Our Stories Shared

Over the course of 10 weeks, young people from two East London Schools took part in a creative project, working with professional artists and the Irish Voices team to find ways to explore, reimagine and reinterpret the stories from our archive. Their work was showcased at an exhibition and event in Walthamstow Library in May 2014.

I Come From: Poetry and Spoken Word

Young people from across Lammas School in Walthamstow worked with Irish poet in residence Cat Brogan on a weekly spoken word and poetry project. Starting with the statement ‘I come from’, they created new work that reflected many of their journeys from across the world to London, while echoing the stories of the London Irish and their St. Patrick’s Day parade.

The Irish stories they heard and investigated inspired evocative poems around the celebration of identity, living under suspicion and voicing protest. Images of parade banners and protest placards led pupils to create slogans which were transformed into printed posters on a visit to the William Morris Gallery, as well as in their finished poetry, which you can read and see here.

Irish Voice in Animation

Young people from the Year 9 Art class at Willowfield Humanities College took images of the parade as their starting point, working with artist Siobhan O’Neill and filmmaker Carl Stevenson. Photographs of previous parades were transformed into animated characters walking across the parade route through central London and its iconic landscape. The people behind our recorded stories were captured in portraits and their tales depicted in graphic cut out images or drawn in sand as animations for the Irish Voices film. Watch their film and be inspired!

Learning Resource

Our schools project led to the development of a learning resource for creative work with young people in school and community settings. You can read more about the resource and access the full document here