Drawing the future is the outcome come of a series of virtual workshops with participants from Watts Gallery’s ‘Art for All’ programme, during the course of the Art & Action: Making Change in Victorian Britain exhibition.
In each workshop, I invited participants to discuss the paintings, share ideas and explore the themes of the exhibition through the lens of their own experiences. I prompted them to give voices to the silent subjects of these paintings and to imagine radically hopeful futures that we could all inhabit.
In this moment, in the midst of a global pandemic, on the brink of climate catastrophe and with new waves of fascism rising all around us, we need art not just to reflect these realities but to help us envision what could happen next; because we cannot build a better future without first imagining it.
The film is composed of drawings and recordings made during the workshops with the Woking Women Centre, Halow, User Voice and the families programme and in response to resources sent into local schools and prisons.
Lead Animator, Lily Ash Sakula
Sound Design and Music, Taha Hassan