Speaker 2: 0:23

Welcome. Today we have got as our special guest all the way from North London across the river Thames, sarah Gavron, filmmaker extraordinaire, who I am currently making a collaborative book with and who has directed many films, including Brick Lane, suffragette, rocks, and we're going to ask her a little bit about how care and creativity do and don't dovetail. So welcome Sarah.

Speaker 3: 0:54

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 0:56

So I was going to jump in and ask a little bit about your most recent film called Rocks, which is from 2021 and which won the British Independent Film Award, if I have that right, and this is about a Nigerian girl, a Nigerian London girl, who is abandoned by her mother, and you have created this film, which is itself a kind of a collaboration with the young actors that you found in English schools. Can you say a little bit more about that process and the way in which these young people perhaps found their voice as people and actors through this process?

Speaker 3: 1:28

I mean, the initial impulse to make the film came from me having a 13-year-old daughter and watching her and her peer group march down the road every day to the local school and thinking where are these girls on our screen? Why aren't they centered in any stories that we see in the cinema or even on our television screens? And I became because I was interested in her world. I became very interested in exploring what was going on in their minds, what their agendas were, what the pressures were on them, and so it was a very open idea at that point, and the notion was that let's build it with young people, because I'm very removed from there. How could I possibly tell that story? I want to be a facilitator, I want to build it with a whole team, and so we went about it in a very topsy-turvy way, because normally you'd write a script and then you'd find the cast and they'd fit the script. We went into schools. We did five months of just sitting in the back of classrooms, watching and offering the opportunity for students to come and talk to us about their lives, and you realise, when you're not a judge of their lives, when you're not the teacher, the parent, they tell you a lot and they really want to talk and they want to share their lives and experiences. And one of the overriding themes amongst girls because we only went into girls' schools, because we wanted to really make sure we focused on young women was friendship. Girls' schools because we wanted to really make sure we focused on young women was friendship, and so we then invited them to a workshop environment once a week where they were very free to do improvisations with us, to come and go as they wanted, but we had that space for them held once a week. And at that stage we had our writer, teresa Okoko, who was British, nigerian and also a youth worker at that point, so she was combining working in screenwriting with her youth work. And we had another co-writer, claire Wilson, and a whole team of young people and we set up improvisations for these. You know a series of things, from asking them to draw pictures of a person on a whiteboard and then give them characteristics that didn't have to be someone they know, but what are they interested in, what are they worried about, who are their families, so they could all sort of project onto this. And then we set up other improvisations. You're going to a party tonight. What are the dynamics? We whispered little things in their ears. We got them very used to acting, expressing themselves, being comfortable around us, sharing, playing music. We, we did Spotify playlists and that went on for a year and during that time Teresa and Claire were scribbling down ideas for the shape of the film and we were all forming a dynamic as a team.

Speaker 3: 3:55

I was learning about how to work with these young people. The ones who were staying with the process because they wanted to, were clearly going to be the cast members, because they wanted to, were clearly going to be the cast members. So eventually out of this came a lot of scenes and then we looked at it and went this is great, but there's no narrative structure, which, of course, you need in a film. So Teresa Rococo, who sort of really authored the story, said well, I've got a story that I'd already been thinking about and the shape of it is a mother who leaves her young children and the older child becomes the carer for the younger child and the social services are the sort of threat in that environment. And she used that narrative spine and then she pitched it in a way to the young people and they then fed back into it and we then built a script out of it which they wrote, and then when we got on set, we set up an environment that was very unlike a normal film set.

Speaker 3: 4:52

So we shot chronologically, which is a nightmare for a filmmaker, because you go in and out of every location 15 times instead of just getting all done in one place, instead of just getting it all done in one place, and we never said action, and we rolled two cameras all the time and we let them improvise within the shoot, and so that was left for the editor to have reams of material to cut, and we also put in mobile phone footage which they had control of, and we also had a predominantly female crew who were made up of lots of their communities.

Speaker 3: 5:23

So the idea was they'd look behind the camera and see people like them and it would all be rather joined up. And then we set up a mentor programme, which really wasn't my initiative. A lot of the crew then went off to mentor those young people beyond it and set up an organisation called Bridge, which is still going now, which is to foster young people who want to go into the arts and creative industries and to make connections for them and support them, particularly young people from marginalised communities.

