Isabel's Story

"The art room at Oxford Skylight is beautiful space, a living space, calm and full of collective and collecting history. In my three years as a volunteer, I have seen some members come into the art room brimming with existing skills and full of ideas to pursue. To have vision and the need to create to feel whole, but to be living in temporary accommodation such as a Travel Lodge where your room has no windows and where you have no physical or psychological space to create is frustrating for people and even devastating. As an artist myself I can empathise with this."

"There are also more complex examples. I have seen members struggle to have the confidence to make it in for weeks, and when they do, they gently begin to soar. I’ve seen members create paintings reflecting their deeply held spiritual beliefs and also many gifts so painstakingly made for children and parents and partners, sometimes with shaking hands. I have seen so much loving care taken, and the enormous pleasure in giving through making. I’ve seen members determinedly make it into the art room on days when housing disasters have struck and I’ve been astonished by their determination and bravery, even in a state of agitation."

"I ran a project where multiple Crisis members and staff drew one another’s faces from life in the art room. We then cut up the drawings and combined the elements to create surreal colourful portraits that interlaced different people’s art styles and personalities together, capturing the feeling of experimenting and creating in one another’s company, the collective artwork becoming greater and more vivid than the individual. Although it is often very sad when a member leaves Crisis, and we miss them, it is a great joy to think of their work and their creativity going on with them into their future lives. Off our walls at Crisis, and onto theirs.