Message In A Bottle - What Does Safety Look Like?
We’ve been working with older adults and primary school children in the Ashbrow and Greenhead wards of Huddersfield, exploring a simple question: What does safety look like?
Message in a Bottle brought people together across generations through creativity, conversation, and time spent alongside each other.
Across the sessions, people got stuck into collage, photography, poetry, jewellery making, and decorating jars to hold their ideas and creations.
Creativity gave people a way to share stories, reflect, and just be alongside each other.
Bringing different generations together was a big part of this. There was curiosity straight away. Questions, laughter, lovely moments of connection that built during the project as people got to know each other.
People shared what safety means to them in lots of different ways.
Safety looked like:
Being listened to
Being with people you trust
Knowing someone cares
You’ll see all of this come through in the work in the poems, photos and creative objects.
We worked with poet Michelle Scally Clarke, who spent time with the groups helping shape their words, thoughts, and experiences into a shared poem.
Michelle created a space where people felt comfortable to contribute, whether that was a single word, a sentence, or a full idea. The final poems brings together their different voices and perspectives on safety, care, and belonging - something that couldn’t have been written by one person alone.
Poem created by the children and adults Birkby Junior School
Poem created by children and adults at Our Lady of Lourdes Primary School
Sharing events in school
To celebrate the project and the involvement of those taking part, we held a sharing event in each school to perform the poems and to show the rest of the school community the work that they’ve created.
You can see photos above from Birkby Juniors and below from Our Lady of Lourdes school sharing events.
Come and see the work
We’re really pleased to be sharing the work publicly as part of Huddersfield Literature Festival.
Exhibition opening:
Wednesday 7th May
Amped Cafe, Huddersfield
4:00pm – 5:30pm
Please use this link to book your place, tickets are free! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1987737701975?aff=oddtdtcreator
To celebrate the opening of the exhibition we’ll be performing the poems created during the project alongside displays of the artwork created. The exhibition will include artwork and poetry from everyone involved in the project, we’d love people to come along, see what’s been created!
We’re hugely grateful to everyone who took part, to all of the children and adults for sharing their thoughts and ideas, for being so open to the project and to each other. Thank you also to both schools and all of the staff for hosting us so brilliantly!
This project was supported by funding from West Yorkshire Combined Authority through the Mayor of West Yorkshires’ Safer Communities Fund. This Message In A Bottle project also forms a part of our Arts Council England funded project ‘Art of Connection’ and will be informing further creative intergen work which we’re really excited for! Huge thanks to both funders for helping to make this project possible.
Watch this space!
There is still much more to come, Photographs taken as part of a photovoice activity, the feedback and reflections from those taking part a short film created during the project and much more - all will be added to this page after the Exhibition in May.