I’m going to share a series of blogs about how my work has been different this year. First up: a collaboration with the wonderful Handmade Parade, and how you can get involved in this fantastic artistic project.
Hebden Bridge’s Handmade Parade is such a big part of our family’s life. Ever since my girls were tiny, each summer we’ve taken them along to create handmade costumes from cardboard and ribbon and glue, helped by the kind and visionary artists who transform our town once a year.
On the day itself, traffic stops, faces are painted, stilts are strapped on, masks and hats tied in place, drums start up, and the parade takes over our town. Narrow cobbled streets are filled with noise and colour, culminating in a big party on the field on the park. So when Covid came and our streets fell quiet, it was one of the good things we missed this spring.
When Kerith Ogden, Artistic Director of Handmade Parade, asked me if I’d be interested in collaborating on a new kind of project this year, I felt very honoured, excited, and a little daunted in case I didn’t do it justice. We met and talked it through, sitting far apart round a table in the echoing workshop that I’ve only ever seen when it’s bustling with noise, artists at work, the smell of glue guns and paint. That day the puppets were watching us, motionless, from their storage loft…
It didn’t take me long to realise I would love to do this, and that my story would only be a spark, a start, one ingredient in a wonderful collaborative brew. Kerith gave me some elements to include – a town at night, an animal as a main character, some elements left open to be devised by groups as the project evolved – and the story began to take shape.
I used a five-part story structure that’s worked for me before, whether for an illustrated children’s story or a full-length novel, because it gives you: Set-up / Question / Journey / Peril / Resolution
I wanted the story to reflect something of our particular experience this year – so Mouse’s friend Otter is ill and Mouse sets off on a quest to help – but to end, like the parade does, with a community celebration and a party.
Now my part is done, and the project is open to everyone in the UK. You don’t have to live in our area to take part. So it’s over to you now!
The story will be animated and you can get involved by making a puppet or a model or a picture or a stop-motion film. in the end, artist Jack Lockhart will put together a film to animate the story and celebrate the contributions everyone has made.
You can make a bird or a fish, an undersea scene, a house to fit in cardboard town, a sky or countryside scene, an animal costume. Everything is free. Guidance is available at the links below. Materials are whatever you have to hand.
Please do feel free to join in. If your creation is to go in the final film, the deadlines are 18th September for Cardboard Town and 1st October otherwise.
I don’t usually get to work collaboratively, so it’s wonderful to see the first artworks taking shape, and to hear from storytelling and devising expert Tash Holmes about her work with a young people’s group on part of the story. I can’t wait to see the final results.
Thank you Kerith and everyone at the Handmade Parade for all the richness and creativity you spark, this year and every year.
LINKS
Click here for the Facebook group.
click here for the Pinterest board.