Beyond Ramps

We worked with Opera North to facilitate some wonderful workshops with our Leeds Lifelong Learning Programmes, supporting them to create their own musical recording for the Richmond Hill Sensory Trail. The participants worked with the harpist from the Orchestra of Opera North to create their own version of Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, including recreating the scene from the poem the music was inspired by using multi-sensory items and instruments, and adding their own musical suggestions to the beginning and end of the piece. They also came up with and recorded their own Purple Patch-inspired prompts listeners, including ‘think about what the music means to you’, ‘look up at the stars’, and ‘do some calm movements’.

We facilitated the quiet space at Bradford 2025’s opening ceremony, ‘Rise’, helping to ensure that the event was accessible and inclusive for all. We used lights, blankets, cushions, and a dark den to create a welcoming atmosphere, and brought along small activities that related to the event, including playing cards, origami fortune tellers and escapology-inspired knots, enabling anyone who used the space to still feel connected to the show’s magic theme.

We were so excited to work with Leeds Film during their 2024 Leeds International Film Festival to bring one of their short films, ‘House Phone’ by James McGrath, into our Lifelong Learning Programmes. We brought the film to life through creative activities which explored themes including relationships, disconnection and sharing emotions.

You can read more about the partnership here.

We worked with Leeds 2023 to bring two of their projects to life for learning-disabled people using creative and multi-sensory activity: Making a Stand, an art installation in City Square, and Moon Palace, the mobile observatory.

We organised a day of relaxed, accessible tours of Making a Stand, delivering interactive sessions that supported participants to explore the artwork in multi-sensory ways, learn about how Leeds used to be the Forest of Leodis, and discover the amazing ways that trees help the environment.

Moon Palace was a mobile observatory created by Heather Peak and Ivan Morison with East Street Arts. We worked with Leeds 2023 to deliver creative, multi-sensory sessions that supported learning-disabled adults and children to explore Moon Palace and discover constellations, galaxies and the wonder of space through music, movement, art, and a sensory story about the Cassiopeia constellation.

We worked with Eureka! The National Children’s Museum in 2018, linking in with a digital art exhibition called ‘Fusion’ in the Spark Gallery to provide a fully accessible, multi-sensory workshop based on the idea of having control over our journey through life. We used creative, interactive experiences to explore what mattered most to the children taking part, and what their hopes were for the future, and used these ideas to inform individual pieces of woven artwork that represented where the children were, where they wanted to be, and the wonderful array of possibilities that were open to them in the future.

Sensory Stories was a pioneering ‘immersive literature’ programme which we delivered with Kirklees Libraries (2016-2017) and Bradford Libraries (2017-2018) with funding from Arts Council England.

We created and delivered sensory experiences for a variety of stories, from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Through delivering sensory storytelling sessions at Bradford and Kirklees libraries and training library staff and giving them the tools to deliver their own sessions, the projects created long-term impacts, as multi-sensory, immersive storytelling became embedded in the libraries’ community engagement work.

Watch a video about our work with Kirklees Libraries here.

In 2017, we worked as a partner on ‘Around the Toilet’, a cross-disciplinary, arts-based research project funded by the AHRC Connected Communities programme. We used our Purple Patch Approach to enable children and young people with learning disabilities to be involved and meaningfully included in the research project, through delivering interactive workshops which explored toilets as places of exclusion and belonging.

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Dreams of Milk Wood was a sensory installation created in partnership with Buffalo and funded by Arts Council England. We worked with participants with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) to inspire, create and experience ‘Under Milk Wood’ by Dylan Thomas as an interactive, multi-sensory installation in the heart of Leeds Central Library.

Watch a video walkthrough of the installation here.

We worked with Sheffield University on their research project ‘Living Life to the Fullest’, which  sought to forge new understandings of the lives, hopes, desires and contributions of children and young people with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions.

We designed creative, accessible workshops which enabled young people to express themselves and share their hopes and fears using the arts. Participants made superhero masks and reflected on their heroes, created multi-sensory postcards about their favourite places and spaces they feel happiest, and painted fingerprint trees to represent their different relationships. The workshops allowed the researchers to gather data for the project in an accessible way that placed the participants at the centre of the project and allowed them to engage meaningfully, in a positive and supportive environment. 

Watch a BBC Breakfast feature about the project here.