatsApp chat to let women know what’s happening, which may drum up a bit more attendance – fingers crossed.

A small selection of work in progress from this commission will be exhibited at Open Eye Hub in Leigh in October.

Wigan Streets Apart project wrap up

Posted on

 

You can tell I’ve had a busy year as there are entire projects that I’ve barely blogged about.

Last November I was one of three artists selected for the first tranche of Streets Apart commissions – cultural commissions associated with the Wigan Heritage Action Zone (HAZ) of King Street. This was the largest commission I’d received at that point and one of two HAZ projects I was working on concurrently – I was also involved in the Picturing High Streets project in Chester, where I went on to work with Cafe 71, a mental health space.

I spent the first few weeks worrying about how to make my work sufficiently different from the other commissions – I felt like there would be a lot of common ground and repetition since I tend to gather lots of personal narrative type stuff, and King Street is a street full of social memories. Most Wigan residents have some association with the street – often through its pubs and clubs or in the past, cinemas and theatres. Even the job centre is at the bottom of King Street.

I found my course eventually – breaking my commission up to make it more manageable for myself. I ran a series of photo walks with anyone who wanted to photograph and share memories of the street. And I forged a relationship with the Brick, a homelessness and anti-poverty charity in the town which runs a food bank site just behind the HAZ zone. It was also very clear from my first walk up King Street that people had been bedding down in a covered porch area on the street – so I wanted to make sure this narrative was included in the outputs.

The project was challenging at times and I learned a lot about diplomacy, patience and resourcefulness when it comes to working with partner organisations and supporting people who have challenging circumstances. But we got there in the end – and yesterday it all came together with a public sharing of the work.

The photo walks involved about 12 participants recruited via an open call. I also interviewed other people who have worked on or used the street – everything on that side got pulled together into an ebook which is free online.  A selection of images were also put onto vinyl panels in a window on King Street, which is a really great outcome as passers by will hopefully stop and engage with the work and memories written around the group’s images. There is a QR code which takes people to the ebook. It looks brilliant. You can see it over here – it’s called “Street View”.

 

The Brick work was always something I wanted to make into a physical zine, and luckily the commission budget covered a second artist for the project – I chose to work with local designer Amy Cecelia Leigh, who attended many of the workshops at the Brick and worked with participants to make the zine something which they had a hand in. The zine contains their photos, words, collages and design preferences and one of the group members came up with the name “In My Own Words”.  That is also available online, over here. The Brick wants these zines to be available to the public but are keenest to have them to hand within their services, so people who use their spaces can read the stories – that to me is a really brilliant outcome.

One thing that has been bothering me a little about the project is when I learned that at the same time my work was being showcased, the porch area where the rough sleepers had been sheltering would be blocked off by the authorities. I understand this is part of the regeneration process but for me personally it jars massively – it’s the same building where my group’s vinyls have been put. While it wasn’t the work from the Brick, it was work also facilitated by me and the whole thing felt very uncomfortable and compromising for me on a personal level.

All I was able to do was re-write my vinyl text to gently ask some questions about who regeneration serves and whose voices have a right to be heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wigan King Street project – photo walk along a complicated street

Posted on

I enjoyed my second photo walk along King Street in Wigan today, with Jeff, Mike and Dave, for one strand of my Heritage Action Zone commission with the Old Courts and the rest of the Wigan cultural consortium. This should have been my third walk but I ended up having to cancel walk #2 due to my catching Covid. I’ve tried really hard to promote these – via Facebook groups, contacting the local newspaper (to no avail), general social media, flyering, contacting local organisations like the college, Universities of the Third Age and photographic societies, but it’s been an uphill struggle.  I have one more walk next Sat 9th April (drop me a line to get involved) plus a workshop at the Old Courts in mid-May for people who have participated. This week I’ll also start running some sessions with service users from local homeless charity the Brick, for the the other part of this project – exploring their relationship with this rather complicated street.