Bringing the Play to Every Day: Wilson's Republic #16 at Smile Bar & Venue

There's a moment at every good event when the room stops being polite. At Wilson's Republic #16 it came about twenty minutes in, when someone unfolded a piece of paper and found a two-headed creature in fishnets staring back at them.

The theme of the night was Play, and Huddersfield's creative community took that very seriously indeed.

A creative community night in Huddersfield

If you've not come across it, Wilson's Republic is a creative community that puts on regular evenings for the makers, designers, writers and general creative types of Huddersfield and Kirklees. Number sixteen took over Smile Bar & Venue on Wakefield Road on a Thursday night in October, and the idea behind it was simple: play is one of the building blocks of creativity, so let's hear from two people who've built careers out of it.

People drifted in, grabbed a drink and found a bench. Within minutes the long beer-hall tables were full of conversation.

Paper, pens and permission to be daft

Each table had paper and pens. Before long, folded drawings were being passed around in that old game where everyone draws one part of a body without seeing the rest. The results were exactly as ridiculous as you'd hope. Watching a room of grown professionals howl at a drawing they made together is the kind of thing I love photographing, because nobody is thinking about the camera.

On stage at Smile Bar & Venue

Aiden and Katy kicked things off with a big "HELLO!" on the screen and set the tone straight away: relaxed, funny and a little bit chaotic in the best way.

First up was Dani Molyneux, the type artist and designer behind Dotto. If you've walked past a wall shouting "I See You" or "Together Under the Same Stars" in big, joyful letters, there's a fair chance it was hers. Her talk ran from the strange stretch of working through the pandemic, through murals, zines like Untold and poster work for Copenhagen and Berlin, to a closing slide that pretty much summed up the whole night: bring the play to every day.

The room got involved too, with hands up and a mic passed round the benches.

Break!

Then came the break, which at Wilson's Republic means a fresh round, a lot of chatter and people sizing up each other's drawings.

Kyle Wilkinson of Haus of Thrills Studios

After the break, Katy introduced Kyle Wilkinson, the artist behind Haus of Thrills Studios, with a giant childhood photo on the screen behind her.

Kyle opened with a title slide that asked, in rather stronger language, who exactly Kyle Wilkinson is, and then spent the next stretch answering it. Along the way there was a photo of him peering over his own Yorkshire Post Magazine feature, and a picture of young Kyle in a full Teletubby costume. That one came with a heartfelt tribute to how little we cared what anyone thought at that age. (The slide put it less politely.)

My favourite slide of the night was his graph of play across a lifetime. It starts high in childhood with footballs, action figures and dolls. Then it plummets into what he called "the in-between bit", represented, brilliantly, by an accounting software logo. It climbs back up in retirement with golf, cruises and bingo, plus one entry I won't explain here that got the biggest laugh of the night. Then it drops off a cliff at the end. It's funny because it's true, and it set up the serious part of his talk nicely.

That serious part was a question plenty of people in that room have probably asked themselves lately: when tech, the economy and the world all seem to be against us, why keep doing this creative stuff at all?

He took us through the design and culture that shaped him, from a classic leather lounge chair to video games and a wildly geometric bookcase he clearly loves. He finished with his own name up in lights on a big-city billboard. Not bad for the lad in the Teletubby suit.

The audience

I spend a lot of my event photography time facing the crowd rather than the stage, because that's where the story is. You can see whether a talk is landing by watching faces, and this lot were properly listening, laughing in the right places and still chatting about it at the bar afterwards.

The wall of nonsense

By the end of the night, the wall by the bar was covered in the evening's folded drawings: mermaids with skeleton legs, a fish-headed man in wellies, a snowman in flares and a creature in a "HUDDERS" T-shirt. Proper grown-up stuff.

Why I shoot events like this

I photograph events the same way I photograph weddings: quietly, honestly and without asking anyone to pose. The good stuff happens when people forget you're there. A belly laugh over a daft drawing tells you more about a community than any group shot ever could.

If you're running an event, a talk or a community night in Huddersfield, Kirklees or anywhere in West Yorkshire and want photos that show how it actually felt, get in touch.

Thanks to everyone at Wilson's Republic for having me, to Dani and Kyle for two cracking talks, and to Smile Bar & Venue for the space. See you at #17.