A Fond Farewell, and here we go onto the next adventure

“A piece of history for past, present and future…” arthur+martha CIC will wind up in March 2022, after 15 years making heartfelt artistic collaborations, often with people affected by homelessness or dementia.

Stitching the Wars 2014-2017

arthur+martha Community Interest Company (2007-2022) was a long, fruitful partnership – artist Lois Blackburn and poet Philip Davenport, collaborated with marginalised communities in the UK and beyond. The projects were designed to bring joy, comfort and self-expression, challenging social stereotypes and celebrating diverse voices.

Standouts include The Homeless Library  2014-17, the first-ever history of British homelessness – told through poems, art and interviews in artist books – exhibited at the Houses of Parliament and Southbank. Kindness 2007-09, showed poetry animations by holocaust survivors on public screens at Piccadilly Railway Station, and BBC Big Screens in Manchester and Liverpool.

The Homeless Library 2014-17

“This project is both a piece of history and an art piece. I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything like it before. It’s beautiful.”  Ann Coffey MP, The Homeless Library Houses of Parliament launch

Most recently, A Book of Ours  2018- 2021 was a medieval style illuminated manuscript handmade by over 100 people with experience of homelessness:

“This book, here you have our world at your fingertips. Damaged in every bloody way, look at the state of us. We are terrible and we are beautiful.”Chris Keane

A Book of Ours 2018-2021

Quilts were a way of making many-handed work, for example the Bomber’s Moon 2014-17 quilt is a textile artwork that’s both an aerial view of Derbyshire and a war poem. The War Widows’ Quilt  2018-20 brought people together through embroidery to give expression to and raise awareness of War Widows’ experiences:

“A piece of history for past, present and future. A quilt of unending love, pain and grief. A quilt of great honour. A true work of art.”   Theresa Davidson

The War Widows’ Quilt 2018-20

Art and poetry intertwined, exploring people’s stories. A series of printed publications and ebooks captures some projects, starting with Patience 2009-10, a journey through ill-health and end of life with older people, gathering first-hand depictions of how it feels to be a patient. the warm /&/ the cold (2018) is a poetic epic of homeless lives, young offenders’ stories and a Buddy Club for people with dementia.

Not only did arthur+martha challenge societal boundaries, they embraced experimentation and reflected a multiplicity of experiences. The quilts became stitched pages carrying poems that blossomed with rich colours and deep emotion. Oral histories became verse, entwined with drawings, or morphed into songs. The boundaries of participatory and collaborative practice were redrawn, with the belief that participatory art can make a significant artistic contribution to the wider world.

Kindness 2007-09

Many of the pieces were exhibited at iconic venues, bringing the art and poetry to wide audiences: the Houses of Parliament, Royal Museums Greenwich, Manchester Cathedral, Brighton Dome, Piccadilly Railway Station, Festival Hall, and the National Gallery of Art Lithuania, to name a few. All projects were shared in places and ways that the makers themselves could access and witness.

The War Widows’ Quilt 2018-20

“arthur+martha have been like some turbulent confluence of a river, where great ideas, rich practice and changed lives come together. I’ve long held them up as a polar star, some rich alchemy made physical, and something that researchers don’t need to measure. The work speaks volumes – or rather the people do...”Dr Clive Parkinson

THE FUTURE arthur+martha winds up, but the work continues… Lois’s current projects include A Necklace of Stars and Unfolding Beauty, creating hand fans, gathering and inspired by experiences of the menopause from women across the country.

Follow Lois’s Projects

Phil will continue to collaborate with the homeless community. Meanwhile, his story of childhood during the violent years in Northern Ireland, with interviews from many others – “an autobiography in many voices” – will be published this year as HIMSELF IN EXILE.

Follow Phil’s projects

The arthur+martha archive of blogs, portfolio, soundtracks and website will remain online, as part of the mostly-unwritten heritage of homelessness and in memory of those whose dementia has made it difficult to speak.

