Ablaze in Bradford

The Bradford project will bring the voices and images of breastfeeding mothers and birthing parents closer to the public’s attention than ever before. With an audio tour across green spaces in the city, free writing workshops for mothers who are currently, or who have tried breastfeeding and an exhibition of moving and still image portraits in Airedale and Bradford Infirmary hospitals, this project builds on elements that are tried and tested with some entirely new concepts.

The Holding Time Chair

Walking whilst listening is one of my favourite activities in this age of noise and city stress: a stroll in a city park with a good podcasts and headphones can be one way to find headspace when the pressures of life are rising.

SInce the first Audio Tour in August of 2022, I have been working on an idea of using a seat in a public space as a link to the digital programme of videos and audio. Initial meetings with health professionals in Bradford in late 2021 moved the emphasis of the Audio Tour part of the project away from cultural institutions and towards the outdoors as it was felt that this was key to really reaching all of the population.

“Breastfeeding goes a long way toward cancelling out the health difference between being born into poverty and being born into affluence. It is almost as if breastfeeding takes the infant out of poverty for those first few months in order to give the child a fairer start in life and compensate for the injustice of the world into which it was born.” –

UNICEF Executive Director James P. Grant

I am always looking for ways to reach more people whilst bringing in new Creative Health and Social Prescribing elements – so this project emphasises the physical and mental health benefits of the outdoors, green space and walking. All three offer parents wellbeing at no cost .

Together with Adele Adams, Landscape designer and project manager at Better Place Bradford, I wrote a brief in Spring 2023 for what we started to call, The Holding Time Chair and shared the idea with the Community Engagement Team. At this stage, we didn’t really know what it would look like.

In April, I had the opportunity for the first time to visit the UNESCO prehistoric ‘Giantess’ temples in Malta – an island rich with human history, for a family holiday.

‘Ġgantija’ means “Giantess” in Maltese and is the oldest of the Megalithic Temples of Malta. The site is set on the Xagħra plateau in the center of Gozo island, where I took a open top bus tour with family in April 2023. We were amazed to discover that this temple was the oldest standing human made structure in the world. The Ġgantija temple complex has been dated from the Neolithic (Stone Age) period around 3600 to 2500 BC making them older than the pyramids of Egypt.

I loved this site and the tiny figurines found around there so much, I had a postcard of one of them on my desktop.

Not long after getting back I had one of those Kizmet moments.

Adele suggested working with Dan Jones who has already created several outdoor large-scale sculptures in Better Place parks in the city.

I was I talking to Dan on the phone about the design for the chair as a new element that makes use of outdoor public space, freeing the project from the timescales and curatorial agendas of galleries and museums.

We were thinking through this problem of how to create an iconic outdoors ‘digital portal’, for the Bradford Audio Tour and I started to describe the volumous ‘Giantesses’. on my keyboard.

And so the idea of a huge chair in the form of a lying lady, resplendent with large hips comforting swathes of skirts to sit amongst, whilst holding or feeding a child arrived, completely fully formed.

Suddenly I felt chills thinking about bringing this ancient icon into the project in a very modern context.

Something about the idea of birth and motherhood being a unifying principle that brought people together into communities, feels really pertinent to this iteration of the Holding Time project, suggesting where we are today and where we need to go from here.

I have always been fascinated by the idea of the Maternal Figurines as an example of Cultural Evolution – helping Ice Age peoples survive one hundred generations in caves. Something about the idea of birth and motherhood being a unifying principle that brought people together into communities, feels really pertinent to this iteration of the Holding Time project, suggesting where we are today and where we need to go from here.

The Holding Time chair offers parents the opportunity to sit enveloped by this ancient lady. To take time to sit and be with their child or just to sit alone and if they choose, listen to or watch the rest of the project using codes carved into her clothes.

Dan is yet another great example of a brilliant collaborator, who I add to a long list of wonderful creatives, mothers and health professionals who have helped to co-create this project. We met in Bradford to talk about this maternal figurine chair.

