Final Bilborough workshops with Nottingham Contemporary

As part of the Writing East Midlands Write Here residency at the Nottingham Contemporary, I have been lucky enough to act as a mentee on the project, learning from and assisting the Writer in Residence Wayne Burrows. As part of the residency Wayne has been facilitating workshops with a group of older people from a community centre in Bilborough, which have taken place both at the centre and at the Nottingham Contemporary gallery itself.

For the third workshop Wayne, Jo Dacombe, one of the resident artists at the Nottingham Contemporary, and I were at the Bilborough community centre once again, and welcomed three new participants to our ever growing group. We looked at the sound works created by the artist Jack Goldstein and currently exhibited at the Nottingham Contemporary. These sounds, pressed on coloured 7” records, made quite an impact on the group while we were visiting the gallery in the first week, and include recordings of burning forests, boats out at sea and cats fighting. They create a vivid image in the listener’s mind, bring back memories from the past to the foreground and can be incredibly evocative. I was struck by how every listener responds to recordings in their own personal way, much like how everyone has their own individual response and feelings to a particular piece of artwork, or piece of music or writing.

For the workshop Wayne had prepared a collection of old vinyl records by recovering the sleeves and the labels with blank paper, a virgin canvas waiting to be relabelled as something new. We then prompted the group to explore the memories that the sounds had created, or for them to create new pieces of artwork and writing based on what inspired them. We encouraged the group to follow their own individual creativity, and working one to one with the participants helped them create song lyrics and titles, snippets of speech captured from their recounting of the past or even, like Jack Goldstein’s sound works, more ambient sounds such as the forest and nature. Through their stories, discussions and individual creativity the group came up with some fascinating work, often poetic and poignant, spanning from the depths of space with a Dr. Who themed record, to the sandy deserts of the Sahara.

For the last workshop the group returned to the Nottingham Contemporary, to revisit the exhibitions and, in the cases of some new comers to the group, see them for the first time. There was an added dimension to the group with one of the members bringing her charming granddaughter along also. For this final session we set about collecting some of the thoughts and memories the work the group had created had evoked. We looked at the records and text totems created by the group over the past couple of weeks and asked the participants where their inspiration had come from.

We then walked round the exhibitions once more, this time prompting the group to find a piece of artwork that has some kind of relationship with the ones created by them, and this was recorded by Wayne, Jo and myself. What emerged from this exercise were many moving stories came to the surface. Stories of loss, of bereavement, of the struggle of coping with every day life and of self initiated growth and change at a very late stage in their lives. Stories of lost first loves, of running away during the Blitz and not wanting to accept the powerful force of change in an ever changing world, of hiding in forests, of enlisting to the air force and of family members estranged despite still living in the same village to this day. Though tinged with regret and sadness, the memories were often very positive, with perseverance and preservation a prominent theme among them, and I found the whole experience very powerful. By meeting up as a group at the community centre every week the individuals reach out to each other, giving comfort and understanding where it is most needed and able they continue to learn from each other, retaining the all important sense of self worth and friendship.

The workshops have been in my eyes a resounding success, engaging a group with forms of art and writing that they might otherwise have not have tried nor had access to. When asked if they would be interested in further workshops similar to the ones they had taken part in, the resounding answer was YES! Out of the group, only one member had been to the Nottingham Contemporary before, and it was wonderful to see them engaging and responding positively to the space. The work they created also acted as a vehicle for them to express their lives, their memories and experiences, and to me this was a blessing beyond riches.

Wayne will now collect some of the group’s thoughts on their work and weave them into a longer narrative, to be displayed later at Bilborough Library with the artwork created. As for me as a writer, it has given me ideas on larger bodies of work and stories and characters I’d like to explore, and these characters are currently tap dancing around my mind. As with any group workshops that come to a close, I feel sad to leave some of the lovely people I have had the pleasure of meeting through the projects, but also blessed to have taken part and to have met them.

Write Here at Nottingham Contemporary

Write Here is the writer in residence programme organised by the writing development agency, Writing East Midlands. Write Here is fantastic as it creates residencies for writers in culturally and socially significant venues across the East Midlands, facilitates the creative development of writers and strengthens their links with local communities and audiences.

As part of the Write Here programme, the writer Wayne Burrows is the Writer in Resident at the Nottingham Contemporary. For a period of three months, Wayne is responding to the exhibitions, the museum’s atmosphere, services and working environment. As part of the residency Wayne is also running two series of workshops providing a supportive environment in which participants will be encouraged to creatively respond to all facets of Nottingham Contemporary; one series of the workshops is running in February and the other in March, the latter of which will be held in the Nottingham Contemporary’s ‘Study’ space and is open for participants, so if you’re interested contact Saima Kaur at saima@nottinghamcontemporary.org.

The February workshops are currently taking place with a group of older people from theBilborough Community Centre. These workshops particularly interest me, as I have previously worked in the care industry; I have an affinity with this demographic and I am lucky enough to work as a mentee on these sessions. I was interested in how the group would respond to the gallery and what their thoughts and feeling would be to the exhibitions on display there.Currently the exhibitions at the gallery focus on work by artists Jack Goldstein, reputably one of the most important ‘artist’s artists’ of the last 30 years, and Anne Collier, an exciting artist working with photography.

The workshops are collaborative, as they combine the expertise of both the writer in residence, Wayne, and one of the gallery’s four associate artists, Jo Dacombe to help the participants amalgamate the written with the visual and explore the exhibitions’ themes and ideas in a variety of ways. The first week acted as an introduction for the group to the gallery, with the group exploring the gallery and the exhibitions. A couple of the participants exclaimed that it was the first time they’d ever visited a place like the Nottingham Contemporary before and it was wonderful to see them engaging with the pieces, particularly the sound-scapes, Jack Goldstein’s recordings pressed onto vinyl of forests burning, cats fighting and a tornado to name but a few. After we had explored the exhibitions we all convened for another well deserved cup of tea and a discussion on what the pieces had said to us. There was an agreement from the group that everyone reads the pieces differently, and it was interesting to hear their thoughts and feelings on the experience, with one lady explaining that you can learn a lot about life just by looking at art.

The next workshop on the following Tuesday, Wayne, Jo and myself traveled to the community centre in Bilborough and met the group there. It was larger this time, with more participants who had not been able to attend the previous week but nonetheless keen to take part. For this workshop we reminded the group of some of the pieces that had engaged with at the gallery, and discussed Jack Goldstein’s ‘Text Totems’, explaining our mission for the session was to create some totems of our own.

The session commenced with the group cutting out words and poetic phrases from magazines and newspapers and arranging them on paper in a meaningful and significant way. Other participants played with the relationship between words and images, and wrote thoughts and phrases down, inspired by the Nottingham Contemporary’s exhibitions in an artistic way.

Wayne, Jo and myself worked one to one with the participants during this session, helping the groups with their pieces and encouraging them to approach them from a different angle. I particularly loved the charming, often poignant stories that emerged through this process, tales of first loves lost during the war, of a lady whose husband had gone to school with the man who was the inspiration for the character the Fat Controller on Thomas the Tank Engine, and a lady whose career in fashion had to be abandoned during the chaos of the war, but would never have met her husband had she not moved away from the city.

I think the group found the creative process to be incredibly therapeutic and enjoyable, with no two Totems the same and each offering a different perspective. There was a genuine sense of wellbeing after the sessions, with the participants pleased with their artwork and taking it home to show family and loved ones. I look forward to the creations we come up with tomorrow!