Rebecca Swindell
Community Projects
Group photo of participants from the Tea Stories Project.
Tea Stories
This project looked at the past use of the building which is now Spike Island Arts Space but was once a former Brooke Bond Tea packing factory. Over the project I made contact with over 80 ex Brooke Bond employees, We held a number of reunion events and exhibitions such as a reunion Tea party and book launch amongst other events. The project culminated in the making of a book, which was based on the format of the Brooke Bond tea car albums. The book detailed the working lives of the Brooke Bond employees, the book also included a DVD of short films and interviews from ex employees about their time at Brooke Bond. The book is available online from https://www.tangentbooks.co.uk/ The project was funded by Arts Council England, The Heritage Lottery fund and Sparkplugs.
Alongside the book a large body of other works were made such as the Brooke Bond wedding dress. This was made in response to discovering the tradition of staff making a tea bag wedding dresses for each bride who was getting married from the factory. On their last shift at work before their marriage they processed about the factory wearing the tea bag wedding dress as everyone stopped work and celebrated and cheered.
Brooke Bond Wedding Dress. Tea bag paper, pencil, glue and cotton.
Tea Cards- Various subjects. Pencil and water colour pencil. 8 cm X 3 cm
The Pencil Line
This project made an online gallery of images submitted by the general public traveling on trains, shown on the project website -https://thepencilline.com/ We had over 400 drawings submitted by the public, who responded to drawing packs left on trains between Birmingham and Carlisle. Alongside this we ran 4 drawing workshops on board trains for groups such as St Mungo's and Bristol Drug Project. As Part of the project Rebecca made many journeys from Bristol to Carlisle, travelling over 4763 miles, using the train as a mobile studio, drawing continually as she travelled. The Pencil Line project was run in partnership with Virgin Trains and funded by Arts Council England.
Train Ticket Drawings
Train tickets and pen
Rebecca drew on over 500 train tickets while traveling between Bristol and Carlisle to drop the drawing packs on trains.
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