WIN vibrant art print and help Stage Goat Theatre Company

I'm a Mid Wales artist and I’m auctioning off one of my art prints to raise money for our local Stage Goat Theatre Company (details of the print are all below).

I’m Mum to 1, aunty to 3 and friend to countless kids at Stage Goat Theatre Company - a theatre group which was set up by a local Mum, Tracey - entirely voluntarily.

Tracey is the humblest person I know, far more comfortable behind the curtain than in front. But the service she has offered to our community - for almost a decade now - extends far beyond the customary remit of a theatre company and is nothing short of an award-worthy, superhuman magnitude.

Tracey set up Stage Goat with the vision of gently facilitating a theatre group that is youth-focussed, youth-led and wholly inclusive. It began as a weekly class with a handful of kids to what is now 4-nights a week of classes, with hundreds of kids.

Tracey’s rare and precious gift as a facilitator, is to work exceptional magic with our kids - treating them with love and respect and keying into and teasing out, what makes each of them shine and feel damn fine about themselves.

To boot, she works hard to foster a close community of supportiveness, collaboration and mutual cheerleading amongst the children, young people, volunteers and wider Stage Goats community.

When it comes to show time: there is a place for absolutely every single character stripe and shade… from the outgoing ones who embrace big stage roles, to the more introverted, shy children who have key roles as stage managers, directors, choreographers, photographers. Everyone is made to feel a vital part of the production. And often too, the kids who join as painfully shy - end up opening up and out and shining on stage too.

And this is where Stage Goat as a vital community asset steps up: Lampeter and the surrounding areas is in rural Mid Wales, an area largely cut off from bustling cultural and civic infrastructure.

At the same time, rural areas are often a font of creativity - borne of necessity, resourcefulness and frankly, the ‘boredom’ and experimentalism that are vital rites of passage of a rural (and any!) childhood and adolescence.

However, vital youth services have been consistently cut or closed down over the last few decades, leaving a dramatically dwindling number of places for our young people to go - vital places for that fizz of youthful energy that needs a space, a channel and an outlet.

Crucially too, our young people need places to be/go/express themselves and feel a sense of creative and expressive autonomy - as a vital support to their mental health and overall wellbeing.

Within the umbrella of Stage Goat, a youth cafe and events venue has also been established, with plans afoot to develop all of this further, culminating in the vision for an entirely youth-led arts venue.

I’m not sure how you put a monetised value on such a priceless gift - to our kids and by extension, our community and society in general.

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I’m hoping to raise as much money as I can for Stage Goats, via the auctioning off of a print mine, called ‘BECAUSE THIS IS HOW WE WANT TO LIVE’.

The piece includes hand-painted, neon pink font set against my spin on a pointillist style - namely flowers drawn from thousands and thousands of hand-painted ‘dots’. As artists, we are our own worst critics but this is a piece even I love and have on my own wall at home.

If you’d like a chance to win yourself a large print of this work, a £5 donation will buy you 5 ticket ‘chances’.

Click HERE to go to my website to see the print you could win (the format of this fundraiser means I can't add an actual image of it here!)