Speaker 2: 5:48

It's an incredibly slow and respectful way to create something like a film which is consumed so much more quickly.

Speaker 2: 6:00

I mean, obviously, all things that we make, including our book.

Speaker 2: 6:03

These things are quick to consume and extremely slow to make, and we know that even from making a casserole.

Speaker 2: 6:09

But I think that it's really useful to try to unpick the strands inside the process that you've described, because there are so many elements of care in it Care for humans, not just care about the product that you're making, the film. It almost feels that film is an incidental byproduct of the amount of care that you and the team had put in and taken of each other. And also very interesting to hear that it began with your feelings and thoughts as a mother and that it came from your own caring experience caring for your child that alerted you to this idea of where are the young girls on our screens. So I wonder how you found it, when you were first a mother and you were looking after small children, and if you had always half an eye on the story or if you were just very involved in weaning and nappies and all the usual things, how your creativity dipped and dived and flourished in the middle of extreme care as we know it.

Speaker 3: 7:21

Well, it was definitely a challenge becoming a mother that I hadn't anticipated. I mean, I think it's always a huge kind of venture for everybody. But I realised that how I'd conceived of it was because I'd always been project based and I immerse myself in a world and an idea and the creating of that world, and then I come up with a product and then I let it go and then I moved to the next one. So after about four months I thought, hello, I've done this, go. And on, I moved to the next one. So after about four months I thought, hello, I've done this, there's my project. Shall I move on? And no, they stay around.

Speaker 3: 7:51

But the wonderful thing about kids is they're morphing and shifting and they're constantly challenging in new ways. So you're making sort of 20 films, not just one film with those children. But I do think there's a massive connection between, particularly, filmmaking and looking after children. Well, film directing and looking after children, because in filmmaking you're creating a space, you're allowing people to be vulnerable, you're playing, you're parenting, you're anticipating needs, you're containing, you really are caring for a whole team. And working with children is a great training ground for that, because it's all about, as we all know as parents, it's all about anticipating need and not being afraid of vulnerability particularly, and not being overwhelmed by emotion and with actors, you have to take a lot of that, you have to absorb a lot of it as the director.

Speaker 3: 8:41

So you really are the adult on the set, the parent, a lot of the time. So you really are the adult on the set, the parent, a lot of the time. But there's also a way which we all are very familiar with in which bringing up children really pay attention to carers in film, because there's a kind of incompatibility, and particularly this affects women, because we know women are often the caregivers, whether it's for their own parents or their children, and how impossible it has been for women in caring roles to go into film just because of the sheer quantities of time required in the making of a film away from home. And so it's definitely been a challenge, I mean creatively. I think it's fostered and fueled me, but time-wise it's been a massive battle. So it's worked on both fronts.

Speaker 1: 9:40

Is there a way in which you might say, without trying to reduce this in any way, this incredibly textured life that you've had as a care and as a creator? Is there a way in which your life as a care has led to really high quality work, but not as much work as you might ordinarily have done? Would that be fair? Could you make an argument for that done?

Speaker 3: 10:03

Would that be fair? Could you make an argument for that? 100%? Could I make an argument for that? I definitely have made choices in a very different way. So I've reduced my output considerably, and so has my partner, david, who's also working in film. We've both made decisions not to do every project we could possibly have done, because we want to create time in between for the kids. But that kind of fallow period with the children has led to me making different decisions and pursuing different films and projects, so they've really really influenced one another. I mean, I think we both would have had totally different careers if we hadn't had children at home. We would have made completely different projects, and I would never have made Rocks if I hadn't had a girl growing up at home who I was looking at, and even probably our book about Terrazin and possibly I might make a film about it are all very linked to thinking about the grandparents who are David's parents, who I've done some caring for, and my mother and her history and you know. So it's very bound up.

Speaker 1: 11:02

Could you say a little more about this project and you?

Speaker 3: 11:05

know. So it's very bound up. Could you say a little more about this project? So the story comes from my father-in-law, who was aged two as a Danish Jew, trying to escape with his family to Sweden because Germany had occupied Denmark and they were betrayed and sent eventually to Theresienstadt, where they spent a couple of years. And what happened is that Ib, for his 75th birthday, my father-in-law took us all as a family to visit that camp, which was essentially a transit camp, where the Nazis put all the most famous Jews in a way, they put all the ones they didn't want to kill immediately, and they saw the opportunity to create a show camp where they could say to the world look, all these people are still here and they're flourishing. Create a show camp where they could say to the world look, all these people are still here and they're flourishing. They're in this ghetto, but they're living life.

