Volunteering for “Sock it to me” by Janet Blackman – booster week 18/10

For the Festival Made In Roath, Janet Blackman had organised a community art piece called ‘Sock it to me’ that I offered to volunteer for during the first Thursday it opened.

I offered to post it on both of my Instagram pages, as well as ‘my story’ on it to get the word out, with the hashtags ‘madeinroath2018’ and ‘madeinroath’ to gain some more attention and hopefully get a lot of socks up!

The purpose of the piece is to get the community together to put their socks up to symbolise loneliness. The missing pair of a sock leaves the other sock ‘lonely’ and forgotten, just like how some people in our communities might be lonely and forgotten. This is to symbolise bringing the lonely people together and make them sociable again.

I helped by putting up the washing lines, putting on the pegs, as well as pipe warmers around the trees so no damage would be caused to them, and then put up posters around the park for passers-by to know what was going on. I also took some photos of Janet for her own documentation of the work she was doing. I then chatted to walkers who were interested in getting their socks from home to put up, as well to Janet about her work, time at university and how being an artist was like in Cardiff, which was very useful. This was 11am until around 4pm, therefore it was an filled and eventful day of gathering information and helping Janet.