My second project with Vox Liminis’ Unbound, a community of people with diverse experience of the criminal justice system - former and serving prisoners (on home leave, or communicating via email-a-prisoner), people on community sentences, their families, artists, academics, and people who work in the criminal justice system.

I was asked to work with people from Unbound it create some artwork for the cover of their forthcoming book of poems.

The Unbound Community have written the book with poet and storyteller, Pádraig Ó Tuama!

Ó Tuama worked alongside Unbound to develop poems exploring the challenges of coming home after crime and punishment, inspired by learning from the Distant Voices research project. The collection, published by Tapsalteerie – an award-winning Scottish poetry publishing house based in rural Aberdeenshire, is now available  here.

The artwork was created by listening to some of the poems with the group and working with them to doodle, sketch, write and discuss the imagery that sprang to mind. There were about 12 of us in the room so there were a lot of ideas, I tried to condense them down into an abstract sketch which developed from drawings of bars, traffic lights stuck on red, mazes and spikey vortex, using institutional building type shapes and a palette decided on through online communication through the groups Basecamp.

The green line bending the shape and coming through the bars could be, if you want it to, representative of an act of casual kindness.