Speaker 3: 11:52

And what happened is it evolved because all these creative people went there filmmakers, artists, writers, composers, musicians and they created.

Speaker 3: 12:00

And they created really, because it was, as Friedel Dicker-Brandeis said, who was one of the artists there. In turn, it was a flight from turmoil. It was a way of extinguishing their anxiety to be absorbed in the creative process did it connect with our ancestors and their story of trauma and flight and having to be removed, forcibly removed from their worlds into this place? But it also connected with our creative instincts and, you know, it's a story as much about art as it is about all those other things and much about creativity, and so it was hugely exciting for us both to meet each other and realise that we were both so engaged in everything that was happening in this place and we wanted to find a visual way to tell the story. And so Sophie could bring all her skills as both an artist and a poet and writer to combine text and image. And there's something about the graphic novel because we're doing it as a graphic novel, it's very akin to filmmaking because it's like a storyboard. So we've been on this long journey creating.

Speaker 2: 13:10

We're about, I don't know, halfway through well, we are a long way into the journey because we've been spending a couple of years at least doing research, and for me it's really interesting to make something slowly, because I'm in a different place from Sarah, in that a lot of the work I make I make on my own and it's not part of a team, so I can go at my own pace, which is sometimes very fast, because I'm trying to fit it in between breakfast and dinner, which is another aspect of the carer's day and how we work and how we structure our work and our working lives with and without other people.

Speaker 1: 13:56

My question is about slowness and about time. Sophie and I we've talked a lot about the speed Silicon Valley speed that we all live in now. Sophie and I we've talked a lot about the speed Silicon Valley speed that we all live in now, the sense of productivity and how we determine what constitutes enough art, let's say that we're making, and there's something about your father-in-law, who was 75, right 72 years or something, after he left Tereshenstadt.

Speaker 3: 14:22

At that point he was ready, the story was ready to be told it seems like, and that seems like a long time, but it also seems like it's just the time that it took. I think that's so true. Yeah, and you learn that, that you, as an artist, and I was thinking how, for a long time, ip's family were lost for words. They didn't know how to process the trauma and they couldn't address it. They couldn't talk about it. My father-in-law talks about how his own mother, who was 25 and was put in solitary confinement, thought she was going to lose her young child. How, only years and years after, when she was asked actually by the Spielberg Foundation to talk about it, did it open a little chink and she was able to address it, you know, 50 years after. So you're right, I think there is a way in which you can only do things at the right time.

Speaker 2: 15:08

With the current conflict the Israel-Gaza conflict I have found myself lost for words too, and I normally write all the time. I write poems all the time, I write notes all the time, and I've just taken up watercolour because all I can really face doing is looking at what's in front of me. It feels like that's the most grounding thing I can do and that's the most inhabited thing I can do, and one of the things I feel that I've learnt not only from my own family background, but really a lot I've learnt acutely from working on this book with Sarah is that what the people who survived these dreadful ordeals would like to do is to look at what's in front of them and paint it. They would like a cup of tea, they would like to listen to some music. They would not like to talk about torture.

Speaker 3: 16:01

No, and that's what this woman, who really is called the mother of art therapy because it was like she invented it in Theresienstadt that's what she recognised that if she could let the children just sit there and create whether it was a fantasy world or express what was going on inside them. We all know that when you create something, you're exploring, just like Tisha, but your hopes, your dreams, your anxieties and all that way of expressing yourself is hugely cathartic, isn't it? I mean, it's a way of escaping, it's a way of sort of processing, it's a way of grounding, and you can even do that in the middle of chaotic trauma. You can kind of create order out of that mess in some way by doing your watercolours.

Speaker 2: 16:43

And we did see those people in the Ukrainian bunkers playing the violin.

Speaker 3: 16:47

Yes.

Speaker 2: 16:48

And while Sarah and I were first talking about this book and that Ukrainian war was just at the beginning, which of course now it's still going on, but it's been eclipsed by another hideous war. So you just don't know where to look. Really, there is no safe place to look, apart from just directly in front of you. But we've seen that way that art has the potential for redemption. I mean not a great redemption, it can't save a life, but it can colour a life.

