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As part of a year-long collaboration between Blue Cabin and Articulate Cultural Trust exploring the connections between Blue Cabin’s Creative Life Story Work and The Articulate Approach to life story work, two Associate Artists from both organisations “buddied up” to explore this digitally.
Working alongside a team of young researchers, Rosie, from Articulate, and Ruth, from Blue Cabin, experimented with The Vault, Articulate’s bespoke digital platform to explore how this could support the delivery of life story work.
Rosie is one of Articulate’s Quality Teaching Artists and has been working with Articulate since 2021. Articulate have recently supported her to gain her qualification in the Rose Model of Therapeutic Life Story Work.
Ruth has been working as an Associate Artist with Blue Cabin since 2021. During this time she has delivered on a range of projects including Creative Life Story Work, Creative Aid and All About Us, a pilot exploring the development of Creative Life Story Work with care leavers.
Below is a conversation between Rosie and Ruth about The Vault Experiment.
Rosie: The Vault is an online space for care-experienced young people to store personal files, artworks, special mementos. The platform was co-designed by the young people from Articulate Cultural Trust and responds to conversations around how memories can be lost when you are someone who goes through the care system. It was initially inspired by our exploration into memory boxes and cultural rucksacks.
Ruth: When I was first introduced to The Vault, the thing that really struck me was just how important it was that this was a really private space. It was owned by the young person, and nobody else has access to anything that was in there. It could be used to store memories, like you say, or it could be used to house those important documents, like your national insurance number or bank details.
Rosie: One of our young researchers described it as a wallet. That’s how they saw it. Whereas for some other people, they saw it as like a time capsule, it was all their memories in one place.
Ruth: And throughout the experiment, it became used as a bit of a diary, or journal and a place to document thoughts and feelings as well as creative ideas.
Rosie: The Vault Experiment came about through a collaboration between Articulate Cultural Trust and Blue Cabin exploring how The Vault could potentially work as a tool within Creative Life Story Work, or creative life story journeys.
Ruth: The experiment took place over a six month period, beginning with the ‘buddying’ together of Rosie and I, where we started our process of getting to know each other and learning from each other.
Rosie: We then met our three young researchers from all over rural Scotland online.
Ruth: And we were all given a tour of The Vault so we were all starting from the same place. I think it’s worth saying that Rosie and I were coming to the Vault fresh and new in the same way that the researchers were and we had no preconceived ideas of how it should or could be used, or what the potential could be.
So we shared what we knew and, more importantly, what we didn’t know with the group and generated some questions for us all to explore together.
Rosie: We then had a period of six weeks of creative challenges, working individually to fill up our individual Vaults. These tasks were designed in direct influence from the All About Me process and were creative in nature.
Ruth: We used these creative challenges as a jumping-off point for us to get to know what The Vault was and what it could do and how we could play with it. So those first six weeks were about playing and then we got back together to reflect on what that was like. We put it to a playtest!
Rosie: After we had all taken part in that, we reflected on our creative challenges and then we shared three presentations, exploring different types of life story work. Ruth facilitated a session using her All About Me and All About Us work with Blue Cabin and I presented about Therapeutic Life Story Work as I am now a qualified Therapeutic Life Story Worker, through the Richard Rose model. And we also had a wonderful presentation about the Trove by Chloe Meineck who shared with us a physical and digital device to keep and treasure important objects and memories.
We presented all of those different strands and asked the young people to think about what Articulate Cultural Trust could be doing in this space. Reflecting on these innovative practices that we were interested in, what could our own version of life story work or life story journeys look like?
Ruth: By the end of the experiment, the young researchers in the group were clear that The Vault is a really valuable tool to accompany deeper in-person supported work. And the process ended with a clear invitation for Articulate to develop what their version of life story work could be.
Rosie: What Ruth and I spoke a lot about throughout our journey on this project was the value in the opportunity for us to share practice. Not only did we both feel that we’d been matched together for a reason, because we have very similar outlooks on what art can do, but also we both have a lot of different passions in the same areas about the different contexts that we work in. And what was really amazing about this part of the project is that we got to share our own practice and how we work with the young people and each other, and we both got a lot out of that.
Ruth: Definitely! I’ve had experience of buddying from within Blue Cabin, where I’ve been buddied up with another Associate Artist, which is always a brilliant and valuable way to reflect on your own practice and learn from each other. With this project, to be buddied with somebody who works for another organisation was really empowering for us both and we aligned so well in our ways of working and learnt so much from each other. I was particularly inspired by Rosie’s journey qualifying as a Therapeutic Life Story Worker and how this learning really shaped our path through the project.
Rosie: And we both spoke throughout the process, and especially in the reflection, about how much we’d felt that our collaboration had taught us a lot of things about ourselves, by looking at each other’s practice. And on an organisational level, I think Articulate Cultural Trust has really benefited from having Blue Cabin as a key partner. On a personal level I feel lucky to have met Ruth and hope we will continue to collaborate in the future.
Ruth: Ditto!
Ruth: The whole process felt like a space for learning from each other. Collaborating with the brilliant young researchers to explore The Vault was vital for the experiment to work and have meaning. The geography on this project was pretty wide-ranging, where we would connect together online, and through postal packages, from all across rural Scotland and the North East of England to ask questions and explore together.
I think a really important part of the project was that we were very open about not knowing what the answers were, or if there even would be answers! This can be unnerving as we didn’t know what we didn’t know but it was vital to be open and honest with the group about that.
Rosie: And you also don’t want to have an idea in your head. That’s not authentic, you want it to be driven by the young researchers and what they’re interested in, what they care about, and what their thoughts are.
Ruth: You don’t want to prescribe anything. And the young people that we worked with were incredible. They were so honest, open and generous with their time, their thoughts and their ideas and all of the sessions felt like we were discovering one step at a time alongside each other.
Rosie: And what’s really exciting is that post the experiment, we brought key players in the Articulate Cultural Trust community together to look at the findings our young researchers came up with and one of our young researchers was at that development day, and played a key part in those conversations.
So now, we’re hopefully developing a pilot for the start of next year and it will be completely informed by this project that has created such a solid foundation for something exciting to happen.
Ruth: I think by starting off our project with play and us all playing together really set the tone for us to establish our relationship together as a working group. The sessions were creative and fun and allowed us to create a safe space for us to explore and dive deep into big subjects.
Rosie: Don’t be scared to ask the questions, even if something feels difficult. Discuss it, get into it, ask the questions. To develop something that’s going to benefit care-experienced young people in the future you have to make sure you are asking the experts and those are the young people who have been through similar experiences. Say you’re confused about what your service is doing or what direction it is taking, invest in your young people, pay them to do it, to be the strategic leaders so they see that they’re being valued in the way that they’re being treated.
Ruth: It’s about valuing young people’s time and expertise. And what came out in the sessions is that the young people were constantly thinking about how the Vault might be useful in different contexts. There was a real awareness and care for other young people who might benefit from it throughout the whole process. This whole project underlined, for me, the importance of centering the voices of young people in the work we do. As Rosie says, they are the experts and we learn most when we are their students.
Thank you Rosie and Ruth for sharing your conversation about The Vault experiment!
Creative Life Story Work provides training, resources and guidance for anyone who wants to take a creative, trauma-informed approach to life story work.
You can learn more about the Articulate Cultural Trust, and get in touch with the team, here.
