Celebrating the best of Harehills community inspires Leeds 2023 project led by animators

Leeds Animation Workshop has been creating, producing and distributing animated short films on social issues for 44 years.

A not-for-profit cooperative company run by women, the organisation has been based in Harehills since the 1980s.

Leeds 2023 gave the team a new reason to share and engage with their local neighbourhood.

Group members Naomi, Oran and Terry tell us why they were keen to be involved in Leeds’ landmark year of culture:

There’s always more anyone can do in their local area. We’ve seen a lot of creative and cultural change over the years we’ve been working in Harehills, so to have a new opportunity to do something significant, with the backing of Leeds 2023, was exciting.

Creating work to be part of Leeds 2023’s My World My City My Neighbourhood series of projects meant that we could be ambitious and do something locally, on a big scale.

We wanted to celebrate all the positive things about the community here in Harehills. That felt really important.

We wanted to tackle some of the negative press Harehills often receives in the media; instead we wanted to welcome people to come to events in this area, and also encourage those who already live or work here to get involved in something special.

Harehills is incredibly diverse with lots of different communities, so it was key to us to try to include as many of them as we possibly could.

We had promised to provide a variety of workshops in the course of this project, and we also decided to create a big exhibition, the Harehills Culture Show.

It featured several professional artists with local connections, but also some of the content for the exhibition was produced in the workshops we held at the Compton Road Library, Thackray Medical Museum and other local venues.

People who attended produced drawings, paintings, and animated films. In one of the workshops, held in the library, people learned to do embroidery, using photographs of buildings from the area transferred onto fabric. The results are beautiful and unique.

We also co-ordinated a huge collectively-made sculpture - the Bayswater Tapestry. Thirty-five different knitters worked to create 240 small pieces that were sewn together to make a 2m x 5m hanging that shows a terrace of traditional Leeds back-to-back houses, like those which make up many of the streets in Harehills, and across the city.

The Tapestry can now be seen on display in Woodhouse Community Centre.

Our local school, Harehills Primary, also got involved in the Culture Show. We asked them to create images inspired by the back-to-backs.

Their art teachers liked the idea, and helped all 600 pupils to produce pictures, drawings, models and sculptures depicting their homes in the nearby streets.

We brought all this together at Shine, the Social Enterprise centre, and welcomed in the local community to celebrate with us.

When the schoolchildren saw their work on the walls showing their neighbourhood, it was a really special moment.

This project engaged people of all ages from across the community, and we say: hats off to Leeds, for not giving up on being a City of Culture - regardless of our exit from Europe! - and for investing in the arts, for including local artists and organisations, and for recognising the importance of creativity and its impact on our mental health and community cohesion.

We’re excited to see it all continue during 2023 and beyond – there’s much more to do that can support and connect us all.

You can catch some of our films as part of the Scalarama film festival, when we will be putting on a screening of animated shorts. Tickets are free or ‘pay as you feel’ for the screening at Compton Road Library on Monday September 19, 5.15pm-7pm.