Speaker 3: 17:19

Yeah, the sort of purpose of art and how much it can achieve or not achieve is a question I'm often asked. Do you think you can change the world through a film? Do you think you can? I mean, I think you can do things in small and bigger ways, can't you? I mean the process of creating.

Speaker 3: 17:31

Creating, as we all know, as artists or creators, can be very healing and can ground you and can help you express something that you're desperate to express.

Speaker 3: 17:42

And there's no doubt that lots of the people who go into creative arts are there because they need to express stories from their families or their lives or their past, or they're compelled to. But I also think the art itself can be healing for the audience. And just to take rocks, we had a lot of young people come up and say somehow sitting in an audience and seeing even old people. When we went to the Toronto Film Festival, the Rox girls said there were grey haired old men watching me on screen and that made me think that I mattered, that they were blown up, six feet tall and watching a story and they seem to enjoy it and be engaged in it. So I think it's affirming to see yourself and have your stories reflected, and so art can do that, because it puts up a mirror to our world in different ways, and so it's got so many purposes, hasn't it? I mean, you know, we know it's got so many purposes and it can save lives, but it could also be manipulated and used for propaganda, as we also see in.

Speaker 2: 18:43

Theresienstadt. Yeah, we see a lot of that. We saw how I mean we haven't even got on to talking about this in the book, and who knows if we'll manage it but the artists that were imprisoned there were made to make propaganda for the Nazis, and that's what they did in a great big drawing office every single day. And then at night they drew the truth. They drew people starving, they drew rooms full of corpses and they kept those drawings secret. And when those drawings reached the outer world, I'm afraid those artists were executed.

Speaker 3: 19:14

But the drawings survived and told the truth.

Speaker 2: 19:17

And we're looking at those for our book. We're going to be using them. So there is something about a kind of countering of death, isn't there?

Speaker 3: 19:28

Definitely, and there's no doubt that art has power. I was just at the Rome Film Festival and met an Iranian filmmaker who made a very powerful film about a political prisoner who'd been put in a woman, who'd been put in a mental institute because that's what they did with her to make her feel she was mad and a young doctor got her out and they went on a road trip together and so it was the story of that journey, and because he'd made that film, he's not allowed to go back to Iran. So they're recognising the power of cinema, yeah, big time.

Speaker 1: 20:03

One thing I've noticed, both in the UK and the US, is that there's been the strong move toward looking at art as medicine. I know the national health system here has a lot of programs where they are dispensing art and in the States doctors will say I'm going to prescribe that you go to the museum twice a month because you need to disconnect from all the screens or whatever, and in a way it seems absurd to prescribe a museum. On the other hand, it seems perfectly normal to imagine that art makes us healthier. Maybe it doesn't make us better, but it makes us healthier. Are you seeing that in the UK? Does that movement have any legs?

Speaker 3: 20:46

That's interesting. There is this new thing called social prescribing. So GPs have noticed that they can't give enough time to patients and if they have these other people employed in the surgeries who are called social prescribers, who can listen to their patients and then decide what will help those people, whether it's going swimming or going to an art gallery or talking to someone or you know so they're looking at the sort of holistic picture. And I've looked a lot at the role of creativity in schools and I mean Ken Robinson gives a great TED Talk about the role of creativity and we know how incredibly important that is for kids' mental health to have the creative arts in schools. So I think it's sort of being increasingly recognised, isn't it that, how vital it is? I think it's sort of being increasingly recognised, isn't it that, how vital it is?

Speaker 2: 21:34

I think it's being recognised at the very same time as it's being ripped the hell out. Well, that's right. Yes, because it's in response as well to quite a lot of exclusion of arts and creative projects in schools and in education.

Speaker 1: 21:48

And an epidemic of mental illness among youth around the world.

Speaker 2: 21:51

There's no coincidence, really is it? I mean, it's fundamental stuff.

Speaker 3: 21:55

When I was growing up, my mother was obsessed with this man called Winnicott who had the theory of play and how important it was to play and be creative and how incredibly linked that was to our well-being.

Speaker 1: 22:10

Did that prompt her to approach caretaking or mothering in a particular way?

