February 4, 2025

Gabriela Lipska, District Manager Westmorland and Furness, talks to Dickie Felton (Communications Manager) and Amy Stretch Parker (Programme Producer) at Barrow-based Full of Noises, as part of our Beyond the Edge – Inspiration and Innovation interview series:

GL: Hello and welcome to our Beyond the Edge series that looks at all the amazing, inspiring work that drives change and innovation in Cumbria and works in support of Community Power. Amy and Dickie, can you start with introducing yourselves and your organisation?

Dickie: We’re an arts organisation based in Barrow in Furness working with sound art and experimental music. We have a lovely venue in the middle of Barrow Park. Full of Noises was set up 15 years ago as a biannual music festival, which used to take place at lots of venues around town. But in the last 18 months, we’ve had our own venue at Piel View House – an old park keeper’s lodge built more than a century ago.

At one point the building was under threat of demolition, but we were able to raise funding from Arts Council England, Sir John Fisher Foundation and the local council to transform this space into a music venue.

We don’t just do music, we do workshops and work with younger people. Particularly over the last 18 months, we’ve really felt embedded in the community and made lots of partnerships.

Amy: We have lots of ideas, and my job is to make sure that those ideas come to fruition. My background is in participation in arts and heritage and so I’ve come to the role looking at how we as an organisation can engage more with our community, with the hyper-local community within and around the park and the people of Barrow. Historically our audience has been from much further afield, and my job is to develop that local audience so that we’re engaging more with people in Barrow.

One of the things that I do is I look after the artists, but my other role is to develop community partnerships with various local organisations. Over the past couple of years, we’ve been developing a partnership with Vision Support Barrow District and Autus, Cumbria, and we’re just starting one with Cumbria Wildlife Trust. Another part of my role is the environmental sustainability lead. I’m developing a programme of events that engages people with the environment through listening and sound exploration. We work with sound artists and musicians to deliver workshops with local people that encourage listening to the local environment and as a way to monitor biodiversity within the park itself. We’ve developed what we call ‘The Listening Garden’ here at Piel View House, which was funded by Westmorland and Furness Council’s Climate and Nature Partnership fund. We’re also creating a community food forest (funded by Zero Carbon Cumbria) and a space where people can feel safe, sit quietly, listen to nature, and engage with art and music and the sounds of the world.

GL: It all sounds amazing. An intentional connection between everything that is most beautiful in humans: art and creativity with the natural world. You do the work of reconnecting – How is that being received in Barrow?

Dickie: When we are having third sector organisation conversations you always hear that Barrow is deprived, with high needs – ‘is this the thing that people need in Barrow?’ ‘Or maybe there is something else that is needed in Barrow?’

I mean, from my point of view I think we’re just trying to show people that there’s another way of life, especially for the young people we work with, who either come to our concerts or come to a workshop.

It’s about saying: You can be creative, you can use music – it can change lives. I think that with BAE being the big employer in Barrow young people sometimes think they’re going to go and work in the shipyard, maybe like their mother or father did.

We’re trying to show people they can do something else with their life if they want to. Maybe light a spark. I love to see young people coming to the concerts. We are a small venue, we can only hold 50 people maximum normally. We sometimes get the same young people coming along to each performance and you can see how much they love the music.

A young person will come and watch the concert, and then the next day they’ll be doing a workshop with the artist who was on stage. For me that’s just brilliant. They’ve gone from watching music to making music. We are trying to show that it’s possible to make a career out of this…

GL: you mentioned hyper-locality and engaging with a local audience. How do you achieve that?

Dickie: We have quite a loyal audience. I will print off marketing leaflets and I’ll go to the houses round the park and I’ll put them through doors to try to encourage our neighbours to come along. Seeing families come with very young kids to make music and let themselves go on the microphone – for me, that’s the best.

Amy: I would add to that that I think experimentalism in all art forms is from the margins, it’s the edges, it’s the boundary. What we’re trying to do here is not take away the art, the art still exists. It’s quite unusual stuff that happens here.

