The Festival of Light - RIO MOORE

The Festival of Light, was developed by Rio Moore and Dr Victoria Jupp Kina PHD on behalf of ScrapAntics, the concept was to create a city-wide ‘community gallery’ to celebrate the winter season. Funded through Dundee City Council’s Festive Fund, the work provided a means to celebrate the winter festive season and inspire connectedness through the theme of ‘light’. The Council had allocated money from its Common Good Fund to establish a grant scheme to help groups organise community events to celebrate the winter festive season. The aim of the project was to encourage families from across Dundee to create their own winter festival window displays. Through providing inspirational craft packs, including all instructions and materials, we were able to encourage households to create their own works of art to display in their windows. While we would usually run workshops in our ArtAntics community studio space, Covid restrictions meant that we decided instead to adapt the creative pack scheme which we had already been delivering throughout the summer. Through drawing on the skills and talents of local Dundee artists, we created a call-out to the creative community to submit proposals outlining their unique designs for inspirational and accessible community craft packs. We were conscious that many families would be struggling financially at this time, so we also included a ‘pay it forward’ scheme within our project design to ensure that there were no financial barriers to taking part in the project.

Project Delivery:

We exceeded our original target, providing over 400 creative packs to households across Dundee. Through our existing partnerships, we were able to gain sponsorship from two of our key partners, Halley Stevensons and The Siobhan Trust, enabling us to provide 300 packs completely free of charge to families and households across the city.