Bronagh LawsonBronagh Lawson Artist Twitter @creativchangeni Instagram @creativchangeni born in Newtownards in 1966 to Frances and Paddy lawson, who had returned to Northern Ireland to oversee the design and build of the Ulster Museum extension, Bronagh spent her irst two years on the Upper Newtownards Road with her three older sisters before moving to Portaferry in 1968. After Frances and Paddy separated in the seventies, the girls and Frances moved to a council house in Strangford, Educated at Down High School, Downpatrick, in 1986 Bronagh attended art college in Bristol and then gained a first class degree in textiles and fashion at Winchester School of Art, Hampshire. Moving to London on graduation, she won a Fulbright Scholarship and attended Parsons School of Design in New York. Bronagh sometimes visited Northern Ireland and despaired. Returning to Northern Ireland from New York pre-ceasefire, she spent time as a participant on various cross-community cross-border development programmes before deciding to use her creativity in a different way. For Thirteen years she set up and ran cross -border cross community development programmes mostly within the enterprise sector in interface areas of Belfast.Within this gift of a time she investigated her own socialization of being brought up in rural coastal Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and heard any stories from people in the city similar to life she saw only on TV growing up- and often switched off as it was so horrific. She spent three years based in north Belfast, between the republican New Lodge and Loyalist Tiger's bay. Walking into work one day she collapsed. She had become incapable of processing the trauma that people living in some of the most deprived wards in Europe at the time brought in with them daily.Disillusioned with the traumatised structures that had developed around the peace-dividend, wounded, she found herself coming back to her original training as an artist and hence started a journey towards her own healing. This book is a true account of that time and it's unusual unfolding outcome. Read More Read Less