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Contact


Email glitterfishlara@gmail.com
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About


I am a community artist and educator with over 20 years experience. In all my roles and projects, I aim to use creative practice to enrich lives and promote social change. I endeavour to provoke a response in participants and the audience that makes them stop, think and question, possibly shifting opinions or inspiring them to challenge the status quo through their conversations and actions.
In the last 12 months my work has developed around changing migration narratives and challenging xenophobic representations and inhumane developments in government policy. I have been working closely with Care4Calais, local community groups and other voluntary organisations to develop projects and activities that build relationships between immigrant and host communities facilitating opportunities for exchange of skill, knowledge and culture (transculturation) in both directions, an idea initiated by Tania Bruguera in her 2019 “School of Integration”.




ARTIST EDUCATOR FACILITATOR

 

 


ISSUE BASED WORKSHOPS - MOSAICS AND JEWELLERY 
C0-PRODUCTION AND INTERVENTION

EQUALITY MAT-TERS


In collaboration with Stars and Stitches and Rachel Shore Arts, this craftivism project aimed to highlight inequality in Salford and promote conversations around levelling up and challenging injustice. Working at a hyperlocal level, projects like this can shift opinion and organise and mobilise communities. Get in touch for further details.

OPEN DOORS


Open Doors ran from May to September 2022 and was a collaborative and co-produced project with the Hulme and Moss Side communities and refugees who have made their home in Manchester. We used the power of art to challenge the hostile environment at a peaceful protest level, engaging the wider community in conversation and direct action through doorstep conversations, workshops and interactive blackboards. The front door has become a valued piece of cultural capital in Moss Side. If anyone is interested in participating, particularly with the use of your own front door, please get in touch. 

I Am Because We Are



A collaborative group running at Niamos since November 2021 where anyone wanting to challenge Teresa May’s hostile environment is invited to share stories of migration and make art, with a view to promoting solidarity and unity. The Nowruz celebrations, which took place on 17 March 2022, were a product of this process, where we share ideas, stories and cultural traditions to enrich all our lives.

Participatory Workshops



I often facilitate participatory projects collaborating on large scale mosaics, sometime purely aesthetic but often inspired by social issues.

In 2020, I worked with years 5 and 6 to produce 2 mosaic plaques (100cmx100cm) for the school, which combined the school logo and the Manchester Bee.  The children also had the opportunity to make an individual piece of work They loved learning new skills, having the opportunity to use real tools and being able to use the skills they’d learned on the group project to unleash their creativity.

Most recently I ran a series of transition workshops in a high school which received high acclaim from participants and teachers/ support workers as an agent to building confidence, positive relationships and an understanding of their value and importance in a social group. Students worked together to produce a series of 7 mosaics illustrating the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly, a metaphor for the formative process of learning and change in high school. The school plan on displaying the mosaics (all sized 60cmx90cm) in the school for the duration of this cohort’s education.