Windows of North Belfast

Last week, the Duncairn hosted a fabulous exhibition launch: Windows of North Belfast. The exhibit showcased the beautiful artworks created by the participants to the Supporting Families group.

Supporting Families @ the Duncairn is a collaborative project between ourselves (funded through Esmee Fairbairn) and North Belfast Health Partnership (NBHP).

Our work together is the first time the NBHP considered the arts as a programme of activity, and since our relationship began in 2018 the project has gone from strength to strength.

From the outset it was clear that the multi media activity approach of community arts sat very well with structure of the group: not just encouraging untapped creativity, but the development of the hidden treasures that are difficult to get across to funding bodies, who rely so heavily on numbers and bums on seats.  

This group is a manifestation of all that we hold very dear here at The Duncairn: it’s collaborative, it’s peer learning, it’s sharing and sustaining new friendships and most importantly it’s influencing the community we live in by bringing creativity and shared learning back into our homes.

The result of such creative work is an amazing wall hanging, a patchwork of squares. Each square represents a window into life in North Belfast for the participants, who used multiple artistic media to represent their favorite place of this unique area.

Windows of North Belfast is clearly a project that the group have worked so very hard on.  Months of exploring where they live, seeing things perhaps from different perspectives and for the first time; learning new skills, research, design,  image transfer, embroidery, sewing and how to make joint decisions for the good of everyone involved. 

We couldn't be more proud of this group and our relationship with North Belfast Health Partnership and its-coordinators Trish and Claire, and from our perspective we want this group to go from strength to strength, onward and upward.