Founded by Josie Sutcliffe and Natalie McGrath, Dreadnought South West’s aim is to connect individuals and communities through telling great and courageous stories about women and girls, providing bold, high-quality arts and heritage work that inspires, educates and raises awareness throughout the South West and beyond.
Our first major project celebrated and marked the centenary of The Great 1913 Women’s Suffrage Pilgrimage, where women walked from Land’s End to Hyde Park demanding their right to vote. Dreadnought toured throughout the South West a new play Oxygen, and in addition there were forty-five arts and heritage way-marker projects led by individuals and communities along the pilgrimage route. All of these were inspired by the stories of women walking and protesting peacefully. It has been a model for Dreadnought’s work ever since.
Dreadnought South West (DSW) became a charitably incorporated organisation in 2016 with a Board of Trustees.
Our Purpose is:
‘To advance the education of the public, and in particular but not exclusively women and girls, in the role of women in society from both an historical and modern day perspective, in particular by using the medium of the arts.’
Our aim is to provide bold, high-quality, arts and heritage work that inspires, educates and raises awareness throughout the South West and beyond.
Founded in 2012, Dreadnought South West is an organisation that connects individuals and communities – through the telling and keeping of great and courageous stories about women that have lain undiscovered and often untold.
Our aim is to be a platform for bold, high-quality, arts and heritage work that inspires, educates and raises awareness of these stories throughout the South West and beyond.
We do this by working collaboratively with artists, historians, singers, songwriters, writers, actors, designers, journalists, producers, directors, dancers, choreographers, administrators, curators, facilitators and more. Our partners and supporters include arts based and non-arts based organisations, groups and individuals.
Our first major project in 2013 celebrated and marked the centenary of The Great 1913 Women’s Suffrage Pilgrimage and asked, ‘What is important to women today’? We toured a new play, ‘Oxygen’, performing at over 20 of the original stopping places along the South West route of the original Pilgrimage between Land’s End, Cornwall and Hyde Park, London.
This project reached 6,500 people across the South West Region and beyond with individuals and communities leading on how they made responses to the story of women walking along the pilgrimage way in 1913. There were approximately 45 attached way marker projects in order to achieve this. From an exhibition of original photographs from the pilgrimage donated by the Fox family in Cornwall, at Penlee House, to Daleks being yarn bombed in Corsham to mark the path the women took in the town, to a Speakers Corner event in Teignmouth.
In 2015 we went on the road to develop a new play The Orchard as part of our Rebellious Sounds Roadshow. Here we connected with a range of SW communities to listen in to their responses to our artistic work. Read more >
In 2016 we continued to build our work around The Orchard, developing the script, a new character and the sound of the play, whilst dreaming about what next. We also moved forward significantly in our planning and thinking for our Rebellious Sounds Archive’s future. Read more >
Occupy the Airwaves, was a 16 hour Community Radio takeover on International Women’s Day, 8th Wednesday March 2017. This celebrated and shared the diversity of voices and stories of women and girls from across Exeter. This was in collaboration with Phonic 106.8 FM, Exeter’s Community Radio. A wealth of amazing Podcasts were made for the day and these will be posted on this website soon, as will the programmes themselves so they can continue to be listened to and shared to a wider public. Read more >
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