The art lives on — and so do the memories of these encounters. Lois and Philip would like to thank everyone who’s supported us. We are grateful to the funders who showed such belief in our work, especially the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England. Our work was not only a collaboration with individuals but with organisations whose staff showed extraordinary kindness and lent great insight and skill to all our projects. Most of all we would like to thank the makers of these projects, who took part, sharing their lives and opening up new worlds to all of us…

Host and partner organisations:Age UK, Alzheimer’s Society, Arts Derbyshire, Arts and Homelessness International, Back on Track, Big Issue in the North, The Booth Centre, Bury Adult Learning Service, Bury Art Museum, DCC Home Library Service, The Farming Life Centre, Gallery Oldham, Inspiring Change Manchester, Invisible Manchester, Love Creative,  M.A.S.H, Manchester Histories Festival, Morris Feinmann Home, Quilters’ Guild, Red Door Housing Concern Centre, Salford University, Socialiniai meno projektai, Springboard Oldham, Stepping Hill Hospital, Tom Harrison House, The War Widows’ Association of Great Britain, The Wellspring.

Exhibition Venues: BBC Big Screens, Brighton Dome, Bury Art Museum, Buxton Museum, Derbyshire Libraries, Festival of Quilts, Gallery Oldham, Holden Gallery Manchester, Houses of Parliament, Imperial War Museum North, John Rylands Library, Manchester Central Library, Manchester Histories Festival, Media City UK, National Gallery of Art, Lithuania, National Memorial Arboretum, National Trust Lyme Park, the People’s History Museum, Piccadilly Railway Station,Southbank (Saison Poetry Library), Summerhall Edinburgh.

Funding support from: Arts Derbyshire, Age UK Salford, Arts & Humanities Research Council, Arts Council England, The Booth Centre, The British Council, Bury MBC, Bloom Awards, Clore Duffield Foundation, Derbyshire County Council, DCC Public Health, Heritage Lottery Fund,  Imperial War Museum,  Liverpool John Moores University, the National Lottery, the Royal Academy,  Royal Museums Greenwich, Salford PCT, St Helens MBC.

Advisors:Kat Au, Adrienne Brown, Dr Langley Brown, Danny Collins, Amanda Croome,Julia Grime, Kate Hardy, Matt Hill, John Hodgson, Peter Inman, Polly Kaiser, Jeni McConnell, Lawrence McGill, Melanie Miller, Dr Nadine Muller, Dr Clive Parkinson, Matt Peacock, Helen Perkins, Professor Jeffrey C. Robinson, Ieva Petkute, Stephen Raw, Jerome Rothenberg, Dr Caroline Swarbrick, Joy Thorpe, Dr Scott Thurston, David Tovey, Katie Watson.

“We tell it from the heart.”  Roy, Book of Ours 2022

Philip Davenport and Lois Blackburn aka arthur+martha would like to thank everyone who has joined in and supported our projects since 2007.  website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram.

“A piece of history for past, present and future…”
 

WAKE WITH THE SUN IN MY MOUTH. The big book launches at Manchester Cathedral.

A BOOK OF OURS is finally in the world, you can visit it in person at Manchester Cathedral for the next 6 months until March 2022, before it goes onto John Rylands Library for its place in their permanent collection — and in history. Because this is a big, big book containing many lives in an untold history: the story of British homelessness.

Manchester Cathedral, 14 October 2021. From top left: Chris Keane, Christine Johnson, Philip Davenport and Lawrence McGill, Calligrapher Stephen Raw (in green) sharing the book with audience members, artist Lois Blackburn showing a golden page from A BOOK OF OURS.

“This book, here you have our world at your fingertips. Damaged in every bloody way, look at the state of us. We are terrible and we are beautiful.” Chris Keane

On 14 October A BOOK OF OURS was launched with readings, singings and an official welcome of the manuscript into the Cathedral by Canon David Holgate, who also blessed the book for good measure!

The experience of homelessness is usually shared quietly, person to person, through private conversations that disappear into the air. And as a rule, these experiences go no further. In A BOOK OF OURS, such quiet conversations have finally been recorded on a page, using the exact words of the tellers. And not just recorded. Here they are given rich colours, decorated in gold, and most importantly of all they have been given time — time to be heard, time to arrive on the page, time to be witnessed for their own beauty.

