Workshop leader Geraldine Crimmins next to her painting

ARTISTS with experience of homelessness have put on an inaugural exhibition that is awash with colour and creativity.

For the past six months 18 artists, some beginners and some experienced, met at an “open studio” on Saturdays facilitated by Geraldine Crimmins.

Their work is now on display for the first time at the Old Diorama Arts Centre until the end of the month.

The collective include people living in tents on the streets, a refugee, those living in hostels, and an artist who became street homeless at just 14.

“There’s a lot of stories in that room,” said Ms Crimmins, 66. “It’s good to have the people who have been through [the system] and who are stable in the same group because they know what it’s like.

“The combination of newcomers and older people makes a good atmosphere and the creativity that’s happening is amazing because of the group consciousness. It’s a collaborative thing.”

Ms Crimmins, who was once street homeless and a decade’s long hard drug user until she got clean in prison, said her group was an inclusive environment where the most vulnerable people could make, and now sell, their art.

With funding from a donor and space provided by the ODAC, she provides materials, snacks, allows pet dogs to come in, picks up a disabled man from his hostel and pays for bus fares.

Another of the artists, Shakir, suffered from multiple organ failure due to Covid and was rushed to the ICU. He is disabled, struggles with fatigue and has a degree in textile design.

When he first came to the sessions he could only manage a little drawing. Now he’s displaying three A4 images in the exhibition.

One wall in the exhibition

“That’s the power of the group. It’s about building their confidence and giving them a sense of community,” Ms Crimmins added.

Unlike some workshops which when they finish participants are immediately back out on the streets again, at the OADC they can “sit downstairs, chat and make a cup of tea and just relax”.

Ms Crimmins always loved art in school, but never considered herself a “creative”.

As a young woman she ran a clothes stall in Camden Lock and later trained as an addiction counsellor, after she kicked a two-year habit.

But when she was 38 she underwent the first treatment trial for Hepatitis C, an infection commonly contracted from injecting drugs, which led her to become clinically depressed and she relapsed.

She said: “I made some really bad choices. I lost my five-bedroom house and two businesses. I was the director of treatment for a halfway house. I had a whole career and I just lost everything and ended up on the streets within a year.”

She slept rough around Victoria train station for two years. Ms Crimmins said people would beat her up, which led to health complications, and she would wake up to find a man on top of her trying to rob her.

“There were very few people I’d hang out with as an addict. As a woman, you can’t sleep during the night. You’re on edge and awake. And then you have to sleep during the day.

“I was also so crazy with crack. I’m quite likeable, but then I was just getting on everyone’s nerves. I was just a train wreck. I wouldn’t sleep for three days.

“My mental health was terrible. Even in my own peer group of addicts, I wasn’t stable. I was very vulnerable,  so I got taken advantage of a lot.”

It was while in prison for a drug offence that she got clean again and had an “epiphany” from reading a book about spirituality.

“You can’t hear anything when you’re drugged up,” she said. “Nothing goes in, you’ve got a complete filter. ‘No one’s getting to me’. I thought I have got to take responsibility for my own bitterness. I was so bitter.

“I thought, ‘that’s it I’m not harming myself again with drugs’, because I was hurting myself.”

She picked up a paint brush and painted a nude that was displayed in a prison exhibition. Six people asked to buy it.

When she left prison, she attended life drawing classes and did a B-tec. At the age of 60 she took the leap to become a self-employed artist and has never looked back.

Now, she has combined her two passions, art and supporting marginalised people. “Someone did it for me, that’s why I want to do it for them,” she said.

The exhibition will run at the ODAC in Regent’s Place until the end of August.