Social Study
PEEL

PEEL focuses on helping people explore and understand their true identity, addressing the challenges posed by social media and self-expression. In addition to individual challenges, many organisations face difficulties in creating authentic and inspiring relationships between teams and their members.

The PEEL Programme uses the transformative power of creativity to enable us to understand and express our true selves, helping to build self-confidence, resilience and empathy.

Social media, self-expression and self-identity present growing problems for young people, and there is growing evidence that this pressure is contributing more and more to mental health issues. Trying to establish a true identity, whilst finding themselves within a ‘selfie’ culture of carefully curated Facebook and Instagram lives, has never been harder.

Each PEEL programme follows a simple structure. Working in small groups, participants interview each other. They put their phones down, and start listening. They gain personal insights about each other and they write them down. This leads to a piece of poetry – an ode to a young person.

The poem is used as inspiration to create a photographic portrait. The poem and the portrait are combined into a single artwork. The artwork can be shared online on the PEEL website.

As part of the programme we developed a limited edition book to accompany the course. With only 1500 copies, the book is cloth bound, foil blocked and printed on high quality craft paper, the PEEL book features 30 plates of colour images taken by the students.

Each photograph folds out from beneath its paired poem, so the reader engages with the poetry before revealing the portrait. The latter section of the book features helpful information for youth group leaders and teachers considering running a ‘PEEL’ workshop of their own.

The book comes shrink-wrapped together with one of nine lenticular prints. The prints are scaled down versions of the prints used in the PEEL exhibition. The lenticular technology allows the poem to be viewed from one angle and the accompanying photographic portrait from another.

The book was launched at an exhibition during fashion week. Since then we have facilitated and run multiple PEEL courses across the UK and America. At the end of each programme, the imagery and poetry is always exhibited with each image paired with its related poem.

A wealth of data is captured which enables us to measure the positive outcomes of each PEEL Programme. The NHS recognised Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale is used to measure the impact of the course on the participants.

Before taking part in PEEL, participants grade simple statements about their feelings, such as how optimistic they feel. They answer the same questions once the project is over. The results are noteworthy, showing particular impact on ‘Feelings of usefulness’, ‘Energy’, ‘Confidence’ .

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