Processions: Making the Bolsover banner

As part of the Processions 2018 event I was asked by Junction Arts to lead a series of workshops with women in Bolsover and Shirebrook in Derbyshire. The timescale was very short, the number of sessions was limited and they were to be spread across two different locations. This was going to be a challenge. 

The idea was that Artichoke had asked a 100 Arts organisations to each commission a female artist to work with a group of women or girls to produce a banner either to mark the 100 years of some women getting the vote, or to reflect what it’s like to be a woman in the 21st Century. 

I had worked with one of the proposed groups of women last year on the New Bolsover Model Village miners’ banner so I was really looking forward to working with them again. The other location was the church hall in Shirebrook with women with a link to the church and local Polish women, many of whom work in the local Sports Direct warehouse. 

Whilst I was really open to the women dictating the direction of the project I also had a few objectives myself. Firstly I wanted to try and give such a diverse group of women the opportunity to individually express themselves. This would mean sometimes them doing separate ‘bits’ and then somehow combining them together. Secondly I knew that given the subject matter there would be many, quite rightly, banners with a serious message. But given that these aspects of the subject would be featured I wondered if we had scope to try something slightly different and as a result make a banner that would stand out. 

We spent time talking about what the women wanted to theme to be. It was clear that featuring their role models was a reoccurring theme across the groups.   Now sometimes I get an idea stuck in my head. It’s like a bluebottle in a jam jar; it buzzes around and gives me no peace. I had the phrase ‘Smile, it confuses your enemy’ noisily in my head for a number of weeks. I was posting an email with different choice for the women to vote on and just thought I would suggest this as a possible alternative theme. 

It went down extremely well with the women and was democratically chosen for our banner. Lovely Shirley from Shirebrook got very excited and asked if we could have the smiles of ‘their’ women on the banner as well; a plan was being formed. We would have the smiles of 100 women who had been influential to us upon which we would place the embroidered letters of our phrase.