This isn’t like going somewhere else and seeing a performance. Here you can experiment, you see people do stuff like playing bicycle wheels, creating sounds out of rocks, rubbing a stick against a wall or hitting a railing or crunching leaves. It is about developing a sense of curiosity.

It doesn’t matter what kind of background you come from to this art form. You don’t need money to go and learn how to play an instrument, you’re not having to tap into something that comes with privilege or money. This is something where people can go: “Oh, wow! I can create something from absolutely nothing and I can be really explorative with it. I can just experiment, I can play around with it.”

Art is not meant to be exclusive. We have world class musicians performing and delivering workshops here, but hopefully we show people that you can create something absolutely incredible with three-year-olds or with eight-year-olds, or with people without an arts background, or people who have just walked in from the park.

Everybody can access the art here in the same way, and that’s the beauty of experimentalism, it’s on the margins of the art world, and we can engage with people in the margins of a community because we’re part of that edge.

GL: I love this element of empowerment through experimentation, of people not just enjoying coming as a spectator, as an audience, but also having this hands-on experience and being creators not just consumers. Really raising people’s aspirations, inviting playfulness, showing that there is more to life. Enabling people to be curious and maybe not being afraid of getting things wrong, being in this uncensored interaction with the world. How does this link to how you are as people, and then what your interactions in the organisation, within the team, look like?

Dickie: We play a lot. We play with the instruments. We sit together, we have a little jam, our lunchtime band. We play board games. We have a lot of fun, but when we’ve got a concert on we’re ‘on it’.

We’ve got to be quite organised, it’s a bit like a military operation in some respects. You do feel a weight of responsibility. When I think of some of the concerts that we’ve had recently: we’ve had two artists from Los Angeles, Tashi Wada and Julia Holter, and other artists like Marisa Anderson and Jim White who are big in experimental and improvised music circles.

We want the artists to have a good experience, and we want the audience to have a good experience too so we make sure everything is spot-on. But overall, we get a lot more freedom to express ourselves in our work. We don’t have to do things a certain way, we can experiment with our approach to how we deliver the programme.

Amy: We have a lot of fun as a team. You could say we work hard and play hard. I like to have structures and routines in place that allow freedom; play and downtime is factored into our working day.

We also reflect a lot – that’s one of the things we’ve incorporated into our work, and we do that over lunch each quarter. We go somewhere nice and we remember that we’re people and we look after each other. There isn’t really a hierarchical structure within the organisation, everyone’s voice is valid and matters. That’s the way we discuss things and plan things. It’s a collective. It’s each of us asking ourselves, “What can I bring to the table?” For me personally, this approach has helped me develop my self-confidence because there are structures in place that make me feel held and able to express myself safely, and as a result of that safety I can be way more imaginative and think bigger.

GL: is there anything else that you do that you see as enabling empowerment?

Amy: We make sure that we treat each other fairly, there’s a lot of love.

You know, it really does help! For it all to work, for it all to flow, everybody supports each other. We all help each other do different parts of the job. We know what our roles are, but if anybody needs support then we’re quite adaptable and I think that adaptability comes from our freedom to play and explore, from nurturing our curiosity.

I have to pinch myself sometimes that I get to work with these guys and listen to incredible, experimental music!

Dickie: I think the other thing we do here is we don’t separate the audience from the artist either. When artists perform or deliver a workshop, we eat and chat together. There’s no separation. There’s a kind of ‘levelling’ that happens, even with really well-known international artists, they sit and have food together with us in the kitchen.

Our communal space is open plan; the audience will be coming in, they’ll be getting drinks and there’s an opportunity for the audience to meet the artist in a really informal and relaxed way. People say it’s more like coming to someone’s house. It’s intimate!

GL: I know you care a lot about inclusivity and accessibility, can you tell me more about that?

Dickie: People with accessibility needs, the artists, the staff, the audience: everybody has the same rights. We keep it a nice, level, family feeling where everyone’s cared for. That’s what we try to do anyway.

GL: So far you have mentioned experimentation, playfulness, fairness, people being on the same level, no hierarchy, trust, a lot of understanding, listening and valuing everybody’s voice in their roles in their room and creating conditions that will foster that. I know you are also brave to do things differently. This series is looking at the concept of Community Power, and practices of local organisations that can inspire and show examples of community empowerment. So first I would like to ask you how you understand the concept of Community Power, and then I would love to hear some more examples of how you practice it, and what the ingredients are.

