Shadowing and Letting Creativity Bloom

Words by Ray VM
Featured image by Tod Jones

My name is Ray VM. I am a freelance artist based in Birmingham. This includes but is not limited to poetry, performance, workshop facilitation, life modelling and papermaking. One day, I was noodling around online and saw that a friend of mine had sent me the callout for the shadow facilitator. At this point, I had been facilitating workshops in a freelance capacity for a couple of years. Facilitation for me had always been a very learning on the job role. I started out in it by asking a queer café at the time if they would be interested in creative writing workshops. Faith and audacity under my wing, they said yes and gave me a month-long block of sessions, which were then renewed.  I remember the feeling of having regulars for the first time! 

Anyway, back to the noodling. The callout was specifically for neurodiverse folks, and it wasn’t too far from when I had my diagnosis. Most of the people who had come to my workshops had been neurodiverse, but at that point, I had never thought about facilitating as a person who was on that spectrum. I applied for the role because I thought there could be something valuable in watching how other people facilitate. And I was right! How lovely.

I appreciated the structure of shadowing sessions over the course of several months. I won’t lie, at first I felt a little conscious that I didn’t feel like I was doing anything. But I challenged that discomfort and came out the other side valuing the time observing and participating. I enjoyed how things developed as they went, and the potential project that I would be the lead artist on wasn’t fixed from the beginning. It allowed me to be present and let my ideas and interests come naturally to inform what the sessions might look like. The sessions were well explained, and at no point did they feel rushed (shoutout to Ruby for truly being a great facilitator to shadow).

Through the sessions, I realised that the place that stuck with me the most was Brushstrokes. A daycentre for asylum seekers and refugees, that run sessions from gardening to football to crafts and supports with the bureaucratic nightmare that is seeking refuge in another country. Something about a space that not only allowed but encouraged Black & brown folks to express themselves through art made me feel warm inside. Sabrina, another facilitator and fine artist extraordinaire, felt a similar sentiment and shared about her time volunteering there. We talked about maybe collaborating with the end goal being a mural at Brushstrokes.

Honestly, it was a very wholesome time. The first few sessions were papermaking, and it was cool to say the least to see the apprehension turn into curiosity and then actual paper. People were swapping techniques by the end of it. Trying different colours, flowers and ways to infuse them. 

Paper making is something I taught myself how to do, as I realised that yes, I was making things, but not physically. I wanted to explore an art form that was slow and tactile. An online shop, a propped-up phone on the bus with a YouTube tutorial and I was on my way. 

Through shadowing, I got to see more niche art forms being presented (eg, weaving & flag making), which gave me the confidence to pitch doing some papermaking. 

Following that, we had a design session to see what people were thinking for the mural: hello in everyone’s language, birds, fish, flowers, and a sunrise. Cut out from the paper or illustrated and placed in a patchwork of ideas and possibilities. 

Sabrina took the reins of the latter half of the project, sketching up designs for people to choose from. It was so lovely seeing people dropping in to take part in painting the mural. The shadowing taught me that if you give people the resources, time and patience to create, they will take you up on it. The result was a beautiful, huge mural that I think the people at Brushstrokes can all call their own.