Speaker 3: 22:16

It's a really good question. I think she was quite playful and I think there was a way in which you can be very creative in your caregiving, can't you? Especially in response to children. And she did get us making and doing and she was artistic and interested in that. But what she ultimately did that had a big impact on me was she set up a local community centre because she saw that young people had nowhere to go and they were breaking into this local church and she said let's foster their impulses and give them a space. So she created this community centre along with some local people and I sort of was dragged up there, as I used to say, and they called it her red brick baby, but spent hours sitting in this community centre where there was drumming and drama and Indian dance and collaging and shadow puppets and I did all those activities and that was fantastic. So she poured it into the community, really care in the community rather than care at home, but there was a bit of care at home.

Speaker 1: 23:15

I have a question. I was thinking about doing something quite different, which was a little popcorn round robin. Shall we try? We've been talking a lot about improvisation, okay.

Speaker 1: 23:23

Well, the question I was going to ask was there a moment in our lives and maybe I'll go first, just to feel it's only fair when we first discovered what it was like to be creative, like that moment where, like, oh, this is what art making is, this is what creativity means, and or a moment when we felt like we understood what it meant to care for somebody else?

Speaker 1: 23:44

I was thinking about that, and the answer that came to me when I was asking myself this question was when my sister was about four and I was about eight and she would have trouble getting to sleep at night, and so I would come in from the next room and I would pretend to be some fool, some fop, and I would be a waiter. I would come in with like pretend dishes and I would drop them and I would fall down imaginary stairs and she would laugh and laugh and finally she would kind of tuck her out, the air would go out of the balloon and she'd go to sleep and then I would go back to my room. It was really sweet and for me it was a joint moment when I realized that there was something about improvisation and creativity that was fundamental to me and I felt good and I saw that that could be an act of caretaking and that was a very specific problem with a young person and I was able to solve that problem.

Speaker 3: 24:36

That was bringing both together, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:39

Oh, is it me? Yeah, it's anybody, and you can answer any version of that question.

Speaker 2: 24:44

Yeah, I love your story. It's so, so sweet. I could picture it immediately, which is just charming, isn't it? When you get taken away into a little scene like that, I love it.

Speaker 2: 24:53

I know that my mum kept me and my sister very stocked up with paper and paint from very early, and we had piles of it because she was a textile designer.

Speaker 2: 25:03

She had a studio full of paper and gouache, which was her paint, that she used for designing.

Speaker 2: 25:10

We did grow up painting and drawing as if that was a perfectly normal thing to be doing every single minute of the day, and so I have grown up painting and drawing, and I do paint and draw every day, and one of the things that I think I did instead of a bat mitzvah, because we weren't brought up with any notion of religion or who we were Jewish wise.

Speaker 2: 25:29

But I think my own version was to learn how to draw properly, like where I went to life drawing classes every single night after school, because there was a lot of adult education in those days and you could just sign up for classes and they were only two quid for the week or whatever. So I would go to life drawing all the way through my teens learning, and I was always the youngest person. There was always some old grannies there trying to draw or whatever and so I just learned and learned, and learned and learned until I could represent the whole room with one line. And then I was very disappointed when I found out that being able to draw accurately was not a job, and that's where you find me years later.

Speaker 1: 26:08

Not a proper job.

Speaker 2: 26:09

It's just not a job, to be honest. It really isn't a job, not a proper or an improper job. And as for caring, I guess by doing that I was sort of caring for myself and my own interests in a rather slapdash home in which you weren't necessarily going to be getting actual attention. I can't really say this very easily or succinctly, but care wasn't really the vibe. And then, in terms of caring, I think I was tremendously shocked when I first had my first baby, who is now 27, realising that it was me that was responsible for her staying alive on this planet, and the enormity of it just knocked me sideways. And I've been knocked sideways ever since and still not able to have a job where just drawing the whole room is a job.

Speaker 1: 27:02

Yeah, being knocked sideways. As a parent, I remember that feeling too.

Speaker 3: 27:06

My early story probably relates quite a lot to yours, which is that as a little kid my sister was chronically shy and had sort of massive separation anxiety, and she was my older sister, so she wouldn't go anywhere without me or my mum and she'd cling on and she wouldn't say anything, which made me become a kind of clown and very out there and look after her.

