Introducing our second round of successful Cultural Micro-commissions, supporting 4 Wandsworth based creatives, during the London Borough of Culture year, to create new artworks with grants of up to £1000 each.
Lara Black: Brain Maze
Brain Maze is a series of visual pieces exploring how we perceive our minds when struggling with our mental wellbeing. It offers a raw and authentic portrayal of the lived experience of an autistic artist with ADHD, living with anxiety and depression. The series navigates feelings of being lost, entrapped, and overwhelmed. Brain Mazes reflect the theme of an inner labyrinth, allowing viewers to take an intimate look into my world, and within themselves. What started as doodling evolved into a lifelong art project: I hand-draw each maze, starting with the outline and finishing the filling using a ballpoint pen. Each maze can take anywhere from three to sixteen hours to complete, from one day to several, representing a fragment of my brain. Each maze is an invitation for me and you to slow down, take space and self-reflect.
Brain Maze: exhibition at Battersea Arts Centre (1 - 15 October) and Meet The Artist (16 October).
Lara Black is a Greek London-based writer, vocalist, and visual artist. With a BMUS in Popular Music, an MA in Participatory and Community Arts, and an MA in Creative Writing, Black’s diverse background informs their distinct artistic approach. Typically, their work embraces the dark, painful, and unpleasant — that which we often try to avoid. As a queer and neurodivergent artist, they bring a unique and unapologetically authentic perspective to their creations.
Black’s past projects include a feature in High Salvage (a poetry collection led by Iain Sinclair), and their debut solo exhibition at Bloom Gallery, Sound Minds. Black is currently working on Brain Maze Colouring Book. Their second solo exhibition, Brain Maze, will be hosted by Battersea Arts Centre, from October 1st to October 15th, 2025. larablack.carrd.co
Purple Ostrich Productions: Community Workshops and Performance
Purple Ostrich will facilitate workshops at in the community hall on Beaumont Road in Southfields, where participants can share personal stories related to happiness and home, countering negative narratives around council estates, and celebrating working class and Wandsworth joy. These stories will be used to develop a script, or series of monologues or scenes, to performed by the participants (or the company) at a local community sharing.
Kerry Fitzgerald is a writer and performer from a council estate on the Old Kent Road. She studied at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on a scholarship and is co-artistic director of Purple Ostrich Productions, touring her plays across the UK and Denmark. Her work often explores class, community and resilience with humour and heart. Kerry has been shortlisted for the Funny Women Comedy Writing Award, Chortle Comedy Hotshots and BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Competition and she's acted for ten years across TV/Theatre and Film. When she’s not working, she loves reading history, drawing comics with her son, and feeding her unbeatable tea addiction.
Lawrence (Lol) O'Connor: Sounds, Familiar
"I would like to create an immersive sound and video installation called 'Sounds, familiar' to be hosted at the Sound Minds gallery. This will be produced by a series of audio field-recording explorations of multiple areas of Wandsworth. I will use the opportunity to capture sounds in the community that attract my attention, processing, including optionally looping them live, as they are recorded, discovering rhythms and patterns within them. I will then take these into the Sound Minds studio to examine and document the meaning that the sounds have for me. I will incorporate the output of the narrative of meaning into further producing and layering of the sounds with images captured in the locations of the recordings to produce an immersive installation that I hope will be an invitation to its audience to look afresh at their localities, their relationship to it, and also to other people and their stories in their environment. I would like to make this age-positive activity, with older adults who have lived experience of mental-health and/or social isolation challenges being particularly invited."
Lawrence (Lol) O'Connor is a creative health arts-practitioner with over 40 years of professional experience in the arts, with a focus on projects that address social justice, connection, belonging and meaning within and between communities.
"I live in Wandsworth and am: father to three adult children, a Buddhist with responsibility as a lay-leader in Balham & Tooting, diagnosed autistic and bipolar (type 2), and an advanced pancreatic cancer survivor."
He holds an MSc in Creative Arts and Mental Health from Queen Mary University of London in which he specialised in examining how mental health understanding and practice can inform performing arts and vice-versa, with an emphasis on how performance-arts practice can help address the over-representation of social isolation and death-by-suicide in older men.
He is also artistic director of As It Is Arts - a not-for-profit age-positive community interest initiative, creating and offering opportunities for creative performance arts engagement to residents of the London Borough of Wandsworth experiencing social isolation and mental ill-health.
Felicity Prazak & Global Women of Today: Community Mural
Global Women of Today are a women's group who meet weekly at the Hub on the Doddington and Rollo Estate and at St Saviours Church Battersea. Artist Felicity Prazak will work with the group to highlight the work they do to support health and wellbeing in the borough, raising funds and supporting individuals that have been affected by cancer and other diseases.
Once completed the mural will be housed in Battersea Park Library to let the local community know that the organisation is there for everyone to tap into if they need help and support, especially over women’s health issues.
Felicity Prazak has emerged as a visual artist in Battersea who has immersed herself in the local community. Felicity loves to engage local residents coming from all diverse backgrounds to taking part in creating her paintings and murals. Felicity believes everyone is creative and with careful guidance and support, Felicity enables the most sceptical person that their contribution is of value and equally as important to the work. Her large-scale murals can be seen on Battersea Park Library and around Battersea.
