The design for Broadfield Conversations was made in collaboration with people who use and work in Broadfield Community Centre.
Local residents talked about what they love about Broadfield, highlighting the sense of togetherness and support in the area and the community centre as an important place of gathering.
After studying classical realist painting, Eloise combines painting in the studio with murals in public space, motivated by the direct connection between the artwork and communities.
She invites the viewer to reflect on where and how they find vitality, moments of slowing down and to reach into a deeper undercurrent of connection to each other and the natural world, a process that is often blocked by our fast-paced lifestyles and restrictive political and economic systems.
This is one of six murals made in 2023/24 by Creative Playground. Watch this film to see the story of how they were made.
The #CrawleyMurals have been made in partnership with a group of 19 Crawley residents who are part of the Creative Playground Playmakers group and/or were employed by Creative Playground as Community Connectors. We worked with them every month from August 2023 to now, to develop the ideas, recruit the artists (from a pool of 126 artists that applied from across the world) and decide on final designs and locations for the murals.
We ran workshops with around 350 other local people with the artists we commissioned who helped to shape the designs for the murals. Watch a film about the Story So Far here:
Find out more about the other murals below:
Oluwafemi Babalola’s Coloured Realms
Alec Saunders’ Gateway to the World
Sarah Pimenta’s The Fabric of Crawley 2024
The sixth mural in this series will be installed in June in Manor Royal by artist Jac Seifert from Orakel Workshop. This project builds on other murals in the town that have been made and still exist including those in Three Bridges, on the wall of M&S in The Pavement, at Broadfield Barton, on Dorsten Square and in Crawley Library. There are others that sadly don’t exist anymore including the mosaic mural in Crawley town centre and we stand on the shoulders of all that work.
We hope these murals will last forever (well at least ten years) and that they will inspire others to brighten up the town with arts and culture of all kinds. We’d love to know what you think about them.
Send us an email on [email protected] or DM us @creativeplaygroundcrawley on Instagram or Facebook.
Credits
Playmakers
Clive Martin, Ian Irvine, Iyadh Daoud, Izzy Burghard, Jade Hand, Jade Standeven, Jodie and Ettie Williams, Kathy Rogers, Kathy and Lily Sarjantson, Liz Hart, Rashne Everington
Community Connectors
Lucy Bear, Mark Hales, Nia Finlay, Saaj Raja, Tracy Frake, Viv Evans
Creative Playground Team
Becky Jones, Ben Lintott, Erin Beesley, Harriet McDermott, Lara Hockman, Louise Blackwell, Pav Randhawa, Sam Evans, Sophie Eustace
Murals freelance team
Daria Lipinska, Dom Foster, Ina Miller, Jack Crotty, Kenny Taylor, Lana Needham, Reg Garfield, Sean Phillips
Documentation team
Ian Greenland, Jacob Punter, Naresh Kaushal, Rosie Powell
This mural is funded by Arts Council England.
#CrawleyMurals
Images by: Naresh Kushal, Ian Greenland and Creative Playground Crawley. Graphic by Ben Lintott.
