I came to Wavertree Town Hall on a rainy Saturday in September, not really sure what to expect. I was here to celebrate the final phase of Metal’s two-year programme Picton Play; a programme of collaborative arts projects championing the diverse creativity thriving in the Picton / Wavertree area. The focus of the day was Make Time For Love, a project devised and delivered by artist duo YARA + DAVINA. Make Time For Love explored the different kinds of love that can exist between us and sought to draw our attention to how we might honour these feelings. This project was the outcome of months of workshops and engagement with the local community and resulted in a series of installations and artworks along Wavertree High Street, as well as an interactive sound walk produced by sound artist and composer Sara Wolff.
The rain signalled a shift in the seasons; in the wake of seismic political shifts towards the right, and with the much-protested Labour party conference looming over the city, the tail end of summer felt heavy and busy and switching to a slower pace for autumn was welcomed. It’s a time when the social, political and literal climate begs for the balm of community.
I arrived wet but warmed by the number of people who had turned up to see the artworks, to talk to the artists, and to celebrate the project. As community members started to arrive in Wavertree Town Hall, I sat down with Yara El-Sherbini, of YARA + DAVINA, the moniker used for her joint art practice with Davina Drummond. Everyone arriving at the town hall had just been part of a procession from the library to the Picton clock tower, one of the local landmarks and totems for the project. The procession’s march had been set to music from a local brass band, which took participants to Picton Clock Tower to celebrate its form as the emblem and catalyst for Make Time For Love.
The story of the clocktower is that its designer, antiquary and architect James Picton, created it in 1884 as a memorial for his late wife, Sarah Pooley, who died in 1879. Not only was this monument inherently about love, it was also about loss, and how we find time for the things that really matter. This clock became a poetic metaphor and inspiration for much of YARA+DAVINA’s early thinking. It felt poignant to the artists that this clock could no longer make time, and seemed pertinent to the particular social and political moment we’re in now. They wondered, ‘how do we literally make time for love?’ in a time when our connections are increasingly frayed as communities.
El-Sherbini told me more about the practice she shared with Drummond, emphasising their passion for bringing art outside of the, often impenetrable, walls of the traditional gallery space and into the community. Beginning in June 2025, Make Time For Love worked in collaboration with four different community groups:. Asylum Link, an organisation dedicated to helping asylum seekers and refugees, providing a warm welcome and friendship through a range of community activities and advice; Capeesh CIC, a youth project offering music tuition and mentoring; Damien John Kelly House, supported accommodation for men recovering from drug and alcohol addictions; and Love Wavertree, a CIC formed in 2019 aiming to improve the local area, based out of the charity shop Reloved on the high street. Working with these groups is a nuanced representation of the diversity and multiplicity within Wavertree. Alongside these groups, Metal sent a call out for a board of community advisors called ‘Mystery Dreamers’ who would also share and shape the programme, bringing in further consultation with, and direction from, the area’s communities.
YARA + DAVINA created three artworks with these groups which took temporary residence along the high street: a clock created with each community group, each clock displaying a chosen phrase about what we make time for. For Asylum Link members, coming together to share food when away from home was a ritual that helped create a sense of belonging, and so they chose the phrase ‘time to share’. Love Wavertree, El-Sherbini explains, had a sense of ‘vitality’ to the space where volunteers would listen to music and dance together: ‘time to dance’. What came up again and again with Damien John Kelly House was the idea of the men choosing, everyday, to show up for themselves, and so they chose ‘time to show up’. Lastly, Capeesh CIC chose ‘time for unity’, arrived at through lyric workshops with the artists and young people, creating a communally written song.
After the town hall, we made our way to the library for a performance of the song, the revealing of the final artwork by YARA + DAVINA, and to hear from ‘Stories, Mystery and Love’. Another element of the Picton Play project, this pamphlet contains poems and short fiction written by Hana Issa, Sophie Herxheimer and Joelle Taylor. Joelle and Sophie read from their respective stories, Joelle introducing her contribution by talking about the character of the area — its humour, working-class community and rich histories — and how she sought to encapsulate that hyperlocal perspective in her writing. This platforming of hyper-locality was woven through the whole day, with Make Time For Love’s celebration feeling like the perfect expression of Picton and Wavertree’s ‘je ne sais quoi’ in all its multilayered idiosyncrasy.
After the readings, the finale of YARA + DAVINA’s commission was revealed: a rug that now lives permanently in the library space. A tufted pop of bright yellow and pink, the rug matches the font and colours of a pin badge made in collaboration with Love Wavertree volunteers. The pin badge will be available for everyone who donates to the shop; another way in which the life of the project continues in the community after the launch. The rug reads ‘I flourish in the shade’, which a local community member explained was the English translation of the Wavertree motto: ‘Sub Umbra Floresco’. Translating the motto from its original, arcane, Latin to English, illuminates this beautiful phrase in a way that undoes the implied exclusivity of the Latin original: this was an encapsulation of the shared ethos and accessibility of the artworks, and care-full engagement throughout Make Time For Love.
The final commission to mention, is Sara Wolff’s soundwalk. This walk invites you to journey through the area’s psycho – and physical – geography. To compose this work, Wolff worked with the same community groups as YARA + DAVINA, mapping each of the group’s stories to a specific location and soundtracking it with original music. The sound walk can be listened to via the Echoes app. It is activated by taking a walk along the designated route and visiting its marked sites to trigger the stories and memories relating to those spots. People are invited to keep contributing via voice note to build the archive and create something that grows and maps the community relationships to specific parts of Wavertree.
This idea of local, colloquial knowledge, of folkloric awareness and urban legend, taps into something key about the artists’ shared motivation throughout Make Time For Love and about community arts more generally. This was an arts programme that had been made collaboratively with the community it happened in. Jon Davies, a producer at Metal, reinforced this point when he described Picton Play as ‘not wanting to do art to people but with people’. That magic and mystery, that local knowledge and connection, is not a creative force to be extracted by a visiting artist; instead, Wavertree’s spirit is highlighted in creative ways, through a variety of collaborative artistic processes, creating the best kind of art: the kind that’s shared and created collectively.
Jessie Jones is a writer and editor based in Merseyside.
Make Time For Love was celebrated on 20 September as part of Picton Play, a two-year programme of collaborative arts projects championing the diverse creativity thriving in the Wavertree-Picton area.
This review is supported by Metal.
Published 14.11.2025 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
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