Mr Miah

The past couple of weeks have involved two separate visits to record the story of Mr Aslom Miah. Mr Miah was born in Bangladesh and has lived in Rawtenstall, in the same house, for 51 years.

Mr Miah has been writing a book about his life. How he arrived in England in 1963 speaking no English at all; how he found work in the local mills; then on the buses; between these  jobs he built up a chain of restaurants throughout the area. His story include how he quickly realised that he must learn English, and how with the help and support of friends and acquaintances, English-language classes were organised in Rawtenstall. Mr Miah went on to act as an interpreter for the Home Office, and the Crown Court. Now, still very active and alert, he wants to pass on his story to a younger generation. 

I visited Aslom Miah first with my colleagues Habiba Shenza (above), and later with Shamshad Khan. In total we made over 3 hours of recordings of Mr Miah talking about his life. Because of the work on the book recently, his memories are particularly fresh and vivid - and a wonderful gift to the Different Moons project. 

In fact I knew Aslom Miah in the 1980s, when Horse + Bamboo had a workshop in Foundry Street in Rawtenstall, which is just round the corner from the Miah family. His young children used to come to play in our workshop, and one of the delights of these recent interviews was meeting his daughters Aysha, and Amina, once again. It was lovely to hear their memories of those days - of our horses, making clay models, and the characters they met in the theatre workshop. 

Islamic Geometric Design

Habiba and I spent the day at Northlight Studio in Hebden Bridge taking part in the Islamic Geometric Design workshop led by Eric Broug. Eric is the author of a Thames & Hudson book with the same title as our workshop session, and it was an excellent introduction to the subject. Enjoyable and informative, Eric gave us an overview, and then followed up with practical sessions is which we all created several versions of Islamic designs. 

Although our individual designs were exciting and sometimes slightly challenging to create, using simple tools like rulers and compasses, perhaps the most fascinating feature of the workshop was to see how the individual designs were transformed when 'tessellated', or placed together in tiled combinations, revealing new shapes and forms in the larger design. 

One of the other people on the workshop was Maryam Golubeva, a UK based Moscow born and raised artist with Turkish ancestry. Maryam works in the medium of papercutting and has a particular passion for Islamic art. Seeing photographs of her paper cuts made me feel that this may be the way to introduce some of the design work we're beginning to see emerge in our Different Moons project.

A second animated film

We've started on the second of the planned animated films. The story, once more, is taken from the recorded interview with Mr Mazhar Hussain; its a short section in which he talks about his sea journey from Pakistan to England.

Habiba Shenza is creating the animation, and she has already edited the sound recording into the two-minute section she wants to animate. Habiba is a mehndi artist, and is using henna forms as the inspiration for the visual style of the film. Today we created some short test sections to try different approaches to stop-frame animation. Tomorrow the serious animating starts!