There are a lot of names on the CAN YOU HEAR US? programme. This is about some of the names that aren’t. The designers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, makers, printers and businesses who have helped bring it all to life, and who are doing brilliant things on the Isle of Wight every day.
Check out Part One for our other contributors: https://creativeisland.org/the-people-behind-can-you-hear-us-part-one/
Steve Miles
Steve Miles has been making art for most of his life, although his route through it has been anything but straight.
Growing up in the West Midlands, he became fascinated with hip-hop and graffiti in the early 1980s and started painting under the name Toxic363. He later worked in print, learning the gloriously analogue business of paste-up artwork, color separations and typesetting before studying graphic design. He moved to the Isle of Wight in 1994 and eventually took that experience into videogames, where he continues to work as a graphic designer and artist for Island-based Stainless Games. Alongside all of that, he has continued painting and developing his own studio practice.
Which brings us to the front cover of the CAN YOU HEAR US? programme.
Sometimes collaboration involves months of workshops and moodboards. Sometimes you put an artist’s work next to a design and think: well, obviously.
One of Steve’s paintings sat so beautifully with the colors and visual identity Thump had created that it felt as though the two had been made with each other in mind.
So it became our cover.
Steve is also creating an installation for Re:Box, the tiny gallery housed inside a former telephone box in Ryde. It is another little reminder of how many different forms a creative life can take, and how many of them are happening within a few miles of each other.
The Isle of Wight Festival Team
Dan, Lisa and John from the Isle of Wight Festival offered CAN YOU HEAR US? space at the Festival for free, which was an extraordinary act of support in itself. Then somehow it grew, with the project ending up on the screens in the Big Top and on the Main Stage too.
When Sam heard, she jumped at the opportunity and asked Trudie Wilson to film a short piece with her. Not long afterwards, Sam was standing at the Festival watching the slightly surreal sight of herself appearing on the giant Main Stage screens, talking about CAN YOU HEAR US?
We’re hugely grateful to Dan, Lisa, John and the wider Festival team for giving the project that kind of platform, and for backing it so generously.
Georgie Harris
Georgie Harris is a maker. She loves set design, festival environments and the business of turning a space into something. She has previously worked with young people at The Port in Newport and is now part of the CAN YOU HEAR US? leadership programme.
She is also a young person figuring out what it means to build a creative life on the Isle of Wight.
For the Ventnor Exchange Arena, Georgie has been making 65 metres of felt bunting. Sixty-five metres. It’s the sort of number that makes you realise quite how much cutting, making and assembling is involved.
But Georgie isn’t making the finished piece alone. The bunting has been designed to be handed over to the people who come through the Arena. Visitors will be able to pick up Posca pens and add their own responses to a question about what they love about the Island.
Skinny Mammoth Media
The three people behind Skinny Mammoth Media have taken a fairly spectacular route into filmmaking.
Stu Fisher, Dave Waight and Alex Katsi came from music. Between them they have toured internationally, worked as session musicians, produced albums and built years of live and studio audio experience. Stu and Dave have even toured with Courtney Love’s band Hole. Their shared interest in film eventually became Skinny Mammoth Media in 2014.
Today, from their base in Rookley, they work across video and audio production, live streaming, graphics, photography, CGI and post-production. It’s a serious production toolkit sitting right in the middle of the Island.
They have also been helping us create some promotional films for CAN YOU HEAR US?, capturing some of the people, places and ideas behind it.
Raven Print & Design
Digital things are useful. But there is still a particular thrill when several thousand copies of something you’ve been staring at on a screen suddenly exist in the real world.
For us, that moment has repeatedly involved Raven Print & Design.
Based in Cowes, Raven is run by Scott Raven, who has worked in the print industry for 25 years. The business produces everything from books, brochures and business cards to huge banners, signage, stickers and wide-format prints. They also design, finish, bind, laminate, fold and generally perform the mysterious alchemy required to turn a file into a thing.
For CAN YOU HEAR US?, they have printed the materials that are now travelling around the Island.
And print travels in a funny way.
A box leaves Cowes. A programme gets dropped at a cafe. Somebody picks it up. It gets folded into a bag, left on a kitchen table, handed to a friend. Somebody circles something they want to see.
Suddenly an object that started life on somebody’s laptop has become a connection between people.
There is craft in that too.
And the people without a section
This article could keep going.
The Royal Isle of Wight County Show offered us free space in its programme even though, in the end, we weren’t able to attend. The Isle of Wight Council lent us a gazebo and has helped in those practical, unglamorous ways that can make the difference between something happening and not happening.
Then there are all the people who have taken programmes.
This sounds small until you have several thousand of them to distribute.
Behind the scenes there have been moments when CAN YOU HEAR US? has essentially been me and Sam, a car and an alarming quantity of print. Then someone says, “Give me a stack, I’ll take those.”
Someone is heading to Ryde. Someone knows a cafe. Someone can get some into a community centre. Someone has space in a shop window.
And off they go.
That generosity has appeared again and again. People lending things, sharing contacts, offering knowledge, making introductions, giving time or simply saying yes when saying no would have been easier.
Perhaps that is why we wanted to write this.
CAN YOU HEAR US? is interested in what happens when people feel more connected to the culture of the place they live. When organisations find one another. When people get opportunities to try things, make things and build confidence. When young people can see a future for themselves here. When talent doesn’t automatically have to look across the water to find opportunity.
But none of that begins with CAN YOU HEAR US?.
CAN YOU HEAR US? has simply given us the enormous pleasure of working alongside them.
So yes, this is a thank you.
But it is also an introduction.
Look what’s here.
