Garden Park Parties

Garden Park Parties (Mabelle Arts)
My role: Assistant Arts Facilitator

Garden Park Parties is a community arts initiative hosted by Mabelle Arts in Mabel Park. Designed to bring the community of Mabelle Avenue together, the program focused on fostering social cohesion, collective expression, and strengthening connections within the community. Through participatory art activities, music and fun games, the project encouraged residents to explore their relationship with the park and with one another. 

I served as a supporting artist in one of the arts workshops, assisting the lead artist with facilitation and guiding participants. This role involved hands-on support in workshops, coordinating materials, and ensuring a welcoming, collaborative environment for all attendees. 

The program featured a range of participatory art experiences. In the first week, participants engaged in paper-making from scratch, experimenting with different colours and learning the process of creating their own paper. The second and third weeks focused on exploring personal connections to the garden, where community members expressed their reflections through painting and drawing. 

Garden Park Parties reinforced the power of collective artistic expression in building social connections. The workshops emphasized process, experimentation, and inclusion, showing how participatory art can transform public spaces into sites of shared experience. My role as a supporting artist provided insight into facilitating creative community engagement, coordinating collaborative projects, and nurturing a playful yet structured environment for artistic exploration.