As part of our application we recorded the story of Brian Mead, our balloon designer. His father was from Woolwich and Brian has fond memories of his relationship with his late father and the time they spent together in and around Thamesmead. We passed those recordings to two MA textile students from the Royal College of Art without giving them any brief other than to listen to the recording and interpret it. The resulting artworks were then shown to Brian and included in our visualisation of the balloon. This process and Brian’s response has been documented as a short film which can be seen here…
This film demonstrates the emotional power of recording memories in a permanent artwork. We learnt that the person telling the story does not necessarily need to be the person making the textile interpretation. In fact in this case the moment of re-presenting the story to Brian in stitched and painted form was more powerful than if he had worked on the images himself.
