In September 2023 I was commissioned by DIY Theatre Company to make a handling piece with them for their 30th Birthday, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
As a starting point we used a wall hanging piece I made with them called Picking Up The Threads for their 18th Birthday. We discussed the distant past, productions, friends we have lost and the journey travelled. We then discussed the last 12 years for the new piece.
At this point I’d known DIY for 27 of their 30 years, so we had a lot to talk about.
Using fabric crayons and pens on bleahed calico the core theatre company drew images representing all the productions they had created over the last 12 years and members of their visual arts outreach group that I run made pennants which became an integral part of the piece. For information, photos and video of the process there is great article article on DIY’s website here.
The piece is part map, part game with all the information covering the last 12 years – the productions, films, people and the digital work made during the COVID lockdowns visually encoded into the gameboard/map, dice and game pieces.
DIY Theatre Company is a performing arts organisation for and led by adults with Learning disabilities. They do a lot od work in special schools and the piece has been designed to be interactive and taken into schools to talk about DIY’s history.
