Alongside Art & Action: Making Change in Victorian Britain exhibition artist Lily Ash Sakula devised and delivered a series of online workshops with participants from the Art for All Community Learning Programme.

Taking social realist paintings by GF Watts as a starting point, each workshop invited participants to discuss the paintings, share ideas and explore the themes of the exhibition through the lens of their own experiences.

Participants were prompted to give voices to the silent subjects of these paintings and to imagine radically hopeful futures that we could all inhabit. As Lily Ash Sakula states: "We need art not just to reflect reality but to help us envision what could happen next; because we cannot build a better future without first imagining it."

The final film, edited and directed by Lily Ash Sakula, is composed of drawings and recordings made during the workshops with the Woking Women Centre, halow, User Voice and the families programme and in response to resources sent to local schools and HMP YOI Bronzefield.

With thanks to contributing participants from the following Art for All Community Programme partnerships: Woking Women’s Support Centre, halow, HMP YOI Bronzefield, Surrey County Council - User Voice and Participation and Watt Gallery Trust’s Family Programme.

Lead Animator: Lily Ash Sakula Sound Design and Music: Taha Hassan With thanks to: Dora Ash Sakula and Vania Chavez The Art & Action: Making Change in Victorian Britain exhibition forms part of external co-curator Dr Chloe Ward’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project ‘From Protest to Propaganda: A History of Activist Art in Britain, 1845–1918’.

The Arts and Humanities investigate the values and beliefs which underpin both who we are as individuals and how we undertake our responsibilities to our society and to humanity globally.

Find out more on the AHRC website.