Over the years, Kingsway Mall and Win House have worked together to help women escape domestic abuse, and, for this new collaboration, they’ve really brought their combined message home — wherever that may be.
“Seeing the growing use of tap-to-donate, I thought it would be cool if there was a display that was triggered when someone donated, like turning lights on in a house,” says Bo Tarasenko, marketing manager of Kingsway Mall. “I shared this concept with [Director of Development at Win House] Britni Brady, and she loved the idea — but brought up the fact that gender-based violence extends beyond domestic settings, which then became a big theme for the project. So we gathered a creative team, including Tessa [Stamp], whose passion and expertise helped propel the project to what it has become.”
Stamp is a theatre set designer (among many other jobs) who might love making miniatures more than full-sized sets. “Miniature is a hard word to use for this because it’s 15 feet by nine feet. In theatre the most common scale for miniatures is 1:12 scale, and this one is 1:4. But I’ve said since I was in school at MacEwan that my dream would be to…just make miniatures for the rest of my life.”
But on a work like this (titled Light the Darkness), even the love of craft can’t obscure the purpose for the project. “It’s hard because when you’re building it, and you’re in it for a month or more at a time, you have to focus on the furniture, which is really cute. Even the adjectives that we used in meetings right off the top were like, ‘This is amazing. This is awesome. This is wonderful.’ But no — this is tragic. And when you put the details in the stories, they are heavy for sure.”
As a domestic abuse survivor herself, Stamp says the small details have a huge impact because of their subtlety in showing that most abuse is hidden, and it doesn’t all happen in a literal house. So the miniature home itself extends beyond the kitchen and bedrooms to tell stories shared by survivors at Win House, including one person who after fleeing found the shelter’s number in a phone booth phone book, and had to frantically write its unlisted address on a ripped page with lipstick she found in her escape bag.
There’s also a pallet house in the alley, inspired by a woman who had just escaped physical violence and was, with help from a Win House worker, looking for a shelter that could take her and her dog to. “The closest one was in Camrose, so she just said ‘It’s OK, I’ll just walk around all night,'” Stamp says. “So that room is an alleyway with a pallet house and a dog, with pamphlets in there of all the shelters that are full.”
With each tap donation, a light in a random room lights up and an audio recording shares more information about the story of the room. The information is not graphic, but can still be hard to hear, just like the “statistic [Win House staff] told me in the first meeting, about the thousands of phone calls they get each year, and how many they can actually help, because there’s just not enough resources for them, which is why something like this is so important.”
Help Kingsway and Win House light the darkness until March 29.
