MyTime Community Development and Art Exhibition: Home Stories – Creative Care
“We are very grateful and proud to be part of Penrith City Council’s successful and enduring Magnetic Places grant program, with its long legacy in engaging Penrith’s multilingual neighbourhoods, empowering residents to tell their stories, share their experiences through creative expression and celebrate the places they live. I’d like to thank Penrith City Council for their support in such an important project that spotlights the lives of unpaid family carers of people with disability.
For our project, it is an opportunity for local community members to access local family friendly creative workshops to connect and share their intellectual cultural knowledge and skills in creativity. In doing this, they will learn and upskill from each other, as well as affirm their identities and amplify their important narratives to the wider community through an art exhibition. The project works on the ethos of co-design that actively seeks to bring forward the skills and knowledge that already exist in the participants (unpaid family carers) to steer the project’s journey. This participant-centred approach, I hope will empower the participants to embolden and affirm who they are and build their skills into becoming disability advocates and community leaders.
The project’s driving questions are: Who is an artist? What is art? Where do we go to see art?
The design of such a project is to foreground the strengths, skills and knowledge that exists in our very unique, nuanced and diverse Australian families touched by disability. It seeks to explore, encourage critical reflection and discussion on power and knowledge relating to families that fall within the labels of “carers”, “disability”, “low SES”, “Western Sydney”, “Culturally and Linguistically Diverse” and/or “First Nations”.
Angela Sweeney-Bas and I are super excited for such an amazing opportunity. We’d like to also thank Playgroup NSW, Parenting Research Centre and Braddock Public School for their ongoing support in uplifting the lives of families, especially those with disability.
Finally, a huge thank you to the unpaid family carers in our MyTime Penrith community.”
– Jenny Lai (Artist and MyTime Penrith Facilitator)
For more information: https://www.penrithcity.nsw.gov.au/news/2116-council-invests-in-community-arts-programs-to-strengthen-local-identity-and-activate-public-spaces
