Back in late 2015, we had the pleasure of working alongside two students from Durham University, Charlotte Peters and Kayla Ratcliffe which set up a wonderful creative writing class.
The service users at the centre really enjoyed it and created some brilliant work.
Around the same time, Durham Cathedral contacted us to ask if we would like to be involved in their ‘Recreating the Community’ project. The Cathedral worked with four commissioned artists to create art inspired by the Treasures of St Cuthbert, and we were delighted to accept their kind offer.
You can find out more about the Recreating the Community project here.
Durham Cathedral very kindly arranged for the group to visit the Cathedral and find out more about its Hidden Treasures and the building itself. We then used this experience as a starting block to use in the creative writing group, which produced some great work.
The next stage of the project was to use the creative writing to create a piece of art work for the exhibition, Philippa Coad from the Cathedral and artist Sheryl Jenkins came in to the sessions and helped us produce the piece.
We produced a mixed media piece, which included Zentangle techniques, drawing, graphic design, illustration and paper techniques. All of this was taken away by Sheryl to work her artistic magic.
The piece was up in the Cathedral during the exhibition. Staff and service users from St Margaret’s Centre attended and we were very happy with the end results. We were so proud to see all of our efforts reflected in Sheryl’s finished piece and displayed in such a prestigious location.
The piece is now being displayed here at the centre until it returns to the Cathedral archives, so if you didn’t manage to see the exhibition at the Cathedral you would be more than welcome to pop in to see the piece here.
We would like to thank Sheryl and everyone involved in the project, and we look forward to working with the Cathedral in the future.