While the world was going into lockdown it was a great antidote knowing that poems were still being written, songs were still being sung over the phone and artworks being made — those little conversations were still happening. This book is constructed with paper and ink, yes, but really its materials are memories and hopes, jokes, worries, grief, joys, the things that make us alive.

WAKE EVERY MORNING CAN’T BLOODY MOVE

Wake in the darkness of me

Wake with the sun in my mouth.

A BOOK OF OURS Calendar, lines from October.

We’d like to thank all who came to the Cathedral on 14 October for such a big-hearted reception to A BOOK OF OURS. The performers Chris Keane, Lawrence McGill, Andy Crossley, Joan and Christine Johnson all shone brightly, illuminating the pages with deep feeling. Thanks is due to all the makers. Thanks also to the Booth Centre and Back on Track for their extraordinary help for nearly three years, and for the support from the Cathedral and John Rylands Library where A BOOK OF OURS, a book of homelessness, will have its permanent home.

Supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We wish to acknowledge the unswerving commitment and belief of the Heritage Lottery Fund and all National Lottery Players for making this piece of homeless heritage possible during difficult times.

The launch was reviewed in The Meteor online news co-operative here and a short video documenting the event is here.

We tell it with a big heart

A BOOK OF OURS illuminated manuscript, made by people who’ve experienced homelessness and other vulnerable people in Manchester, is currently being exhibited at Bury Art Museum. On 9 July a group of the makers (and others) from the Booth Centre and Back on Track came to see the exhibition. A selection of 20 pages is on the walls and in cabinets — only a fraction of the whole number of pages which will be bound into the book. Here below are photos from the day, plus some of the group’s comments:

“When you look at this work, you don’t see the circumstances of the people. You don’t see how they were living or how they was suffering when they made these pages. You’ve got to look deep inside these pictures and these words. Then you get the true story of what is being told here, it is told as it is, it is the truth. I have witnessed it. There is a fearful judgement put on people when they live homeless. But these pages don’t say it’s good or say it’s bad, they just say it exists. They are stories deserving the telling.”

Above: Roy, Kayleigh and (in bottom right photo) Shannah, Bury Art Museum July 2020

“I don’t read so well, it takes me a while. It’s brilliant to have the pictures as well as the words, then I can guess bits of what’s going on. The colours dance for me. Now I did get that poem about Dolly Parton, I love her songs, she comes on like a joke but she sings the saddest songs. I’m looking at this one here and I can read all these words myself. They speak to me about suicide. This is how it is when there is no road left to go. Looking at that page made me feel something, to be honest it made me feel terrible. But then two pages along down is this one about hope. The one about the Satellites coming. I like hope coming in at the end. It’s part one and part two of a story. That’s how it seems to me.” Anonymous

From Office of the Dead, A BOOK OF OURS

From The Joys, A BOOK OF OURS

“Phil, it looks great. You know that and I know that and now everyone else can see it. I’ve come a long way to see our story on the wall. All the gang here, we look like bankrobbers with our masks on. Makes me smile, we look so dodgy. And the gang has done great, every single one of us. We made it together, the Collective. Here we are together again, I’d like to have a picture but they’d probably arrest me. Wouldn’t be the first time.” Chris

“It makes you feel good at the time when you’re doing the art, you get lost in it. And then when you see it again, like this. I don’t have the words. And other people’s work too, all those people from the day centres. It can be a lonely world out there — when you’re really out in it, when you live outside. Sometimes, times like this, you’re not so alone.” Anonymous

From The Joys, A BOOK OF OURS

“People never knew about us. Never knew it was there did they, this story of ours? It was written by a bunch of down and out pissheads, as people call us. Bums, to put it mildly. But I been round this gallery today and we’re in there too now — and we are just as good. With the top artists and sculptors. We tell it with a big heart. A bunch of down and outs is what you get called. The harsh judgements. And sometimes we judge ourselves even harder. When you’ve lived this life, you don’t feel always good about yourself. Know what I’m saying? But here — you do feel good. When you ask me is telling this story worthwhile, I don’t even hesitate. Of course it is, of course it is!” Roy

A BOOK OF OURS, Bury Art Museum

Gallery photography by Julia Grime. Page close-ups, Lois Blackburn.

