Halima Cassell has just finished her 3rd session with a group of young people from a local school, producing ceramic panels this afternoon here at Action Factory.

Halima with the clay tiles created here in Action Factory today by a group of year 8 students

Twenty students came and spent time with the artist, learning techniques, styles and inspiration before trying out their new knowledge on the clay,  by carving intricate patterns into the rolled clay. Halima is working with different groups and will create a final piece bringing all the different groups panels together which will be shown in Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery in January 2013.

Here are some of the carved clay examples 
from the Islamiyah School in Blackburn

Woven Threads

The next part of Fabric has been the drama project with Avaes Mohammad, with movement work by Balbir Singh.

For eight days, eight local people shared their own personal stories and connections with Blackburn with Darwen.  On the final evening; Friday 23rd November; Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery became the venue for the performance of these stories.

The impact has been extremely positive, with comments from participants showing leaps in confidence and self belief beyond our expectations.  As part of an approach to evaluation, each participant kept a diary.  I have, with people's permission, taken some extracts from these diaries to show the process in their own words and the following posts will show these extracts.

Quiet Voices

The first project to come under the banner of 'Fabric' has been that of 'Quiet Voices.'  This has been a development from Action Factory's previous work in that the funding allowed for six weeks with a musician, Frenchie, to work with a group of adults from the refugee and asylum seeking community in Blackburn.  The intention was to pass on and develop skills to support participants in creating a song for World Mental Health Day - not only to increase their own self esteem, communication skills and wellbeing, but to create an original, artistic piece of work that communicated an important message.  Our previous work with this participant group has involved Drama, Writing and Spoken Word, as well as shorter projects involving Dance, Film and Music and Visual Art.  Music sessions have always been well-received, but as it is not a specialism within the core staff team at Action Factory, it has been difficult to sustain without additional funding.

To date, the resulting song, 'Freedom'  - written and performed by the group with verses in English and seven Spoken Word sections in different languages - has had an audience on three occasions in October 2012: a World Mental Health Day event at the Asylum and Refugee Community Drop in (Wesley Hall, Blackburn;) the Arts and Minds event organised by the Community Restart Team (Darwen Aldridge Community Academy) and the NHS sponsored Diversity Day (Soccer Dome, Blackburn.)  The event at Darwen Aldridge Community Academy gave us the opportunity to support two locally-based film makers to create short pieces for projection and to showcase writing from our recent Creative Writing pilot project in Darwen, as well as providing a workshop with Frenchie that allowed the Health professionals present to create and rehearse their own song.

FABRIC - our latest project

Fabric is a programme developing three strands of Action Factory’s existing work: 

• Arts in Health; 
• Work with new and established artists of South Asian heritage
• Arts with refugee / asylum / migrant communities. 

The work is funded by Arts Council England via their Grants for the Arts programme.

This blog will be a way of documenting the process and reflecting on the work.  Artists and participants will be invited to contribute, making it a useful tool in monitoring and evaluating artistic process and engagement.  The company aims to learn and develop throughout the project, making new networks, trying different ways of working, evaluating and sharing the results for the benefit of our own and others' development.