community

A Portrait of Levenshulme show – at LOL

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We had the best time at Levenshulme Old Library on Saturday, for the first day of our A Portrait of Levenshulme exhibition. Over recent months, Laura Deane and I (plus local artist helpers Jess Wood and Local Hotel Parking) have worked with hundreds of residents of all ages to create work celebrating our neighbourhood. We’ve helped 170 groups/individuals to make self portraits using a shutter release cable, and helped people make drawings, collages and written reflections on what makes a strong community. This is our contribution to the Platinum Jubilee celebrations – it might seem tenuous but we think community is the most important thing there is and wanted to celebrate that. We were fortunate to receive Arts Council funding via Forever Manchester to make our idea a reality and partnered with Levenshulme Market to be their first artists in residence (hopefully there will be more in the future). So many lovely participants came along to see their work in the show. I loved every minute. We are now going to be pulling everything together into a zine. Watch this space….

Sign language art project

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Last year I was lucky enough to get involved in a local arts project, in which we re-ran a collaborative project from about 20 years ago.  A school near where I live, Alma Park, is a specialist centre for deaf children – with pupils travelling from across Manchester to get support with their communication needs. They spend some time in mainstream classes as well and all children in the school learn some sign language. Years ago the school was involved in a community arts project in which photographs of children’s hands signing out the name of our neighbourhood – Levenshulme – were displayed at the local train station. These were up when I moved here in 2004, but the posters were eventually taken down after suffering water damage.

In 2019 the Friends of Levenshulme Station group decided to re-run the project and invited me to take part. We decided to involve only hearing-impaired children this time and in the summer term I spent a morning shooting 11 pupils’ hands. It then took a long time to get the funding from Northern Rail and other partners which we needed to print the images onto aluminium and there have been other delays while we’ve waited for permission to get onto the platforms and install the images. But now they’re there, along with a text celebrating the existence of Alma Park School’s deaf community, which mainly local people don’t know about.