Community

Peterborough presents…

Peterborough Presents is part of the Creative People and Places programme, initiated and funded by Arts Council England. Creative People and Places is about more people taking the lead in choosing, creating and taking part in art experiences in the places where they live. Peterborough Presents is now entering Phase 2 of their programme, taking their arts offering city-wide, bringing great art to your doorstep. Working with three panels of local residents in North Bretton, Hampton and Millfield, each panel has commissioned three unique arts projects to begin in April 2017. The Moment talks to two of the artists involved

Katy Hawkins
Katy is an artist and project manager currently based in Oxford. She will be moving to Peterborough for the duration of the project, and working with local residents in Bretton. Together they will be running a project for the collaborative, improvement and creative enhancement of Bretton’s green spaces. 

What is the project?
The project, which I am facilitating with Eleanor Shipman and Kate McLean, along with local artists, is about bringing the local residents of Bretton – but also the wider community in Peterborough – into a collaborative process for creatively improving and enhancing the green spaces in the neighbourhood.

What will be happening?
It’s broken down into four stages, and the first stage is about rediscovering the spaces, so we have a lot of participatory walks led by different experts. There’s a poetry led walk, where four different poets from the Peterborough area have written a response to one of the green spaces and during the walk they’ll visit those spaces and the poet will recite. Then, following on, there’ll be a workshop where people will be invited to write their own poems. Another walk will focus on memories – specifically residents’ memory of the area – and another on exploring smells. That involves an amazing lady who has a PhD in smell walks, and really does open your eyes to the locality in a totally different way!

We’ll be exploring green spaces through sports, too, with a kind of roaming sports day – there will be lots of different ways of rediscovering your neighbourhood, and perhaps finding some places you’d previously overlooked. At the end of each we’ll also share our findings. The next stage is designing, so is about different workshops taking place in the context of an exhibition. The exhibition will see all the material that we produce in the first stage exhibited on a large-scale map of the area, then we’ll have a series of workshops that help residents to develop a design intervention that will look to improve or enhance the space, informed by all the material we’ve collected. That will be run by architects, environmental experts and artists.

Then, for stage three, we have a public competition in which people will vote on the best ideas, and the top three will be implemented with the help of local facilitators. It’s really important the ideas come from local people – the aim of every stage of the project is to ensure that local people have the means to inform the process and that the interventions are really responsive to the area. When implementing the chosen proposals, one will be led by an artist, another will be architectural, and there’ll be a gardening intervention as well. The final stage is an ongoing process of sustaining the project, ensuring it has a sustainable social and physical legacy. That will provide lots of opportunities for people to meet, for different experts to keep in contact with each other, and also make sure that the physical things we implement are maintained and looked after.

We’re going to work with an amazing designer to create a map of the area with all the improvement sites marked on it, and all the green spaces identified, and we’ll have a final celebratory day in early September where we will go and see some of the highlights of the programme with poems, memories and so on. And hopefully the map will encourage people to keep visiting these spaces, and also list some of the runner-up ideas, so if more funding comes in those projects could be realised.

How can local people get involved?
There are lots of opportunities for people to get involved, and at all kinds of levels, so keep a check on the calendar on the Peterborough Presents website and follow them on Twitter and Facebook. People don’t have to be there at every stage of it, either – they can drop into whatever interests them!

Amanda Rigby of Paper Rhino 

Paper Rhino is a group of arts practitioners based in the Allia Future Business Centre in Peterborough. They will be creating a space filled with public artwork for the local community to share and celebrate their stories and experiences along Lincoln Road. 

What is the project about?
We were invited by Peterborough Presents to tender for a couple of local projects, and one of those was a proposal for some street art in Lincoln Road. It’s crosscultural and aims to involve different generations and different sectors of the community, celebrating Lincoln Road as a new creative hub in the city and giving a new pride and confidence to the area. The project sets out to empower people to say ‘this is where we come from, this is who we are, we are proud of it and want to celebrate it!’ Some of that will involve images based on our consultations with local people, but also silhouettes and the use of text on the walls.

What will be happening?
The project will begin with a series of creative community engagement workshops, drawing together people from a diverse range of backgrounds, generations and cultures to discuss the things that they feel most represent them (people, places, food, music, art etc.) and sharing their local legends, heroes and influences with one another. As part of the workshops we will seek to harvest a bank of imagery and words, and will also be asking participants to be involved in photography, taking and posing for portraits or silhouettes. After the consultation, we’ll continue to research the stories and themes further for two months, gathering together the best elements and honing them. The next phase will be the artwork creation. We’ll create a number of sketches, leading to final drawings and developing the colour palette, patterns and details

The work will basically take three forms:
● Characters that celebrate historical heroes and important figureheads in the community, honouring their influence on the area or the local community. It’s a chance to create fantastical characters inspired by local folklore and history – but characters could, for example, be made from strips of various faces, representing multiple communities.
● Typography to immortalise words from unsung heroes, poems, songs or cultural icons that have influenced the lives of local people.
● Silhouettes on pavements and walls which fall like a permanent shadow. Feature historical icons and important figureheads in the community, honouring their influence on the area and the people who live there. Created in spray paint and pens over two months, the final pieces will be a fabulous concoction of history and culture and hopefully will get everyone talking!

How can local people get involved?
We’ll be shouting out across social media, but people are welcome to contact us ahead of that via Facebook or our website. We don’t want it to be stuffy. We like to talk to people!

● For more information on these and other future projects, please visit: www.peterboroughpresents.org ● Facebook: /peterboroughpresents ● Twitter: @pboropresents 

www.freepik.com/free-photo/art-enviroment-wood-canvas-decoration_1057203

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