People who have experienced homelessness, and other vulnerable people, have made a medieval-style illuminated manuscript A BOOK OF OURS describing their lives, hopes and dreams in a 2-year project in Manchester, which had its public debut at Bury Art Museum in May and runs until July 2021.

This arthur+martha project took place at the Booth Centre, Back on Track and other support centres in Manchester, along with virtual workshops with (Invisible) Manchester and Inspiring Change Manchester. Much of this work has been inscribed into the illuminated manuscript, and many extra pieces are to be found here on our blog and as songs in a forthcoming CD. The book pages and songs were made collaboratively by people with lived experience of homelessness and other vulnerable people 2019-21.

Supported by Heritage Lottery Fund

Jakir and Phil, pondering

Press Release

Arts Derbyshire – A Necklace of Stars

Following on from the success of the first phase of A Necklace of Stars, we are looking for older adults who are housebound (aged 65+) from across Derbyshire to join us in a creative writing and embroidery project.

Andrea Lewis, Shooting Star

Arts Derbyshire is running a remote embroidery and creative writing project where participants receive weekly* one to one phone calls with artists ‘arthur + martha’. The artists will guide people through the process of creating beautiful embroidered stars or creative writing themed around lullabies, for free.

The embroidered stars will be brought together to create a quilt which will be exhibited alongside the creative writing and lullaby soundtrack around Derbyshire’s cultural venues in 2022. 

A Necklace of Stars hopes to increase confidence and wellbeing, reduce loneliness, forge connections and re-ignite creativity.

If you are interested in taking part in this project (whether you have no experience or plenty), or know of someone who might enjoy getting involved, please contact Sally Roberts on 07395 904386 or email sallyartsderbyshire@gmail.com 

A Necklace of Stars is an Arts Council England supported collaboration between Arts Derbyshire, DCC Public Health, Derbyshire Library Services and arts organisation arthur+martha. 

* Weekly phone calls for approximately 4 weeks or until you are happy with the work you have created.

Michael’s Star

Doorways

Our Covid Journal project WHISPER TO ME ALONE has been up and running a few weeks now. It’s a project that is growing quietly, as people gather ideas for their diaries of words and pictures. Below is the first of the artworks, from Jasmine. A haunting little pencil sketch, it’s an archway that seems to invite us to step in and yet at the same time is a barrier, a secret place.

This project of telephone calls and “one-to-one workshops” is full of fascinating conversations, of insights, openess, and the occasional blind alley. During the calls, I have got a notebook to hand and when it seems important, I scribe down what people say and then read the notes back to them. It’s a way we’ve worked for years, catching words from the air before they disappear. Here, discussing the effects of lockdown, is Anastasia:

“We’ve lost so many lives to Covid. It is a catastrophe. But it has also led us to compassion, gratefulness and more humanity. The appreciation of little things that we can’t have right now. Things like hugs. We are missing contact with other people and finding new ways to connect. With each other and with nature. I’ve been looking at flowers, watching the birds.

“We’ve actually got time during the lockdown. We have been given time to stop and stare. There are less cars on the road, less pollution. You can see the stars.“

Anastasia

WHISPER TO ME ALONE gathers experiences of people who have experienced homelessness — and the experiences of other vulnerable people — in Manchester during lockdown, using journals of writing, art and song lyrics and phone conversations. 

This project is supported by Arts Council England. Partners include The Booth Centre, Back on Track, Bury Art Museum and With One Voice arts and homeless sector global network.

The seeds of your thought

Phil writes:

For years, arthur+martha have run workshops in which a group of people sit around a table to make art and poems together. In truth, these aren’t just workshops, they are also talking shops, they’re about being in one another’s company.