Amy: I think about Community Power a lot. I really believe in co-creation, but I also understand that co-creation is a bit of a buzzword now and that a lot of people don’t really know how to do it. You have to develop a foundation of trust, and of safety, and we try to empower the communities we work with to share their voice, their opinions and their ideas and then follow-through. It’s not just about listening, it’s about actively responding and working together.

Our doors are open. We are welcoming but we’re quite brave and people are aware of that and hopefully they know they will be treated well and fairly. We take fairness very seriously.

I’m currently studying applied permaculture in the arts and I follow the principles of earth care, people care and fair share in all my work. Fairness, especially regarding pay, is very important to us. We might be getting somebody who is early career, but we’re paying them what they deserve and we’re listening to what they have to say and what they need from us just as much as we would someone who’s at the top of their game. We respect their time and their input whether they’re artists or not. Reciprocity is important to us and hopefully we treat everyone who comes through our doors fairly and with love, despite background or privilege. That’s a really important thing to us and I think the word is getting out!

We like to put local, emerging artists on the same bill as big names, and it’s been great to see what comes out of those pairings. We also have a Musician’s Lab, who are sharing their experimental practices. It’s a professional development group, and we offer participants opportunities to perform or to deliver workshops. We don’t think short term about anything. We invest in artists and communities for the future.

We always treat people who come here as if they’re gonna come back. When we (Dickie and I) first started out, audience numbers for gigs were like, 20, but now we’re selling out pretty much every time. We are consistent and we’re getting a reputation for treating people well, I think.

We also have different community groups come to use the space – Barrow Poverty Truth Commission, Vision Support Barrow District, Autus Cumbria, Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Every Life Matters. Sharing what we have enables us to engage with an audience that might not come here otherwise.

We are telling them, “Hey, we’ve got this space, come and use it”, and when you’re in the space, we’ll chat to you and then maybe start bouncing some ideas around. And we start asking those questions: What do you want to do? How can we do that? How can we do that in a way that feels safe? How can we do that in a way that makes you feel as though you have ownership of this project as much as us?

We’re not jumping into places, going and doing something and then walking away again. It’s a long term strategy. It’s a slow strategy. I think that a lot of the time, if you want to really engage with people, continue slowly working with the same people.

That’s why we aim to develop long term partnerships. For example we had some funding to develop The Listening Garden project and we co-designed an accessible garden space with families of visually impaired young people. They’ve designed that garden. They’ve told me what they’ve thought needs to happen in that space.

They’ve told me what they want to experience in that space. And in return, I’ve helped them connect to nature and draw those ideas out in different workshops, different listening exercises. But it’s all fun! Play is really, really central in creating an environment where people can co-create and feel as though they can explore and that they can make mistakes. By allowing that to happen organically you are creating an environment of trust. I remember that I’m part of that community as well, I’m just another person in this town. This is my community!

GL: Listening to you, I could spend a week or more with you guys just listening because you are so passionate and it is contagious. I feel I’m more happy. I’m really uplifted.

Amy: I would add that for me Community Power is empowering people to be creative and to be themselves and to be able to search, to come out and blossom a bit. I think there’s a certain power in showing, especially young people, that there is a different route of life that you can take. Nobody here is telling you can’t.

GL: It’s been an absolute joy in learning from you, are there any last things you would like to share, any golden nuggets?

Amy: I know this is going to sound weird, but my approach to all of this is that we (Full of Noises) create soil. Our job is to create the soil for the artists, the audience, the participants and everybody else that comes to this place to take root in. Together we create this beautiful garden and our job is to keep the soil really nice and fertile and to just water and tend to the plants.

GL: I like how this organic metaphor takes us to the start of this conversation, when you started off introducing the space you work in and intentional connection between the natural world and art. Beautiful ending of this interview, thank you one more time for sharing and for all the work you are doing.

 

Read more posts in our Beyond the Edge – Inspiration and Innovation series here