In September, I was commissioned as part of Derby Re-Well Dressed / Derby Feste 2020 to create The Derby Witness, a poetry street art trail written in response to Coronavirus Lockdown.
The trail was made up of 49 lines of text, submitted by members of the public one for each day of the UK nationwide lockdown between March and May 2020.
The lines documented peoples memories, thoughts, joys, fears and experiences during Lockdown, also touching upon topics and events such as the clap for carers, Major Tom and The NHS heroes and national and international stories such as The Death of George Floyd and the continued Black Lives Matter Movement.
The project was granted additional support from Derby City Council and sponsored by Cathedral Quarter Derby, and St Peters Quarter Derby.
The lines of text were created as stencils and spray-painted (using eco-friendly chalk-based spray paint) at 49 locations across Derby City Centre as part of Feste weekend on Saturday 26th September 2020.
The public were encouraged to explore the city, adhering to government guidelines and social distancing, to discover the lines of text, and document their findings through images uploaded to social media, and to create their own poems using the 49 lines as inspiration.
In addition to this, a free creative writing workshop based on the lines of text was held on Sunday 27th September via zoom, led by Derby based spoken word artist Sophie Sparham and an audio accessible version of the project is being developed online.
Over the next few months, in addition to the audio version, we will be uploading a series of free workshops for schools and other educational settings based upon the project to the website plus a template for the stencils used in the project so it can be easily and cost effectively replicated as an educational tool.
A book documenting the project will be published by Big White Shed in Winter 2020 / Spring 2021.
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