A Legacy
This vibrant and contemporary tapestry is a legacy of A Big Weave for All, a community weaving project, and was created with the help of over 200 visitors to St Mary’s Guildhall in Spring 2024. People came together to weave in their thread and so added their bit to the tapestry. In doing so they made their own connections with the medieval tapestry hanging in the Great Hall and also to this new community tapestry. Most participants had no previous experience of weaving and picked up skills as they worked on the tapestry. The outstanding medieval tapestry housed in the Great Hall inspired our contemporary design. We started with a marguerite flower signifying Margaret of Anjou, one of the central characters in the Coventry Tapestry.
Particpants from the Queer Writing Group, Coventry Refugee and Migrant Centre, The Weavers Workshop, Hope in Unity and regular visitors to the Guildhall all took part in the weaving and left their mark on the community tapestry. To find out more, follow the link to Diane's blog about the process.
As part of the St Mary's Guildhall Community Grant Programme, Underground Lights hosted their Creative Cafe at the Guildhall. Over the course of twelve weeks they tooks tours of the building, and were inspired by the space to create art, music and poetry. At the end of the term they put on a wonderful end of term performance and Open Mic Night in the Great Hall. To read more about the project, please follow the link to their blog.
Underground Lights are a community theatre company that is run for an by adults experiencing social disadvantage, homelessness and/or mental health issues in Coventry Warwickshire and the surrounding area.
The CCCHP was launched in January 2024 by a Coventry-based community group, the ArawaK Community Trust (ACT). The aim of the project is to provide research and curation skills to young Black people in Coventry, enabling them to contribute to the creation of a live community-based exhibition. This exhibition was hosted in St Mary's Guildhall, and was partially funded by the Guildhall's Community Engagement Programmme.
To read more about the project, please follow the link to the blog written by Holly Cooper (Project Coordinator and DPhil student at the University of Oxford) and Jade McFarlane (CCCHP Project Participant).
As part of the St Mary’s Guildhall Community Engagement Programme, as supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we worked with Ego Arts who created an incredible theatrical production which opened at St Mary’s Guildhall on 10th October 2024, and ran until 19th October 2024. Francis Stojsavljevic, from Ego Arts, wrote about their work in this blog.
The show received phenomenal feedback and welcomed new visitors to the Guildhall every night.
‘Protest & Identity’ was inspired by the archive ‘Stories That Made Us’, which includes thousands of artefacts documenting the South Asian experience in Coventry and beyond managed by artist, activist and curator Hardish Virk in partnership with Coventry Artspace.
This exhibition and associated programming addressed these themes whilst exploring different types of protest – identity can also be a form of protest. What you wear, music you listen to, relationships that are developed, groups you belong to and movements you follow can become a part of ones’ identity which can also act as a protest – challenging the status quo, societal rules and stereotypes – carving out an identity based on the individuals heritage, experience and relationships. Photos, leaflets, artworks, books, magazines, objects, artefacts alongside sound and video in the exhibition are designed to ignite a conversation about the role of protest and identity in history as well as today.
‘Stories That Made Us: Protest & Identity’ is part of St Mary’s Guildhall community engagement programme, which is funded by the Heritage Fund thanks to National Lottery players.
The link leads to a blog by Ilina Joshi, who wrote about her experience with Stories that Made Us: What We Wore - our previous project with Hardish Virk and Coventry Artspace.
St Mary’s Guildhall Community Grant Project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, was designed to hand over the reins of the programme to the community, and fund projects that were designed for and by the communities in Coventry. Digital Douglass is one of those projects.
The project reached out to young people of African origin, and invited them to research, write and perform a script for an audio track telling the story of Frederick Douglass. Douglass was a formerly enslaved person who used his hard-won freedom to campaign for the abolition of slavery. He was a talented orator and used his skills to tour Britain and Ireland to raise funds and support for the abolition movement. This is the product of their work.
Credited participants: Lead Producer: Taylor Renee Cottrel. Denzel-Reagan Kira, Jude Avery, Deborah Paul-Enahoro, Hiten Vara, Takudzwa Mudiwa. This project, designed and run by House of Emanuel I&1 C.I.C.