Immortal Bloom

Co-founder/Director in Immortal Bloom CIC is a West Yorkshire based Arts Education organisation that uses circularity in design to create, educate and visually communicate environmental subjects.

Our key principle is Circularity: we use waste materials such as single use plastics and fabrics to facilitate fun, creative ways to reduce, reuse and recycle, whilst having inclusive discussions about the natural environment. By using these materials in a creative way, we believe that by adding value to these materials, we can respect their life cycle, by reducing how much we consume and offer education about the recycling process.

Our work explores common and under appreciated materials, and using them to tell stories about both our impacts on the climate and the properties and science behind the materials themselves. To do this, we use repurposable and open source electronic devices which, like the rest of our sculptures, can be taken apart, reconfigured and repurposed, and recycled at the end of their lives. In this, we also explore the impact of technology on our lives and the environment. It can be difficult to maintain a sense of wellness around the ‘doom and gloom’ message of climate change and the overwhelming amount of information that digital media provides, so we break this down into bite size topics using a hands on approach by tapping into our inner creative to maintain a sense of fun when making positive change.

We like to collaborate with fellow organisations, businesses and individuals to exchange skills and knowledge to navigate our practices into accessible processes.

We work with a number of disadvantaged and excluded groups, in particular disabled people; and all of our directors work extensively with multiply disadvantaged communities in Leeds and Calderdale, including women and non-binary people, and people with economic and educational disadvantage.