Speaker 3: 27:30

But then I decided that we would just play endless imaginative games, and I wasn't really interested in toys or dolls, but I was interested in this imaginative game. So we would for hours and hours, and for weekends, whole weekends and even weeks, if we could. We'd be role-playing and I'd say so let's. It always began with let's pretend. So let's pretend, you're this and I'm this and we're going off, and so we'd be in spaces with adults, but they'd all be roles in our play which they didn't realise they were. And we did this. How is my poor sister? I was always deciding what happened, but she didn't seem to mind. And somehow it got us through life, because if there was something rather disturbing or unhappy happening in the house or someone was upset, we just incorporated them into our game.

Speaker 1: 28:16

It's a way, perhaps, of having some agency to reframe and to give yourself a persona, at least for a while, which you both believe and don't believe, in a way as a kid.

Speaker 3: 28:25

So true.

Speaker 1: 28:26

But that somehow makes you feel alive and that you can create a different script for yourself.

Speaker 3: 28:32

Yes, and it's the playing of God, isn't it? You know in your own little world.

Speaker 1: 28:38

I had one other thing that I was curious to ask, which was there's a line in the book that you're working on and I was able to see an early version of this first half, and I won't say anything else about it, other than there's a line when, in the beginning, the two of you are coming together and you ask Sophie a question about should we do a project like this, and Sophie says I'm quoting come over and I'll crack open a bottle of ink, which I thought was so beautiful, and my interpretation of that line is yeah, come over. Instead of having a cup of tea, which you probably had also, sophie was going to open up a bottle of ink, which meant that she was yeah, come over. Instead of having a cup of tea, which you probably had also, sophie was going to open up a bottle of ink, which meant that she was going to start to create. And there was a sense of not exactly art or ink as medicine, but as the beginning of a conversation, an expansion into possibility.

Speaker 2: 29:27

I mean ink is one of my very, very favorite things in the world and I have made ink myself out of old oak galls on the ground in the park and I've made ink and I've used ink all my days. It rescued me so many times. But also it's my tool of choice if I'm listening to people and I'm drawing what they say they say. So it's fluid and it's responsive and if you use it with a lovely smooth brush, it works faster than your mind. And I think one of the great things about drawing an ink for me is that I can outwit myself, so I can park myself somewhere and let the ink and the wrist do the talking or the listening, and it's almost again a way of losing yourself or just being present without interfering with what you're doing, not being self-conscious.

Speaker 2: 30:19

And it spills. It spills its tendency and its wish and its very essence is to spill. So the amount of times I've taken it in a suitcase and it's just dumped itself all over my clothes. But I forgive it because it contains all our sentences, every word that's ever been printed. It's like the essence of language, but in its raw, unspilt form, or in its potential form. So the potential of the story is there inside the bottle of ink.

Speaker 1: 30:50

To outwit oneself is such a fabulous term, right, the idea that we may try to stop ourselves or shoot ourselves in the foot. But by trusting our body and the materials that are connected to it, we are able to kind of outsource the best of us to our hand or a movement in some way.

Speaker 3: 31:09

Yeah, and I think that's what you're so good at is that when we talk, sophie sort of creates an environment where you discover things as you talk. And you discover them partly through making and doing, because lots of artists have said, haven't they? Don't wait for the creative idea, just start and they will come. Because, in a way, by starting and doing, you discover what you want to say. You don't know that you want to say that or that you want to explore that, but it emerges onto the page.

Speaker 2: 31:38

Well, looking and listening, I think, are the absolute cornerstones of care and creativity. That's where they start, don't they? And we all probably know that really.

Speaker 3: 31:52

Listening, yeah, fundamental to care, isn't it? Particularly old people and young people just want to be listened to.

Speaker 2: 31:59

Absolutely everybody wants to be listened to. I mean, I have found this with the story collecting and I'm sure that the process you described with rocks absolutely backs that up.

Speaker 3: 32:11

Those young people said no one ever listens to us.

Speaker 1: 32:14

That was their big thing we were talking before the podcast sar Sarah about StoryCorps, which is this American oral history program, and the tagline for that is Listening is an Act of Love.

Speaker 3: 32:39

So true, so true.

Speaker 1: 32:41

Which I really love. Sophie, I wanted to ask you about the story collecting that you mentioned. I know what you mean. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about this process of listening to people and sketching them and what that experience was like both for you and them?

Speaker 2: 32:57

Actually, the story collecting has been going on for about 20 years now and it's a very long story how it began and where I'm at with it. And now I have something like 2,300 of these drawings. They're drawings on A3 paper done with black ink and a brush, and I do them in collaboration with people on the spot, so I spend a little time with somebody. They don't normally take more than 15 minutes.

