NEW STORIES FROM CREATIVE VOICES

During the summer months, we often find ourselves winding down, attuning to the weather and a general feeling of breathing more, seeing more clearly and taking time to reflect on our impact over the first half of the year.

This is summer, we find ourselves with surprisingly active project. We recently secured a grant from The Grocers’ Charity to launch our Animating from Care initiative for care-experienced young people. We’re also in full-swing with fundraising for our moving-image project Recorder and the relaunch of the Crystal Palace Artists’ Open House in autumn 2027. No complaining here. It’s our pleasure to provide platforms year round for new stories from creative voices.  If that means re-thinking when and how we take a break to reflect on impact, we can certainly live with that.

OPEN CALL FOR MOVING-IMAGE MAKERS

Small Blue Dot, Espacio Gallery, 159 Bethnal Green Rd, London, UK E2 7DG | 20th - 25th August 2026

We’re delighted to be collaborating with Painting Progress to curate their upcoming summer exhibition, Small Blue Dot.

Painting Progress is a non-profit arts organisation that uses art to support wellbeing, inclusion and access via a ever-diversifying programme of community workshops and public exhibitions.

Like us, the nurturing of human and social capital through artistic creation and celebration is at their core.

Small Blue Dot will feature work from creatives whose work responds to:

• Climate change and environmental transformation

• The relationship between people and nature

• Injustice and inequality

• Access to resources and environmental responsibility

• The impact of human activity on ecosystems

• Care, repair, and regeneration

• The connections between local experiences and global systems

Artists, makers and creatives at all stages of their practice and working across visual-storytelling disciplines are encouraged to apply.

Deadline and submission details
19th July 2026 at 11:59 pm | £10 submission fee

London, UK | July - August 2026

Teacher, playwright, compulsive creator in the theatre arts - Gur Arie Piepskovitz is a multi-faceted visual storyteller with a passion for fringe theatre and a penchant for not re-inventing wheels.

“In my work, I highlight the tension between reality and fantasy and delve into the darker aspects of humanity with playfulness and irony.“

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve begun development on a fresh project with Gur (and his production house A Riot Theatre) that looks to blend theatre craft with animation and fresh realisations of staged performance.

In meantime, we invite you to catch the latest performances of two of Gur’s works this summer, both wonderful intros to a storyteller whose work has incredible resonance and heart:

I’M A VICTIM OF MY GENERATION (THE RESURRECTION OF MARY MACLANE) | 12 - 14 July 2026 | 7:30 pm at The Divine | Ticket link: I’m A Victim of My Generation (The Resurrection of Mary MacLane) Tickets | Multiple Dates @ The Divine, London | Pay What You Can to £12 | OutSavvy

Podcasting, Witchcraft and Chaos: Summoning Mary MacLane at The Divine By Gur Arie Piepskovitz - QX Magazine

EARWORM: AN ANTI-ROMCOM | 18 - 22 August 2026 | 9 pm at Camden People’s Theatre | Ticket link: Earworm – Camden Fringe | £10 concession, £15 general admission

Earworm Trailer Camden Fringe - YouTube

EXHIBITION: Emma Donaldson | Trails of Colour Dissolve

West Norwood Library & Picturehouse 1 – 7 Norwood High Street, London, UK SE27 9JU Free exhibition until 19th September 2026

Emma Donaldson is a self-taught artist who has attended classes at Attenborough Arts in Leicester and Roof Top Arts in Corby. She has been profoundly affected by the impact that her work has had on herself and other people.

Emma defines herself as a Textural Abstract Artist, and her process involves creating light-weight textured paintings and mixed-media works on canvas stretched over a wooden frame. She has exhibited paintings in Cank Street Gallery (Leicester), Ten2 Gallery (Hinkley), Roof Top Gallery (Corby) and The Millennium Gallery (Sheffield). She has work displayed in De Montfort University, and her private collectors include other artists, photographers and academics. She also has a piece in the Museum of Bad Art in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Emma has wanted to be a Dadaist since she saw Barry Humphries with a wellington boot full of custard. With this in mind, she wrote a surreal play in Spanish entitled La Vida Local. This is completely unintelligible to anyone particularly the Spanish. She is also a life model at universities and art groups.

“The exhibited works reflect assorted moods expressed through uninhibited breadth of palette. Faces are seen as familiar yet indistinct. Colours compete for attention whilst maintaining uneasy truce on the canvas. Sharp angles and soft curves collide or avoid. Restlessness seems ever close.”

Trails of Colour Dissolve is the first London exhibition of this multi-faceted creative.

Sales proceeds go towards supporting the artist’s growth and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.

ARTIST RESIDENCIES

Through our artist-in-residence programme, creatives are offered the time, space and resources to incubate and realise fresh ideas in visual storytelling. Since last year, we’ve helped nurture the growth in practice of four individuals, three of whom have exhibited the fruits of their labours via our Exhibitions programme. This summer, we welcome new new creatives to the studio.

Our latest artist-in-residence, Ella Ogan, is a visual artist and image maker whose work is an exploration of the industrial and the organic through naïve forms, repeating symbols and soft structures. She will be using her time with Packed Lunch developing a creative language begun in her last residency in Berlin and, as part of our offer, growing her art-business acumen.

In August, we welcome Muna Ko to our residency programme. Muna’s work is rooted in joy, faith and healing. Having worked and exhibited at home and abroad, including a recent mural in Lima, Peru, her current focus is The Sunflower Project, a Christian faith-led creative journey combining fine art, storytelling and charity that will culminate in a fundraising exhibition (and her first solo show) in partnership with The Leprosy Mission.

To learn more about these artists and our art residency programme, visit:

Treasurer - Board of Trustees

Are you passionate about the arts and their impact on human and social capital. If so, we'd love to hear from you.

Packed Lunch trustees are volunteers who bring their skills and expertise, networks and passions to bear in furthering our charitable mission, and they are vital to governance.

We're currently recruiting a Treasurer, someone with experience of charity governance in the UK.

If you're interested in working with a young organisation with a passion and purpose for advancing visual storytelling by nurturing learning and growth through creation (and in being integral to defining its growth and direction), get in touch!

We're accepting expressions of interest until 11:59 pm on Thursday, 30th July 2026.