Garden of Connection
Art Club with Mafwa Theatre: Roxby Community Garden, Lincoln Green,
Art Club is Mafwa Theatre's creative workshop programme for adults from refugee, asylum seeker and settled communities in Leeds. For this round, Mafwa Theatre worked with Lens Lab Project to explore photography and image-making at Roxby Community Garden in Lincoln Green: through portraits, photowalks, hands-on printing and collaborative activities.
Participants worked with a mix of methods spanning the history of photography, from anthotypes and cyanotypes made using plants from the garden itself, to tintype portraits and more conventional digital image-making, building a body of work with real variety in tone, scale and treatment rather than a single house style.
The work was exhibited at Roxby Community Garden as part of Refugee Week 2026, with prints shown alongside the plates, negatives and processes used to make them.
The group's work is also collected in Garden of Connection, a 44-page zine designed collaboratively across a series of planning sessions. Image size, pacing and paper stock all shift through the book, with different weights and finishes marking a change in section. The cover carries no photograph or title on its face, just a textured stock in a colour drawn from the garden and its surroundings in Lincoln Green.
Every one of the 70 copies is finished by hand: loose-leaf bound with an elasticated loop, with a postcard tucked into two diagonal corner slits cut into the cover in the manner of an old photo-corner mount, a nod to the hand-processed, tactile nature of the images inside.
Garden of Connection will be launched at Roxby Community Garden's Harvest Festival, alongside a tintype portrait session for visitors.
Made with and by: Bianca, Blerina, Charm, Danmore, David Mackie, Hannah Limbachia, Jie Wang, Jonathan, Kamran, Lara, Michael, Vjollca and Wes.
Art Club was made possible thanks to project partner Mafwa Theatre, the community at Roxby Community Garden, Leeds City Council and the National Lottery Community Fund.