Charlotte Harding, a 3rd Year student on the BA Event & Experience Design in the School of Music & Fine Art, sees the culmination of her innovative project for the Medway Student Scholarship in an exhibition at the Nucleus Arts Gallery in Chatham. The project The Elective Collective included workshops with a number of clients of Caring Hands in the Community to create personalised artwork that intends to inspire people and promote the use of art in the community.

Caring Hands in the Community, located at the heart of Chatham town centre is a resource for housing, job searches, counselling and rehabilitation help for those in the chains of addiction.

Says EED Lecturer Peter Hatton: ‘Charlotte devised an inspirational participatory project to work with homeless adults at the Caring Hands Centre. She had a small team of her peers on the course to support her alongside staff at the centre in running a series of activities including mask making and photography. Her intention was raise awareness of homelessness and to increase the visibility of the homeless through their artwork. The mask making was a form of self-portraiture, an expression of individual identity. Participants in the workshop were then given a disposable camera to document their environment outside of the centre. Nucleus Arts have contributed to the project by giving the participants the exciting opportunity to exhibit this accumulative personal narrative in the gallery. This public facing exhibition will be both a celebration of the participants and their stories and the awareness-raising element of the project.’

The exhibition will run from 10-16 March, with the preview on Fri 11 March from 14.00-16.00.