Community work

I have recently started working on a community project called 'Stronger mother, stronger daughter'. This project is based at the Getaway Girls in Leeds and it is creatively working with the mother and daughters to produce portraits of each other. The girls are Syrian girls who have all been in the country for various lengths of time, not very long in most cases. The project aims to pick out the positives of their relationship between themselves and their mothers in a creative light, hopefully positively influencing the girls in a variety of ways. 

Getaway Girls 

Getaway Girls empowers girls and young women aged 11 - 25 to build up confidence, develop new skills and take positive risks in an environment which offers cooperation and support.

I help to run sessions each week which vary from collaging, typography and ink drawing so that over the weeks a final portrait can be developed for the final exhibition where the daughters will reveal to their mothers the portraits and vice versa. 

The sessions allow for the girls to do something creative but with a purpose, socialise with other like themselves and also talk to us about the different routes they can take after school. It is about showing them that there are options such as university once they leave school as a lot of them are not aware of this as an option for them. 

The structure of the sessions that we are running start with the development of different creative skills that the girls could use as part of their final portraits. Below are some images for the collaging workshop that I helped to run.

As I specialise in Graphic Design, this is very different to portraiture so I have to run a workshop in typography/lettering. It was my task to think of a relevant workshop that I could run so that the girls got something from it in relation to the final aims of this community project. I spent the first three weeks of this project running workshops alongside two other community workers in the aim to dig deep and really help the girls to think about what it is they love about their mothers, what they want for them in the future and exactly what their personalities are like. So taking this work and then applying it to typogrpahy/lettring was something that I wanted to achieve. I thought about how personality, feelings and expressions can be portrayed through typography and hand lettering. Staying away from typography theory was important in my opinion as the girls are not very old and it would be a quick workshop that needed to be delivered easily despite the language barrier. 

I decided to do expressive typography as it would allow the girls to think of words relating to their mothers and illustrate/present them in ways that visually express the meaning. I think it will be important for me to develop some of my own ideas based on my own mum but make them positive and avoid things such as lazy, sleepy etc. I have uploaded some examples: