Voices of the women involved

 Hi, my name is Suzanne.

I am the mother of two children, age 9 and 6. We live in the Swansea Valley.

I am interested in art and creativity, healing, yoga, writing, and community gardening. I also love felting, and I am just beginning my journey of exploration into this area. My real focus and the thing that underpins everything for me, however, is community, and the idea of bringing people together. We live such busy and often separate lives and connecting with others can be such a powerful and healing thing, but something we often forget to do.

By being involved in Llan, I am hoping to use my experiences as a mother to explore and deepen my artistic practice and gain direction and focus. I also hope to explore areas that I haven't worked in before (particularly film), learning new skills that I can use in the future. Or at least I think this is what I want to get out of it. I have a really bad cold and am knackered at the moment so it is hard to think straight!

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My name is Angie, I moved to magical, mystical west Wales only 8 months ago with my husband and one of my children, the eldset staying in London making his own way in life. I am gradually finding my way in connecting to community and making friends, important not only for myself but really importantly for my 18 year old daughter, who has learning difficulties and so is very dependant on me helping her to be involved in community, finding activities and participating.

 

My ancestry is Welsh, I knew I needed to be here to grow as a person and have the opportunity to live gently amid the beauty of the trees, streams and tranquil valleys, and also for my daughter to have the freedom of movement she loves and be a part of the amazing inclusive community that we have already found and is ever growing.

 

Becoming involved in the Llan project has really given me a platform to express and share the journey I am on and relight my creative fire, coming from a performance, creative arts past. Being connected to the small group of women that we are in the Llan project is both rewarding and exciting. I love being in the presence of other women, listening and learning, sharing and communicating our thoughts, ideas, fears and dreams. 

 

I hope that what I have to share will resonate with other women and particularly other women who are mothers who have a disabled child. Our move to Wales took many years of thinking about it and many years to shed our fears that it would not be right for our daughter. So far it is working and we are all finding our way in our various ways.......

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 Hi, my name is Sheila. I'm the mother of four fabulous children. I became a young mother by “accident” 27 years ago but it was the best accident of my life. Since that time raising and loving my kids has been the defining influence on the way I live.

I am nearing the end of a 20 year experiment in home schooling and feel extremely lucky and blessed to have been able to do that. Home schooling four children has kept me very home based and I have been so happy here. I have written a book about my parenting experiences and thoughts which is free to download at www.wisechild.org.uk

My home / Llan is an extension of my family and I absolutely love it. Half way up the north side of a windy hill top, and 8 miles from the nearest shop, it's not perfect (quite), but after 17 years it feels part of who I am. I want to be carried out of here feet first.

In the bits of time I have left over after parenting I am a wife, foster carer, gardener, environmentalist, mountain biker and fun loving loonatic! 

I joined Llan simply as a way of promoting my website but I have already gained so much more than that from it, connecting in an intimate and honest way with other women is very soul strengthening. :)

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Hi 

Mothers and homes…??  mmm…
both VERY TRICKY SUBJECTS for me...

I guess that why I have arrived in this project.

I am Pamela, by the way.

I never had any babies and I always wanted to be somewhere else.

Longing for Home.

Cwmhiraeth.

Became an adopted mother aged 48yrs to my adopted daughter (then aged seven) and her brother, my adopted son (aged six).

Now they are eighteen and seventeen. There is many a tale to tell there. But not yet. Not now. Not right at the beginning when we all hardly know each other.

Oh…I am also recently a grandmother since daughter had a baby when just seventeen years old.

If you have done your maths right you will have correctly worked out that I am sixty next year. How can that be? I don’t look sixty. Nor do I feel it. Whatever sixty is meant to feel like??

And I still want to marry Cliff Richard.

That is also a tale to tell, and I will tell it. If only to discover how it ends.

Maybe you will see that it is not so extraordinary, as I sit in my renovated longhouse within an old stone farmyard in rural West Wales.

We lived in a yurt for the first two years, me and my husband , arriving in my ancestral homeland almost twenty years ago. Another story. Seems I have many to tell. 

Home building was, for me, frustrating and painful...the anxieties of getting planning permission, the near break up our new marriage as we sloshed around in mud and rain. There was a lot of mud and rain. It was, after all, rural West Wales. 

We worked hard to pay the builders every month as I climbed up and down a ladder in my nightie amongst the building site and cement mixers. We were also trying to make a baby (in my early forties!?)   

My husband’s stubborn determination kept his dream going, whilst I railed and ranted. With his care to every detail, sheep fleece insulation, green oak lintels, solar panels, sustainable fuel of log stoves etc. The house slowly appeared.

The baby didn’t.

It took around five years to build our home and much longer to make a family.

I once read that a birth mother gives birth from the womb and an adopted mother gives birth through the heart.

I liked that.

Wombs, Hearts, Homes and Hearths. Welcome to Llan.

That was Pamela’s voice.

Can be read softly or loud. As the reader, you will decide. That is the strange thing about voices on blogs. x

 

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Llan

For more information on the project please visit our organisation's website for previous blogs: Valley and Vale Community Arts (click here)

This blog will contain the documentation and creative work of the women who are taking part in the project over the coming months, in the lead-up to the performances on International Women's Day, March 8th 2013.

My name is Tracy Evans and I work for Valley and Vale Community Arts as a Drama/Performance Development Worker.

I am very passionate about working with people using the arts and creativity to effect change and transformation, both on a personal and collective level. I was influenced by the work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal when I studied Drama at the University of Manchester 15 years ago. I was fascinated to see how drama could be used to bring change into people's lives. Boal worked initially with peasants in Brazil as a way of supporting them to make changes in the way the land-owners treated them. From reading about and training in his work (Theatre of the Oppressed and Rainbow of Desire), I learned the following key principles which have resonated profoundly throughout my life:

1. You cannot change anyone else, only yourself.
2. As a facilitator of change, you cannot change things from the outside, you must work inside, with people to effect change.

Boal came to work in Europe, based in Paris, and discovered that Europeans also suffered from oppression- not so much in the way of basic standards of living, but in terms of the mind. He described it as 'cop in the head'....that Europeans think so much, they can oppress themselves. In Jungian terms, this might be called the saboteur.

Based in south Wales, Valley and Vale works with many deprived communities, but we also work with others who are seeking to bring change in to their lives in other ways. In order to do this, they choose creativity as a means. Creativity opens us up; it connects us; it allows our deep wisdom and experience to have its say; it tells us to play more; to lighten up; to experiment and discover new things. If we can tap into our creative powers then we can move mountains!

Each of the women on this project is from a completely different background, living in very different circumstances, but all share some common experiences: being a mother, living in rural/semi-rural Wales. It is my vision that these shared strands will be woven together during the course of the project. The invitation for all other mothers out there is to join us! Leave comments! Share examples of your own work! Let's use the wonder of technology to connect us, so that we might all be gathered together around near a stream, a river, a lake, listening to the running water and each other's voices.

www.valleyandvalecommunityarts.co.uk

Funded by:

Arts Coucil of Wales

Bridgend County Borough Council

Esmee Fairbairn Foundation