ABOUT THE ARTIST

Made homeless in 2005, Vieve Forward moved into Davis House Salvation Army hostel in Swindon. Thinking she would only be there for a couple of weeks, she ended up staying for 15 months. She attended the art classes provided and began producing portraits of her fellow residents and gathering their stories. She gained a small grant from Arts Council England to mount an exhibition of those drawings and stories, which took place in the Wyvern Theatre and Council Offices in Swindon in September 2006.

By then, she had started an Access course in Art and Design at Swindon College, and began to develop her work on the theme of homelessness and exclusion. This culminated in an end-of-year exhibition in which she showed a large painting entitled The Last Supper at Davis House, in which the place of Jesus and his disciples was taken by some of the homeless people she had known - alcoholics, drug-users, ex-criminals, people with mental health problems and learning disabilities, and the unemployable.

This exhibition was visited by a member of Swindon Drug Interventions Programme, who invited her to produce murals for the cells at Swindon Gable Cross Police Station. Work on this project began in the summer of 2007, and took over two years to come to fruition. Vieve is now working on  three more Storytiles murals for Gable Cross Police Station, and is meanwhile offering copies of Charlie's Story for sale and accepting commissions for new stories of all kinds.