Polly Brannan and George Harding

Pop-up DIY poster-making across Cliftonville West led by OSE’s Artistic Director Polly Brannan as part of our 2024-26 Civic Programme Home is where the garden is. In workshops we explored the poster as a tool for civic resistance and as a direct, DIY platform for community voice. 

Workshops took place at OSE’s Mobile Growing Unit, which toured Cliftonville West and Margate in the summers of 2025 and 2026, popping-up at Civic Partner venues Age UK Thanet, Ark: Cliftonville Cultural Space, Cliftonville Community Centre, Millmead Community Centre and Roma Drom: Cliftonville Culture Centre.

The posters stem from the artistic practice of OSE Artistic Director Polly Brannan, and were used as a way to explore complex questions about home, belonging and environmental justice with local residents in Cliftonville West. The questions posed by local community members changed at each pop-up venue, informed by their own diverse life experiences, and included:

What is a home? What does it mean to have roots? What connects you to home? What does home mean when someone is not there anymore? What does a garden mean to you? Who/what is a garden for? How are you connected to plants?

The design of the posters, the typography and where workshops took place were all co-designed with Despacito Art School as part of OSE’s Civic Programme. Typography for the unit was co-designed by Despacito Art School with Polly and OSE’s in-house graphic designer George Harding.

The posters were exhibited as part of Despacito Art School’s 2025 Summer Exhibition Home is where the garden is at Roland Ross gallery on Northdown Road in Cliftonville.

Polly Brannan is Artistic Director at Open School East. She is a social practice artist and educator who has produced projects at Serpentine Galleries, The Barbican, Tate Britain, Frieze Art Fair, Lisbon Experimenta Festival and Nottingham Contemporary, amongst others. Polly’s work is temporary and live, often staged in transient spaces and engaged in co-development through long-term working with local communities and authorities. To work in these settings and engage non-art audiences she has spent the last 20 years developing and learning from existing roaming and DIY approaches, such as mobile working units, poster making, community-led publishing and more, tools that enable her to build relationships with communities at a hyper-local level. Her work has a continued focus on improving access to green space, protecting spaces for vital services, and supporting the development of advisory groups to enable local residents to lobby for change.

This Civic Programme event is part of OSE’s two-year thematic cycle Home is where the garden is – find more events: https://openschooleast.org/home-is-civic/