Creativity on sea for all
By Sarah Milne
There have been two nights in my life where I have sat up watching news break from a distant country and experienced a real deep, physical ‘knowing’ that what I am watching will have a dramatic impact on my own life.
The first was one night early in 2020, when I watched news of an outbreak of a mysterious respiratory virus in Wuhan. It took some weeks before people stopped saying I was overreacting when I told them I didn’t think life would ever be the same again! For many, life has returned to something resembling how it was before. For me, lockdown events led me to sell our family house in Croydon and return alone to my hometown, here in Hastings.
The second was this February, when, ironically, I was up struggling to sleep sick with Covid as I watched the first bombs and shelling across Ukraine and the images of people crowding onto trains to escape them.
Like many others, I scrambled to do what I could to help through donations and fundraising. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that my own life, here in Hastings, was about to change in a big way. At first, I put it down to images of nuclear explosions in the media bringing back that sickening feeling we carried around in our stomachs throughout the 80s. Then the ‘Homes for Ukraine’ scheme was announced. I decided to offer a room in my little Old Town cottage and, within a few days, was asked if I could offer a room to a young woman living in a refuge after escaping a bomb attack on her home. My gut feeling at the start of the war had been right, my new life in Hastings was about to change! But change was to run a lot deeper than sharing my home.
During the weeks planning for the arrival of my new Ukrainian friend, I was also preparing to start some writing and creative workshops at The Nest in the Old Town. The first, a writing workshop opened on May 3rd. A bad idea! Word to the wise – don’t try and launch a new project the day after Jack in the Green because half the town stays in bed.
The second session was an open creative workshop, to explore and express a theme through a range of artistic mediums. Visual art is a powerful way to break through language barriers to share stories and understand other people’s experiences and feelings. I decided to invite Ukrainians, along with all refugees in Hastings, to the workshops free of charge.
I set out markers and paints, still feeling disillusioned after sitting alone at the same table two days before. But this time we barely had enough chairs for everyone. The first exercise was to draw a quick selfie and use it to introduce yourself to the group. A young Ukrainian mother was the first to share her drawing, and there it was! There was the moment I had felt was coming, my life as I have known it since moving to back to Hastings. Her picture, drawn in Ukrainian blue and yellow, was of her with huge wings she felt she had to make and put on to spread her love and strength to her son, here with her in Hastings, and her husband in Ukraine. In that moment, the workshop had become something new and different.
From that first drawing and the wonderful sharing of stories, feelings, love and many tears that followed, I realised I had found my way back Hastings to be standing in this workshop facilitating something very powerful and very much needed.
Creative therapy uses non-lingual expression, like art or music, to enable us to access and communicate our inner world. This not only helps us to share our stories with others, but also to understand and find clarity in our thoughts and feelings that can often be difficult using words alone.
The lady who drew herself with angel wings has since told me how she hopes one day to have the English words to express fully how art helped her to explore her feelings. She told me it enabled her to unblock and clear the heaviness she was carrying.
Another lady told me during a workshop last week, “I am so happy I met you and I discovered all your creativity and ideas. We have many, many emotions and it is important, we cannot just forget things. This creativity gives a way to express and let these things come through.”
In less than a month, the creative workshop has grown so much that we have moved to a bigger space at ‘His Place’ on Robertson Street. Our numbers grow with every session and we welcome everyone, regardless of age and artistic experience. We have workshops on Thursdays between 10am and midday and from 4pm until 6pm, with a craft activity for children. We are also helping artists who arrive in Hastings as refugees to find materials and link them to galleries and craft shops and have our own exhibitions in the planning.
To make art and creative therapy accessible to everybody, all our workshops are free with a wide range of materials provided. Everything is growing so fast and we have big plans. We have formed a Community Interest Company called ‘Creativity on Sea’ and are applying for grants, but these will take time and we need your help to keep this important work going in the meantime. Please, if you can donate anything at all to our Go Fund Me, it would mean so much to us.
• To help out go to gofundme.com/manage/creative-workshops-with-our-ukrainian-guests
For more information, please email Sarah at [email protected]
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