A place making community arts
project
TALE TOWN
is a community arts project by Elizabeth Marruffo and Campbell Whyte that encourages people to reconnect with their local area.
Participants celebrate their neighbourhood as a site of unique stories, both big and small, and tell these stories through a series of playful workshops.
COMICS
During the workshops, everyone taking part chooses a personal story about the area. Expert comics teacher Campbell Whyte then shows them how to identify the structure of their story and compose a draft of it in comics form.
These stories are workshopped and developed into a series of autobiographical comics that are published together as the TALE TOWN newspaper.
CRAFT
It’s then time to jump from the flat page and in to the third dimension.
Sculptor, Elizabeth Marruffo then guide participants as they craft poseable, soft-felt models of their cast. These models are joined with dioramas of the local location that their story is set in.
COMMUNITY
Finally, the community gets to come together and celebrate their local area. The sculptures and newspaper comics are exhibited together in an open event for the public.
TALE TOWN – INGLEWOOD
The first TALE TOWN we brought to life was the suburb of Inglewood in Perth, where eighteen local residents shared their stories about the Great Bunnings Fire, life during lockdown, their favourite local cafes and the healing power of nature.
The resulting sculptures and newspapers were exhibited at the Inglewood library and then re-exhibited as part of the 2021 Perth Comic Arts Festival at Spectrum Project Space.
You can read the resulting newspaper below, overflowing with the enthusiasm of first-time comics-makers exploring their local community.
TALE-TOWN-web