Right now, this is not possible. We have to work at a distance so that we don’t spread the virus. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I ring people and we talk one-to-one, sometimes for a long-ish while. And although I miss the chatty groups, I’m starting to appreciate other qualities of distance working.

One-to-one conversations give people time and space to reflect. To question exactly what it is they’re interested in, how they write about it, to face the things that they are dodging, to appreciate strengths they took for granted.

Below, Margaret’s powerful trio of poems Dandelion time talks about exactly this struggle, to find a pattern in life, compassion and understanding in what can look like chaos. It’s a brave and rather beautiful documentary of the life of the heart. She starts by simply watching the dandelions – these very same dandelions that filled the air when the virus epidemic started. The dandelions become a symbol, they are blown by the wild winds of life and love. They’re also the seed of her daughter’s life. Then in the final section she opens her window to let in whatever life brings along next. This is a heartfelt journey, facing fears and delight equally — and it embraces both.

 

Dandelion time

 

Part I

Invading gardens

littering the roadsides

dandelions wait to tell the time

 

The tic toc of the clock

releasing seed heads,

thoughts that fly

 

It’s bare pincushion head exposed

reveals a Fibonacci spiral

nothing random here.

 

Part II

 

My thoughts take root,

bed down in my house,

the collected chaos of myself

in notebooks and files,

the library of my life.

 

How shall I bring order ?

Unlike the dandelion

my life has been

without a grand design

no Fibonacci sequence.

 

You blow the dandelion to

the tic toc of your own time

letting your seeds of thought fly.

 

I pressed my wild flowers

into heavy books

catalogued on library shelves,

crushing out the colour,

wanting to hold them fast.

I fitted passion into form

hoping to make it last.

Love and marriage

the one fought the other

the other always won.

 

My daughter you are the flowering

of that explosive mix, grown up,

un-afraid to puff your cheeks.

 

Part III

 

Your

seeds fly

through my door

opening windows in my house

as you wait for me to come outside

inviting me to take another chance at life and blow the dandelion clock.

 

Margaret Gosley

 

 

Today’s blog was written by Philip Davenport, arthur+martha. The poem and dandelion photos are by Margaret Gosley.

A Necklace of Stars, is supported by Arts Council England, Arts Derbyshire, DCC Public Health and Derbyshire County Council Home Library Service.

Happy?

 

How are you coping

As we go through lockdown?

Perhaps you are lonely

Perhaps you are sad

Yet be consoled; this too shall pass.

 

Annie Carter

 

While we have been working on the poems for necklace of stars, the Covid virus has kept everybody shut away in their own little worlds. For some this has been a shelter and a relief, for others a prison. This time alone, or else in small family groups, has forced people to look at themselves and think about who they are. And the question of happiness has come up over and over. When I ring up participants I very often ask how are you doing? And they want to know about me — how is it today?

Questioning happiness, contentment, the striving to find peace, is traditionally the business of poets. And so some of the pieces we’ve gathered for this lullaby project are not lullabies at all, instead they address fear. And the writers look very deeply to see if they can find peace, either in themselves or in the world around them.

And, as is the way of all things, just as peace arrives, it leaves again and we see the world in conflict once more… and the words of lullabies mean more than simply finding sleep, they mean finding harmony between ourselves:

 

Hush-a-bye baby, hush-a-bye

Sleep sweet to my lullaby melody

Dream of your place in the Galaxy

Safe from the chains of old slavery

May your life be filled with sweet harmony

And your fantasy never lack sanity

May you never be plagued by poverty

May you reach for the stars as your destiny…

Hush-a-bye baby, hush-a-bye.

 

Annie Carter

Joan Beadsmore, embroidered stars for Necklace of Stars, quilt. June 2020

 

Today’s blog was written by Philip Davenport, arthur+martha.

A Necklace of Stars, is supported by Arts Council England, Arts Derbyshire, DCC Public Health and Derbyshire County Council Home Library Service.

