Body & Soul “Home Again”
Paint the Change held a month of workshops at the Body & Soul charity in London, UK, in November 2021, culminating in a beautiful mural of a kintsugi vase full of flowers. Meet Hollie Smith, the charity’s Head of Creative Partnerships, to learn about a special project that addressed trauma and community through art. The below interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does Body & Soul do?
We transform trauma with love. What we're trying to do is ensure that the trauma that's happened in someone's past doesn't define who they become. We work with all ages, from babies through to older adults, recognising that it's never too late to access support and that the whole family can be affected by one individual’s traumatic experience.
We provide a holistic, person-centered approach to care. There's lots of different things that members can access from practical support with housing and immigration needs to 1:1 therapeutic interventions.
We also provide different workshops that are designed to build resilience skills; so that the safety people feel here, they can start to feel in the outside world, and be able to navigate their lives without the heavy load of the trauma that they're carrying. Everything we do is rooted in community and compassion.
Hollie Smith, Body & Soul’s Head of Creative Partnerships, and Emma Yese, Body & Soul Youth Wellbeing Programme Manager, celebrating the charity’s 25th anniversary in front of Atma’s kintsugi mural
Emma Colyer, Body & Soul Director, and Jed Marsh, Body & Soul Assistant Director
How does art help Body & Soul in its work?
We really believe in the power of the arts in the healing process and ensuring that our members have access to that. We know that the arts have a crucial role to play in fostering the strength, solidarity, and hope that we all need in order to heal.
Every arts project that I produce unites leading artists in a collaborative process with our community to create ambitious and affirming work. Creativity not only provides opportunity for connection and expression, but it can ignite change, renewal, and recovery.
For this project the aim was for our members to feel a sense of ownership of space back in this building as we haven't been in the physical space in the same way since the pandemic. So, it was really about members reclaiming the space as their own. It also coincided with our 25th birthday; so it was a celebration of the community, everyone who has walked through our doors, and everyone who is yet to walk through our doors, making this community what it is.
Matt [Matt “ATMA” Dufour, Paint the Change artist] and Efe [Efe Ezekiel, Paint the Change youth mentor]] delivered workshops on a Tuesday evening on a Thursday evening over the course of a month and on the fourth week Matt painted the beautiful mural. Over sixty members of all ages were involved in those workshops that explored different art forms and created discussion around what this community means to them and gave space to share their stories.
How does the new mural contribute to Body & Soul’s community?
When Matt and I first met, we had a conversation around the Japanese art form of kintsugi, something we've always felt is a good representation of what we do at Body & Soul. [Kintsugi is the art of reassembling broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, creating a new and more beautiful object, and treating breakage and repair as part of life rather than something to disguise.]
You can walk in the door feeling quite broken and fragmented and the sense of collective healing that can happen here can be really beautiful.
The vase represents the body of the community and the flowers represent the soul. The flowers, the lilies represent a sense of rebirth that happens to people when they come to Body & Soul. Each colour on the vase represents the 4 groups that Matt & Efe worked with, a real honouring of their time together. The creation of the mural has been a perfect way for the community to connect with their home again, reclaim the space as their own and see their stories and experiences honoured in a tangible way.