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.
