A gentle creative session combining visual making and reflective writing

A calm, low-pressure creative space

The Mindful Making & Noticing Session is a quiet, supportive creative session designed for anyone who wants to slow down and reconnect with making, without pressure, critique, or expectations.

This is not about learning techniques or producing finished artwork. Nothing needs to look “good”. Sharing is always optional. Simply turning up and taking part is enough.

Mindful making and writing, without performance

The session gently combines visual making and reflective writing. Participants are invited to create a small image in response to a place, moment, or feeling that has stayed with them. The approach is open and exploratory… abstract, partial, or unfinished work is welcomed.

From the image, a few words are invited to emerge. This isn’t about analysing or explaining the work, but about noticing what stands out and allowing language to arrive naturally. Writing can take the form of sentences, fragments, or notes.

A supportive environment for creative confidence

The tone of the session is calm and unhurried. I make alongside participants, keeping my own work simple, so the space feels shared rather than led. Presence matters more than instruction.

There is time at the end to share an image or a line of writing if you wish, but listening quietly is just as valid. The session closes with a short pause to notice how you’re feeling before returning to the rest of your day.

Who this session is for

This session is particularly suited to people who:

• Want a gentle introduction to creative practice

• Feel unsure or low in confidence about making or writing

• Are interested in mindful creativity and reflective practice

• Prefer small groups and low-pressure environments

It offers a simple, human way to reconnect with creativity, through presence, curiosity, and small, honest acts of making.

Listening, Translating, and Making Space: Tell Us Your Story

Some of my most meaningful work happens quietly, through listening.

Tell Us Your Story was a community-centred project developed with ACTS, designed to create space for people to share lived experience in their own words, and to have those stories held with care, clarity, and respect.

My role in the project sat across several overlapping areas: visual identity, digital design, creative facilitation, and reflective documentation. Rather than treating these as separate tasks, I approached them as one connected process.

Building a visual language

At the outset, I designed the project’s logo and visual identity. The aim wasn’t to brand people’s stories, but to create a visual language that felt open, human, and trustworthy — something that could hold a wide range of voices without imposing a tone or agenda.

This visual framework was then carried through into the website design, where accessibility, clarity, and calmness were central. The site needed to feel like a place where people could arrive gently and speak honestly.

Listening as a creative act

A core part of the project involved listening to participants’ stories. These conversations weren’t treated as content to be extracted, but as moments of connection and trust. My role was to listen attentively, reflect back what I heard, and ensure each person felt seen and respected in how their story was represented.

For many participants, the process of telling their story — and being listened to without judgement — became an opportunity to reflect, notice patterns, and gain new insights into their own lives and experiences.

From these conversations, I created a series of artistic responses — visual expressions shaped by the themes, emotions, and textures of the stories themselves. These weren’t illustrations of people’s experiences, but creative translations in response to them.

Translating stories across contexts

Alongside the creative work, I updated and maintained the project website as stories were shared, ensuring they were presented clearly and sensitively. I also gathered and organised participant feedback, translating qualitative experiences into reflective insights that could be shared with funders and stakeholders.

This aspect of the work was about care and accountability — holding the human reality of the project while also meeting the practical needs of reporting and evaluation.

Why this project matters to my practice

Tell Us Your Story reflects how I work more broadly: bringing together design, listening, facilitation, and creative response to support people and organisations in articulating what matters to them.

It sits at the intersection of art, branding, and community-rooted practice — where process is as important as outcome, and where making becomes a way of noticing, connecting, and honouring lived experience.

You can explore the project here:
Tell Us Your Story — ACTS

The Bridge of Hope Project

Community Residency / Socially Engaged Practice

Bridge of Hope is a community-based arts project developed in response to a local bridge that had become associated with negative and harmful uses. The project set out to reframe and re-establish this site as a shared, positive space, using participatory art to support reflection, recovery and social repair.

Working in residency with The Old Chapel Café and local residents in Saltney Ferry, the project invited people to engage creatively with the bridge — not as a problem to be managed, but as a symbol of transition, connection and resilience. This approach aligns with my wider practice, which centres on place-based work, collaboration and the use of creativity as a tool for wellbeing and community dialogue.

Rather than producing a single authored artwork, Bridge of Hope prioritised process, access and participation. Creative activities were designed to be informal and inclusive, allowing individuals to contribute at their own pace and according to their own experience.

Activities included

• Collaborative image-making, using a bridge motif that participants coloured and altered, later developed into shared bunting and displays within the community.

• Collective songwriting, gathering words and phrases from participants to form the Bridge of Hope song, reflecting shared hopes and experiences.

• Photography contributions, inviting people to document bridges — literal or metaphorical — that represented connection, change or recovery.

The resulting work forms an evolving collective archive shaped by local voices. It acknowledges the complex history of the site while offering an alternative narrative grounded in care, visibility and shared ownership.

Bridge of Hope reflects an ongoing commitment in my practice to using art as a means of reclaiming spaces, supporting wellbeing, and enabling communities to participate in shaping the meaning of their environment. The project demonstrates how socially engaged arts practice can contribute to longer-term conversations around place, identity and recovery, while remaining open-ended and responsive to the people involved.

Song to offer lyrics for What do you hope for over the Bridge of Hope?

The Walk of Affirmation (WOA!)

Teamed up with The Light College (Glyn, Rachel and Izzy) and Holy Trinity Blacon and asked local people how they experience feeling valued. For people in Blacon, people felt valued through their relationships with family and by helping others.

We looked at making a film or a street mural and finally decided on an installation which would be set up in a local building for local people to visit. The Walk of Affirmation  as a way of allowing people to be affirmed and valued as they walked through it. The wooden tiles with affirmations on playing the part of the voice of encouragement we all value.

The tiles said things like: ‘I am enough’, ‘well done!’, ‘You’re amazing’, Thanks for being you’ etc.

Installed at Holy trinity Blacon, St Peter’s at the Cross in Chester and the Greenbelt Arts festival.