Speaker 2: 33:21

They're about 10 to 15 minutes to collect, so there's something careless as well as caring in the process, which I quite enjoy because I love the mess and the freedom of speed as well, and spontaneity. I don't like to think of care as only a slow thing. It can be a quick fix anyway.

Speaker 1: 33:41

Like a sandwich. Yeah, sometimes it's just that simple.

Speaker 3: 33:44

Yeah, Often just with my son. Give him a banana and everything's all right. Love that.

Speaker 2: 33:50

So yeah, it started off as a project where I was working as an artist in residence in a primary school not far from here and I was the spring artist in residence for a gigantic feast and this was part of London International Festival of Theatre and the kids were spending the whole year and they had three artists a spring one, a summer one and a autumn one and I was a spring one, which was all about planting seeds in the allotment and growing their fantasy school dinner. But as well as growing seeds and growing things, I was going to ask them about what. I gave them all a golden bean and said what would you grow if you could grow anything? And they said things like a baby sister or a silver bicycle, or they went into dreams and wishes and we had a lot of fun drawing and painting our dreams and wishes and doing many things. But then at the end, at the culmination of my residency, I sat in a shed on the allotment and I was supposed to be collecting recipes from them to make a community recipe book and people queued up to come and tell me their recipes in the shed and I was going to hand draw them and write them, but I got so bored when they started telling me lists of ingredients like a teaspoon of bicarbonate and soda. Try and write that in an interesting way with a bottle of ink and a brush.

Speaker 2: 34:56

So I'm asking but who's the cake for? And they were like, oh well, it's my auntie Hilda. She's really particular and you know she can't have gluten. And I said why and what's she like and whose sister is she? And then I got very absorbed with the story and then, before you knew it, all I was doing was collecting the story and not really the recipe, and that became a thing and people really loved it. And then, working with the curator on that project, who's called Claire Patey, she, working with the curator on that project, who's called Claire Patey, she commissioned me to make a tablecloth big enough for us to cover the whole of Southwark Bridge, and so I decided to put a food story at each place setting, because I thought not only is it entertaining and London, with its very, very many voices, could have a sort of choral work where there's a food story from a thousand Londoners across Southwark Bridge and everybody who sits down gets a story from somebody else who might or might not be their neighbor.

Speaker 1: 35:45

Going back to this question of time and slow time and fast time, even though you might sit with someone in line or out at a busy spot and there's only maybe 15 minutes, it seems like there is also the possibility of an expansion of time. That happens in those moments, right, if someone is there and they feel they have the opportunity to just continue a little bit more. In other words, most of the time when someone tells a story, after a few moments, everyone agrees that if it's not going anywhere quote unquote they move on to something else. But even to have 30 seconds of completely uninterrupted time where the person in this case you, sophie is just there to listen, something happens and all of a sudden, I think a person feels they have all the time in the world to tell their story.

Speaker 2: 36:28

Yeah, I mean it's just brilliant. I love it so much because people just sort of you can see their shoulders going down, it's like they get listened to and it's such a treat.

Speaker 3: 36:39

And then it's a treat for me, but're not only listening, but you're marking the page, so you're sort of I don't ever, I don't ever start drawing until I feel that they finish telling me really.

Speaker 2: 36:47

And then because I want to give them my attention as a listener first, that's interesting.

Speaker 2: 36:51

I'm always listening for an opening line and a closing line, so until they've closed, I don't know where to begin and end the story. They might tell me 5,000 words and I want to put 50 on the page. So it's this kind of strange operation, the listening in which I'm trying to suck the essence out of what they're saying, hear it properly, honour it, put a picture of what they've said with it. Some people are poets. They sit there, they tell you something quickly. It's got a mango, a ceiling fan and a bed. Thank you, person.

Speaker 1: 37:22

The classic combination of poetic materials.

Speaker 2: 37:24

I'm thinking of a particular story where I was collecting stories from kids in year five at the Maritime Museum and a little boy told me that he'd been very ill and he couldn't remember much, but he did remember that somebody gave him a mango and the ceiling fan was going round and round above his bed. Well, how beautiful, how clear, how image-dense that is.