Dan had the great idea of making more Holding Time Chairs from recycled baby bottles. In the end we settled on stone, as the most affordable and sustainable material for this, the first version. Adele negotiated with the parks department, a site in Bowling Park next to a new, bespoke, community co-designed natural play area for 0-3s.

Dan has already chosen the stone from Ancaster Weatherbed limestone from a Lincolnshire quarry and carving begins soon.

Using four and a half tons of stone, this resting lady will bring the Holding Time digital content into the city’s park using QR codes and other novel technology. I’m working with Creative Technologist Chris Chowen to develop an AI evaluation tool that will gather and interpret visitors experience of the piece and feed it all back, AI style, to the website so there is a ‘feedback loop’ of In Real Life experience of the chair and virtual impressions of the project and its themes. This is another new element that I’m very excited about!

The Lincolnshire Limestone, is a Middle Jurassic unit extensively used to build churches in the Middle Ages around Lincolnshire/East Anglia. It is an oolitic limestone – ooids being little round balls of calcium carbonate about a mm in size

The stone chair draws together all the other elements of the project, acting as a digital ‘portal’ to the online content and exhibitions which will include:

Portraits

Mothers will be invited to take part in a photoshoot where their breastfeeding relationship with their child will be captured in a series of images to be used in animations, exhibitions and Audio tours across Bradford and in future projects.

Free Writing Workshops

Starting in September 2024, these 1.5 hour creative writing workshops will include participants exchanging stories of their birth and breastfeeding experiences, and using prompts and examples to help them produce a short piece of writing that can offer a fresh understanding of their journeys.  12 workshops will be held between two locations: Cartwright Hall and WomanZone. 

Find out more information and sign up here: Bradford 2024 

Recordings & Live events

Participating parents will be encouraged to record their creative writing, which will become part of the project as video performances on the project social media and websites, exhibitions and other spaces. Several events will be held to launch the indoor and outdoor exhibitions and will feature The Singing Mamas Group. 

The first event will be November 14th 2024 The first event will be November 14th 2024 at Cartwright Hall in partnership with Bradford Museums and Galleries, marking the beginning of Babyweek 2024.

This project has taken two years to plan, starting with an exhibition at Kala Sangham Arts Centre in November 2022 where we launched the idea of the Holding Time Project in Bradford and started to really talk to a wide range of local partners. Alex at Kala Sangham Arts Centre helped us meet grassroots community partners such as Rubina Khalid at Womenzone where we ran singing workshops later that year in partnership with Singing Mamas.

And Jo Ward, the commissioner of the Cheshire and Merseyside project, introduced us to Better Start Bradford who helped us to meet Jane Dickens the Strategic Breastfeeding Lead in the area, helping us to secure seed funding from the NHS.

Two years later, a very long process of writing two Arts Council Applications and much help from Rachel New and Klair Bird our fantastic creative team, Adele at Better Place Bradford and wonderful partnerships with Rea Halstead at Bradford Infirmary, Lisa Williams from Bradford District Care Hospital Trust and Miroslava Zharkov from Bradford Museums and Galleries and we are here: ready to start a full Bradford Project!

Read more about the Project here

And I’m hoping that isn’t the end of the project in Bradford.
Together with curator Aamta Tul Waheed I’m working on a small festival called Another Mothering, designed to look at the ‘Caring Economy’. You can read more about this proposal for 2025 here: Another Mothering

 

We are planning a live event to celebrate the poetry and prose created at Cartwright Hall later this year.

About Holding Time

The Holding Time project was founded in 2018 by Lisa Creagh. Co-designed with researchers, health professionals and mothers, the project uses creative activities to strengthen local communities, and promote pride in place. The project creates portraits of breastfeeding mothers whilst encouraging listening to mothers lived experience via interviews & their own creative writing.

Each mother-portrait is a still image, animation and interview with the option for mothers to participate in performances and radio interviews. The project is a year-long co-creation of versatile materials that we exhibit, perform and display in parks, hospitals and street settings.

Development of the Holding Time Project in Bradford began in 2022 with support from Kala Sangam Arts Centre and funding from the Arts Council. Since September 2022, we have been building the project in the area. Here are some of the activities so far: