Bridging Barriers with Fridges: inspired through volunteering

Meet Harry. Harry is an art student who has developed a project to transform everyday objects into something more meaningful.

We took the opportunity to speak to Harry Hayton, an art student at Goldsmiths to talk about his upcoming art project in partnership with Dimensions.

The project involves giving participants with learning disabilities a fridge to paint as they wish. The idea behind this project is to take objects that represent basic necessities and to use self-expression to transform these objects to mean something more.

With this, Harry aims to convey that people are more than just their basic needs.

Workshops will be organised with teams of professional artists and students to facilitate interaction and socialising. This will lead up to the main exhibition which will display more than 50 fridges.

Beyond the spectacle, the quantity of the fridges is supposed to represent the creators as a community of individuals as opposed to anonymous units. Viewers will also be able to see the recordings of the creative sessions at the exhibition, and a website will be put up for viewing.

Voluntarily participating in political party conferences and also at Heart n Soul – a creative arts company and charity – gave Harry the opportunity to interact with people with learning disabilities.

He found that after a brief acclimatization period you get better at working with them.

Subsequently, he realised that the natural progression for him would be to expand his art to the community.

Recommended to him by a friend, this search led him to Dimensions. He is now planning the execution of his project. He looks forward to developing community spaces for people to create in and organising more community art projects in the future.

If you or somebody you know would like to support someone to participate in Harry’s project, or would like to become a regular arts and crafts buddy, we would be delighted to hear from you!

Please contact volunteering@dimensions-uk.org for more details, or find out more about volunteering.

This story was written by one of our volunteer Storytellers – Dishani Vora.