Zwiebelfish CIC is an arts organisation set up in 2021 to work in collaboration with marginalised people, especially people affected by homelessness.
Our projects communicate life experiences that are sometimes ignored, or hidden, like homelessness. The wide variety of artforms we offer helps people to access their own creativity and can help to explore and release difficult memories, or simply find enjoyment in making.
Projects supported by Heritage Fund.
Directors
PHILIP DAVENPORT is a poet/artist with over 20 years experience directing and delivering collaborative community projects. As co-director of arts and health company, arthur+martha CIC 2007-21, he engaged in numerous creative collaborations with the homeless community in Manchester, many exhibited at major cultural sites — The Houses of Parliament, The Southbank, National Maritime Museum, Manchester Cathedral, among others. Most recently he co-founded Cumbria-based company, Zwiebelfish CIC, directing its inaugural project, Refuge from the Ravens, which was exhibited at Wordsworth Grasmere and the Houses of Parliament.
Phil’s 15-year creative connection with the homeless community has slowly built into a multi-author, multi-poem epic that can be read as an alternative history of British homelessness in the 21st Century, honouring those who are often written off.
As a poet, text artist and curator he has exhibited in the UK and internationally and is the editor of experimental poetry anthology, The Dark Would which launched at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2013. He is currently an editor of international visual poetry magazine, Synapse International, bringing together hundreds of visual poets from all over the globe. His recent project THE LAST WOLF IN ENGLAND opened a new avenue for him in the poetics of sound.
JULIA GRIME has over 20 years experience working at executive level in major arts organisations – predominantly Theatr Clwyd and Northern Ballet, managing large staffs and budgets, producing shows and community projects and curating cinema. A founder-trustee of Liverpool’s Plaza Community Cinema, she has a particular interest in working with marginalized communities and social justice. She was a governor of Glyndwr University, which prides itself on its social accessibility, for several years and is now an honorary fellow.
In 2016, Julia decided to focus on social justice projects and her own creative practice. Whilst living in Germany for two years, she worked on a research project exploring diversity in German theatre and co-founded Zwiebelfish CIC in 2021, devising and producing its inaugural project, Refuge from the Ravens project.
Her campaigning interest in climate change led to her studying an interdisciplinary MA in Environment, Culture & Society. Her dissertation follows the entangled strands of social injustice and environmental destruction, addressed through art-making by community groups including marginalised people. Julia’s photography has been a serious non-professional practice since the 1990s and is the medium in which she continually revisits her ongoing explorations of pattern, time-shift and attentiveness/disconnect with whichever environment she inhabits. She’s currently exploring the shifting power of nature through photographs of Morecambe Bay on the edge of the Lake District. She has documented her projects with marginalised people in photographs and film over the last 5 years.
SCOTT THURSTON is a creative writing academic and poet of many years standing who has a keen interest in the intersection of poetry with other artforms particularly dance, with considerable experience in running workshops and conferences. He links movement, poetry and therapy and the psychological wellbeing and other benefits that flow from this combination.
Scott has studied with dancers in Berlin and New York, collaborating with three dancers in the UK. He worked with Sarie Mairs Slee on the Arts Council funded project Vital Signs, with Julia Griffin on Dancing the Blues and Together Un/Tethered (both linked to the Arts for the Blues project — see below) and he currently collaborates with dancer and researcher Gemma Collard-Stokes.
Following this interest into a collaboration with Dance Movement Psychotherapist Vicky Karkou and Counselling Psychologist Joanna Omylinska-Thurston, led to the founding of Arts for the Blues, a new creative group psychotherapy model.
