Creative Paths Project – Youth

Quaker Cottage, North Belfast
Project: ‘Our View’ Teenage Project
Artist: Rita Duffy
Age Group: 14-19
Participants: x 21
Special Project over 6 months

Funding from BBC Children In Need enabled us to build on our partnership with the Quaker Cottage. It facilitated a 6 month arts project giving 21 teenagers from North and West Belfast, aged 14-19, the opportunity to explore and express their story. ‘Our View’ is the culmination this project.

“How often do we allow ourselves the time to reflect upon our lives? How often are young people given the opportunity to be heard? And how often do people really listen?”

Quaker Cottage provided a safe place where young people were given time, space and support for critical reflection. This art project has provided each teenager with an opportunity to delve into their past and put this experience into words and pictures. Through short interviews with artist Rita Duffy and youth worker Rory Doherty, each teenager was given the chance to capture and share their story.

Creative Paths gave these young people at Quaker Cottage the opportunity to use art as a tool to explore aspects of their own past. Through the artistic process, they produced a visual re-enactment of their experiences. It is not always easy to ‘tell your story’ especially if the story deals with the pain, loss, despair or trauma that these young people have experienced on a daily basis. The project became a means of communicating feelings of isolation and suffering, but also hopes for the future.

Artist, Rita Duffy worked closely with the young people to help them become the author of their own personal story expressed through text, drawings and photographs. Each person felt empowered and listened to by taking a central role in the storytelling, editing and publishing of the book illustrating their lives. At a time when they are often ignored, neglected and simply not heard, it has been a personal healing journey for each participant. It has allowed them to connect with their own inspirational courage.

What emerges from ‘Our View’ is a powerful sense that these young people feel left behind by the system there to support young people, but in reality it has allowed many of them to simply fall through the gaps. They often find themselves with no qualifications and limited opportunities. They live in a society divided with peace walls and locked gates keeping communities apart. For them Belfast has been experienced as a place where the emphasis is on divided lives, and happy lives seem to have been forgotten.

Their hope is that their stories will make a difference to other young people and serve to promote an understanding of young Belfast lives.