Bringing the outside In

We worked with Bringing the Outside In participants to gather, explore and share information about lives lived in the outside environment, we feel it is particularly important to gather these memories as our lives become more and more detached from the natural world.

ArtatWork CIC received a National Lottery grant of £10,000 for an exciting project, Bringing the Outside In, in Mildenhall. Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, the project focused on memories of residents at Mildenhall Lodge Care Home(run by Care UK). The nine month project was co-created by ArtatWork CIC with local arts and walking for wellbeing group for women which we run at Mildenhall Community Centre. The centre is managed by Keystone Development Trust who were also partners in this project.

The women spoke to residents from the home to explore memories of making arts and crafts and being in nature as children, and responded to these through library and museum visits, poetry, journaling, heritage crafts making and mixed media artwork. This was a two-way process as the women researched and creatively responded to what they learnt and shared their work with the residents. An example of this was a care home resident talking about making corn dollies as a child – the women then researched this further, making their own corn dollies and they took  these to the residents to generate further discussion and stimulate forgotten memories.

Check out our piece in the East Anglia Daily Times:

https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/artwork-inspired-by-memories-of-suffolk-care-home-residents-is-unveiled-1-5879899

We made a book to celebrate the end of our Bringing The Outside In project. You can view or download it here in PDF form.