Taking Time was our 2019/20 Arts Council Lottery Grant funded programme. Originally planned to last a year and conclude with a prison based creative arts symposium, the project was brought to a premature end by the Covid -19 emergency in March 2020.

Our team of participatory artists worked with adult men and women in seven NW prisons to co-create work that formed a backdrop to family visits.  This saw us delivering workshops in theatre, visual art, music, spoken word, and creative writing that was presented in visit centres, and at special events such as awards ceremonies and course graduations.

Taking Time was underpinned by TiPP’s talent development programme, which provides training and development opportunities for emerging artists and allows them to gain practical arts facilitation experience alongside TiPP’s highly experienced team of participatory artists.

In the panel on the right you can see an example of some of our work from HMP Thorn Cross Family Visits project, part of the Taking Time programme. On Family Visits, our Taking Time practitioners delivered visual arts and music activity, working to seasonal themes. The images you can see to the right are 'visual minutes' of these events in HMP Thorn Cross.  Drawn by one of our amazing visual artists,  Andrea Joseph, they show sessions at Hallowe'en where the families made bats and spiders, and from Christmas when they made angels, Santa plates, and took part in a group rendition of the Twelve Days of Christmas accompanied by our musicians.  

The images form part of a banner which is on permanent display in the visits centre at HMP Thorn Cross.

More documentary images from the project by Kate Ireland, can be found in the Project Gallery, where you can also see more of Andrea Joseph’s work on this project and others.