Speaker 1: 37:45

I sometimes think about the idea of what it means to curate silence meaning to conduct, or to curate those moments in which case someone feels that they are being listened to and maybe they are being directed in some way to encourage them to go a little deeper or try something a little different. And when we think about some things that are hard to say or can't be said, are there moments when words fail us, and in what way does, let's say, music or imagery come to take its place? That's interesting. So I was going different places in my head as you were talking about silence, just anecd.

Speaker 3: 38:19

That's interesting. So I was going different places in my head as you were talking about silence, just anecdotally quickly. I was thinking that I've just spent some time with a Finnish film director and he was telling me how comfortable the Finns are with silence and how uncomfortable often he finds Americans are with silence. So he'll go out to see his family and they'll all sit and have tea and nobody will say anything and then if someone says something they'll say are we here to talk or to? You know we fill silences.

Speaker 3: 38:49

But as a documentary director because I did make a few documentaries you learn the power of silence Because if you leave silences, people will find things to say that they didn't know they wanted to say. It allows the space. But yes, I think often words don't do it all, do they? We need other forms of expression and that's why people love music, because it allows a kind of it's a vessel in which to project into and feel things that you can't express or you didn't know you needed to express or feel. And yeah, art can do the same. So I do think we need all those different mediums, and I don't mean to be pompous or anything, but do you think film brings together quite a lot of them.

Speaker 1: 39:29

It does absolutely. Will you say one more word about music? We ask all our guests if there's a piece of music that is connected to some act of caring or creativity in their life, an act of music that may bring together even the things that you've said today. Is there something that occurs to you in this moment?

Speaker 3: 39:47

Well, I'm so full of thinking about it at the moment because my mum's not very well and music has become a really important thing for her and she started thinking about it and she told me just the other day that she was lying in bed and the radio has become so important to her because she can't see very much. And an Elvis tune came on, jailhouse Rock, and she said even though my legs were stiff and I felt really bad and I was in bed, I got up and I danced around the room.

Speaker 2: 40:16

Oh, that's so great.

Speaker 3: 40:18

Wow, and it reminded her of being 15. So music can transport you in that second, can't it?

Speaker 1: 40:26

It is a kind of get out of jail free card, isn't it? It really is, yeah, talking about jailhouse rock, exactly.

Speaker 2: 40:32

I know jailhouse rock is a good one for your mum, imprisoned as she is. Yeah, what do you think the monotony of caregiving does to you as a person? What do you think the monotony of caregiving does to you as a person? What do you think it does well to a creative person, for example? I mean, I know we're all creative, but do you think there's anything expanding about the monotony and the kind of graft of having to really do the phone calls, the bottom wiping, the kind of washing up, the kind of grim caregiving that we have all had to do at various points?

Speaker 3: 41:10

It's interesting that, isn't it? Because it can grind you down. You know, we all know that being bored can be quite valuable, and there's something very boring about the monotony of care, isn't it? And my mum actually always encouraged me to relish fallow periods and I always sort of literally have an image in my head of a fallow field. But there's something you're kind of fallow when you're doing that monotonous stuff, aren't you Washing out the baby's bottle or getting the medicine again, and that somehow, if you sit with that and you learn patience, I think it teaches you patience in a huge way, doesn't it? You go okay, I've got that thought, I want to act on it, but I've got to be patient. I've just got to store it away and know that I can do that later in my lunch break or in the time that someone relieves me from this care. I will then hold that for later, and so it's definitely taught me patience. But I also think it probably in some ways maybe recharges your creative batteries as a positive spin on it.

Speaker 2: 42:11

I love to think about what it does to our imaginations yeah.

Speaker 2: 42:14

I think patience is a very important thing and we've talked about it in different ways by talking about silence, and by talking about allowing and the fallow and the kind of time scheme how long it takes to be able to tell a story in a lifetime, if one can ever get to it and these are all related as themes, aren't they? About trusting that you can't do everything at once anyway and that sometimes it's not the time. So that's a really good answer. Thank you for thinking about that aspect of it. That's really good, and I think boredom is a great place to end. We wish all our listeners a little patch of boredom.

Speaker 3: 43:01

Time to stop and stare.

Speaker 1: 43:05

Thank you, Sarah Gavron.

Speaker 2: 43:07

Thank you, Sarah.

Speaker 3: 43:08

Gavron, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 43:14

Art and Other People dedicated to the support of healthy families and communities through the arts. Our theme music is composed by James Rolfe. Join our community at artandotherpeopleorg.