Moving Forward

This Open Door project is our first partnership with The Together Women Project - who work with women in the criminal justice system in Leeds. I did a taster workshop with them way back in spring, when we did some writing exercises and thought about what inspired us. It was clear that writing was of interest for the women there at that time - they had stories they needed to tell, but also a desire to move on. 

So here we are now, a windy, rainy autumn day with the Moving Forward project well underway. The focus is creative writing and animation, but our artist/writers Milena Dragic and Kath Jones have discovered the group is willing to experiment with all kinds of artforms and approaches to writing. Sketches, water colours, found texts and photographs are just some of the things I have seen on my visits to the group. What I have also seen is a growing confidence among the women, who on that first day in August, assured me they were "no artists", or "not much of a writer", and yet here we are just over the half way point and I see notebooks brimming with text and sheaves of drawings, and I hear bursts of laughter as we manoeuver plasticine spiders in front of the camera for the animations.  

I'm struck also by the email I received from one of the artists, Milena who, when I ask her to send me some thoughts about the project tells me "I'm no great writer..." Nevertheless she writes 

I've got eight two hours sessions to work with all these wonderful, talented, funny, women, brimming with ideas and creativity, to make together something new to us all and to transform our doubts, scars, loss and pain into strength and joy of creation, so that we can be proud of who we are and what we can do, not despite, but because of the lives we've lived.

I'm amazed how much work women do every week at home.

And the willingness to try new things,

and their openness with me, in more ways than one, a stranger, with a strange accent...

Need I say any more....?


Dianne