 

 

Spring Greens

“I’m still tired, but feeling positive now. I really appreciate this, the chance to write the poems. When life has been harsh to deal with, it’s helped.”

(Participant)

One of the things I have witnessed over and over again is that making art, writing poems, stitching embroidery, can help to unpick despair. Nobody really knows why, there are lots of theories. At times making a poem or an artwork is simply a distraction. It takes the mind onto other things, stops those restless thoughts chasing each other and becoming frantic.

Art can also help understanding. Writing a poem gives your thoughts new shape and perhaps allows new answers. An artwork is a representation of the world and connects you to it more deeply. Slowing yourself down to the intricate pace of an embroidery gives you time to meditate and find a richer texture in the whole of life.

“I’m feeling my way forward, using my poems as a guide.”

(Participant)

Making things not only shows the exterior world, it also reflects the inner life and makes it richer, brighter. If you can, take a little time to live with the prose poem below. It’s a celebration of trees, the wonderful, familiar friends that I often don’t give a second glance. But here they’re transformed by the poet’s eyes — into furniture, into children begging for pennies, into a swirling cloak that becomes an old coat, or into old pale bones against a winter sky. As well as trees, all the seasons of human life are in this little poem and so it helps me to appreciate my own. And for the makers of such work it is transforming too…

“I found this to be very useful. More than useful, brilliant in fact.”

(Participant)

 

Spring Greens

 

The Hollies are still wintergreen, come spring, leathery, shiny-tough, reliable as upright chairs in their utility upholstery.

Plum and cherry let the March winds take their snow and ruby blossoms from them, holding out small fingers for their fee, which came in copper verdigris and silver tarnish, well-used coins and promise of paper money for the fall.

Oak begins leafing out from nowhere, fine, fresh, lettuce-like, so young.

Sycamore sings, spreading hand spans which unfold into a summer cloak whose generous swirls conceal old mossy coat.

Beech, whose bones arched stark against the pale, cold, winter sky, now shimmers in the heat, the flesh full, lush, deliciousness.

 

Linda

 

Today’s blog was written by Philip Davenport, arthur+martha.

A Necklace of Stars, is supported by Arts Council England, Arts Derbyshire, DCC Public Health and Derbyshire County Council Home Library Service.

 

All these things whirring

For some people, lockdown is a blessing and for others it’s a struggle.

On the face of it, we have peace and quiet and an ever-stretching holiday. But underneath those things are nagging worries: fear of infection, fear of unemployment, fear of those around us, fear stoked by the media…

“All these things whirring.” (Participant)

And yet birds are singing, the air is purer than it has been in decades, the roar of traffic and the thunder of aeroplanes has quietened. The timid creatures that we share our world with have started to assert themselves again. Carparks have become wildlife habitats, the woods and moors are a sunshine paradise.

Today my phone calls with participants in the Necklaces of Stars project reflected the strange doubleness of this time. People have thrown themselves into making poems and songs. They have space and quiet to concentrate and so they dig deep, take journeys, into their deeper selves.

 

Detail, embroidered shooting stars, Joan Link, A Necklace of Stars 2020

 

Their poems appear in the Inbox each day. They’re funny, sad, thoughtful, kind-hearted. Some of them have pasted a grin on my face, others touched me beyond words. It’s good work. And they are rightly excited:

“I have never had this feeling before, where I have let the poem take me over. This time I’ve trusted it and jumped in. Let the form take me and learned from it. I used to treat poems like they were a competition to win, a test. I didn’t ever really let go. Now I’ve got many, many ideas, and I want to do them all…” (Participant)

 

“I am so pleased, so very pleased, to have done this, I was unsure at first but I’ve loved it. I had doubts about myself and my work, felt silly and slow. It’s wonderfully reassuring to be told it’s good, to know it’s reached someone else.” (Participant)

Today also brought tears and shakiness from some. The disquiet underneath the quiet is taking its toll. For those who are isolated alone, solitude weighs heavily on the heart. What is life if it isn’t shared? The missing are missed terribly.

