Voices from the Past at Leicester Riverside Festival June 9/10

130 small objects wrapped up with brown paper and string- no tape or glue. 

130 names concocted from Victorian first names and Leicester family names. 

Stories to be written with dip pens and ink on crisp white labels and tied to the object. 

We had 124 stories but many were family/friend collaborations and many people stopped to read the stories so probably about 250 people engaged at different levels with the project.  

Being in the Eco Tent worked very well; we might not have had so many participants on the boat. People would have had to seek us out rather than being passersby.

Left handed and right handed writers, those who had never used a dip pen before... all produced beautiful scripts.

I prepared 90 objects for the 2 days; 70 stories were written on Saturday so we found 40 more objects to wrap. 

Lots of conversations about 'the olden days'; older people's memories and younger people's imaginations from what they had been told.

The stories have great depth and variety. They are an intriguing snapshot of Leicester imagination on June 9th and 10th 2012.

Some were written in the writer's first language and translated verbally.

Some stories had additional drawings, others were embellished with motifs.

And this is just the first 70... they will all be part of the Cargoes exhibition at Loughborough and Nottingham in July.