Meet the Artists: Abbey Craig and Lily Garget
Remembering Together: Angus have appointed their artists to co-create memorials with communities. Meet Abbey Craig and Lily Garget.
Abbey Craig is a freelance creative arts practitioner with a deep-rooted belief in caring communities that can help to enable every person. This includes always considering and raising awareness and understanding of perceived disabilities, including mental health and complex health needs, illness, death, dying and bereavement.
With a degree in Drama and Education and a Primary PGCE, she initially worked with children and young people before moving into teaching in college and university and eventually working in the wider community.
Abbey believes that Scotland is a place where everyone, given the right support, can help each other in the most difficult of times.
Lily Garget is a visual artist based in Angus. Lily has created work about landscape, time, and self through naturally dyed textiles and self-published zines. Her interests in capturing landscape and creating gathering spaces have also evolved to incorporate mild steel metalwork. Through anam creative, a Glasgow based collective of visual artists and musicians, Lily is expanding her practice to create work and opportunities for other young creatives. These elements come together to form a practice around creating networks based on artistic collaboration, exploration of place, and investigation of materials.
Abbey Craig
Abbey says “ Remembering Together is an opportunity to reach out to our entire Angus community and to give time to enabling the sharing of Covid-19 experiences, to empower everyone to be part of the Covid Memorial process and outcome. To do this we intend on being as visible as possible, to put ourselves at the forefront of people’s minds in the coming months, to be available, approachable, and seen out and about across Angus, in towns and rural areas. To achieve this aim we will be approaching nurseries, schools, colleges, community groups, pre-existing services and charities in our area and will be out on high streets and at community events. We have a central base where people can ‘drop-in’ and find out more about the project and where workshops and more intimate meetings could take place. Our intention is to give as many people as possible the opportunity to be heard, to create their own memorial to their Covid-19 experience as we workshop, and to gather a tapestry of experiences and ideas to present for the 2nd phase of this exciting project.”
“This is a unique opportunity for everyone in Angus to come together as a whole community and to be part of something special, everyone’s experiences count, that’s very important to me.”
Lily says “I was drawn to the ‘Remembering Together’ programme because of the exciting opportunity to work back in my home county on a national project. The ethos of co-creation and recording a collective memory of the county, while highlighting individuals’ stories, is engaging and inspiring, and I am delighted to be part of that facilitation.
Lily Garget
Remembering Together speaks of a unique opportunity to represent, voice, and visualise individual experiences within the collective memory of the Angus communities over the past 2 years. My strategy for the role of Associate Artist is to collect stories and memories in the form of individual and collaborative works, in a range of visual media. These will come together to form a site-specific representation of the whole experience of Angus communities within the pandemic. Working with Abbey Craig on this project is extremely exciting, and I know our varied skills and experiences will give us a unique opportunity to gather these important stories from our county. We are committed to reaching and engaging as many communities as possible, and facilitating conversations and workshops which aid reflection, remembering, hope and healing for this part of the country. “