The Highcroft Lifebook Project

The Highcroft Lifebook Project Enabling Film

2007-04-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

The full DVD video of two more sections showing how to make Lifebooks on a jig is available for £10 (plus post & packing) to Mental Health organisations and groups.

Cheques can be made payable to :

"North Birmingham Community Arts"

a Mental Health User-led Arts volunteer group that functions to create a venue for arts practice and fellowship as well as trying to increase the art-voice of MH User-artists.

For more details contact :

nbca@blueyonder.co.uk

or info@nbca.co.uk .

NBCA has as its core axis the interests of MH Users in Kingstanding and Erdington but it also takes in MH Users interests from Handsworth , Perry Barr , Aston and some other areas . Its creates alliances in the Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health areas where resources allow .

It will also be possible to purchase actual examples of the "Highcroft Lifebook" and we will consider a price on that in the near future - we are currently getting to grips with some new more complex printing in colour-fast and waterproof ink at NBCA ..

Bear with us .

Our End Users Agreement with Service Users and Groups informally using our methods is, that is fine , but if Groups or others want to use our methods formally for grant based training or other revenue related purposes then we regard our ideas as our intellectual property and will needed to be contacted for consultation ..

My Family of 18 (top) and a sequence of enabling photos below and text (enlarge by clicking on them)

2006-11-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

Below is a sequence of photos and text which show the handmaking of a type of book I have simply called the "Lifebook" . A lifebook is a vehicle for making some kind of relational and sense map for those who need it because of issues of family displacement and of childood seperation . Although I do not see why the lifebook idea cannot extend to others who have lives they want to record and navigate for reasons of discovery and sense ..

As someone who came through seperations from my original family who then later curiously kept me displaced in an outer part of the family , it was nevertheless extra nonsensical very painful and needed navigation later in my life because of its emotional effects . Over 30 years I made a journey of sense from 1984 and later created some african masks made from the wood of the Mental Hospital where as a teenager in the 1970's I had broken down . Those masks can be seen at "The Highcroft Lifebook Project and African masks" its another blog ...

I made the masks because I discovered the family I was born into had many patterns of seperation and abandonment of children which had ended up in the Erdington Workhouse which astonishingly was later to become the Mental Hospital I went to broken .. Over 100 years 18 family members had association to this one place under different names - either as the Workhouse or later as the Mental Hospital . The thread which joined us was childhood seperations and unstable marriages .....

Mozilla Firefox is the best browser I have found to view the photos but you can also go to Flickr.com to see them : HERE

Image 1 : Click on the photo twice to enlarge it in your browser

2006-11-14T17:49:00.000-08:00

Image 2 : Click on photo twice to enlarge it in your browser

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Image 3 : Click on the photo twice to enlarge it in your browser

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Image 4 : Click on the photo twice to enlarge it in your browser

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Image 5 : Click on the photo twice to enlarge in your browser

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Image 6 Click on the photo twice to enlarge in your browser

2006-11-14T17:32:00.000-08:00