the drawing shed took community dialogue once more onto the streets of E17 through its trademark durational project on the public signage across the housing estates of Attlee Terrace and The Drive and Hoe Street. The exhibition was live and visible to everybody from Saturday 1st to Sunday 16th September 2012.
Our Printmaking on the estates is inspired by the radical work of visual artist Sister Corita – an inspirational American artist and teacher – who led an in-house PrintWorkshop in a Convent during the radical 1960’s; she was an artist whose day-glo prints agitated the avant garde practice of the day and radically criticised the political injustices of the era; Leytonstone’s Alfred Hitchcock was one of her biggest fans!
Over April to July 2012, with the support of Arts Council England and Walthamstow and Chingford Alms Charity, the drawing shed worked with residents of The Drive, Attlee Terrace and Hoe Street on a live creative writing project, using both Twitter and the pen, to develop collaborative writing under the banner PeopleLikeUs. Writers Jacob Sam-La Rose and Dorothy Fryd with the drawing shed artists Labern+Lloyd have drawn poetic license from the shared writing using the #hashtag of this Collective: #WordintheHand – a new Community of the Imagination!
Our work is co-produced with the communities we work with, reflecting the diversity of Hoe St/Attlee/Drive residents and different voices in dialogue. We want to thank the people who took part in creating this project and for trusting us to take them into waters unknown and in allowing us to curate, print and share their thoughts.
To continue this community led dialogue, we invited the PeopleLikeUs Collective to join the PrintBike workshop on Wednesday 29th to screen-print the tweets that are up on the signage of the two estates with Labern+Lloyd and artist printmaker extraordinaire Joseph Kopiel.
The exhibition on the public signage was a live community-made artwork aiming to share this hidden network of on-line and off-line communication amongst the collective, and to shift the perception of the Drive and Attlee Terrace estates’ external environment, challenging the social impact of the signs which shout ‘forbidding instructions’ at residents and anyone who passes; this transformation into a site of creative dialogue accompanied the community in its everyday life during the E17 Art Trail and was supported by Ascham Homes.