 

And so we talk about…

 

Hope to see your face again in the mirror

On reflection let’s hope the sadness is gone

From the dark shadows where hope is fading

Replaced by radiant rainbow beams of hope.

 

Tricia Clough

Embroidered shooting stars, Joan Link, A Necklace of Stars 2020

Today’s blog was written by Philip Davenport, arthur+martha.

A Necklace of Stars, is supported by Arts Council England, Arts Derbyshire, DCC Public Health and Derbyshire County Council Home Library Service.

The state of things

“..I’m glad you like it as it was a joy to stitch. Your idea just sparked something inside me, making me want to do some stitching which was very welcome as I’m finding it difficult to settle to anything at the moment.”

Participant, Here Comes the Sun

 

Sara Scott, Here Comes the Sun

 

I’m beginning to hear recurrent themes in the feedback to our two current projects Here Comes the Sun and A Necklace of Stars.  Many of our participants are finding it difficult to settle to anything. People describe having fuzzy heads, being overly tired, difficulties in even making even small decisions.

 

“What’s stopping me? It’s the state of things, I’m normally busy, involved with other things.  Normally I paint and paint and sew and sew, but I haven’t in ages. It’s been very, very strange. I can go outside, and talk to my neighbours, and clap for the NHS, but it’s the first time in my life I’ve been like this. I need something to give me a kick up the backside.”

Participant A Necklace of Stars

Here Comes the Sun. Vintage pillowcase, dyed, ready for embroidered poetry.

 

But counter to that, I have had heard from many other people saying that doing something creative is helping them re-focus and spark something in the brain. How interesting our brains are!

For many it has given a prompt to create something with embroidery for the first time in many years and connect with different generations of the same family:

“Thank you so much from my daughter and I for encouraging us to dig out my late grandmothers stash of embroidery threads to choose some sunny colours for our sun quilt squares. My grandmother was a very enthusiastic and skilled needlewomen and she would have loved the idea of this quilt…. (about her daughters embroidery) It is a while since I picked up an embroidery needle and as my stitches show I am more than a little rusty (for which I appologise) I have, however really enjoyed focusing on something creative during these strangest of times. We look forward to seeing the finished quilt.”

Participant, Here Comes the Sun.

One of the delights of the projects is the way news spreads by word of mouth. Having a project to work on gives us all opportunities to think, talk and focus on something different with friends and family, an escape from the news, and Covid. 

Have shared widely, and this has kick-started a WhatsApp group, as I was asked to set up a crafty one a couple of weeks ago. We can encourage each other daily in there and do other bits and bobs too.

Participant, Here Comes the Sun

What a beautiful idea. I’m definitely going to do this, and share with friends

Participant, Here Comes the Sun

 

Catherine Tombs embroidery for Here Comes the Sun. 

But there is always more sharing to do, the more people engaged in our projects with different perspectives on life, the more exciting and greater the depth the project our project gains.

Everyone signed up to our project A Necklace of Stars is currently housebound. Many where before the lock down. So far we have worked with people aged from 65 to 90. Many haven’t done any embroidery since school, but some are very experienced and confident in the creative arts. Everyone has a unique way of looking at the theme of the stars, everyone a story to tell.

Phil and I continually look at ways we can make the projects accessible to everyone, whatever their circumstances. Thanks to support from Arts Council England, we’re thrilled to be working with Booth Centre to invite people who are, or have been homeless to join in. They are being invited to draw suns that our volunteers will stitch on their behalf, a kind of art commissioning without any money changing hands. In addition I will be sending out packs of needles, threads and materials to people at the Booth who want to have a go at sewing themselves. I’m so thrilled to be working in this way and can’t wait to see how it progresses. 

Sarah Burgess, embroidery for Here Comes the Sun.

Todays blog was written by Lois Blackburn, lead artist arthur+martha

A Necklace of Stars is a collaboration between housebound, isolated older people in Derbyshire,  arthur+martha,  Arts Derbyshire   DCC Public Health and Derbyshire County Council Home Library Service. 

Here Comes the Sun, A quilt in the time of Covid 19. Part of the Whisper to me Alone project.