Diana Zwibach Exhibition

from The Lancashire & North West Magazine | November 2022

by The Lancashire & North West Magazine

Carer Support South Lakes

Opening Sunday 13th November at 4pm

Febland Group Ltd, Flaghouse, Ashworth Road, Blackpool, Lancashire, FY4 4UN

Diana Zwibach is a local and known artist who is exhibiting her works executed over the last fifty years.

Aretrospective mixed presentation of paintings, mixed media, original prints, mono prints and drawings. These will be offered for sale to the public to raise funds to be donated to the Blackpool mental health charity Counselling in The Community.

This is what writer and critic Giles Sutherland had to say about Zwibach’s work, “The work of committed artist is always in a state of flux, transition and evaluation; artists who stick to a prescribed formula or relation are therefore no longer artists but repeteurs, a charge which could never be levelled at Zwibach. With maturity comes experience and with this comes a greater understanding of the journey of exploration which art provides”.

Zwibach was born in Serbia. She lived in Ethiopia and Middle East. In 1971 she arrived in London with a BA in art, to further her studies. In 1972 Zwibach was awarded a Higher Diploma in Printmaking: Chelsea School of Art, followed by an MA in painting: Royal College of Art, 1974. Zwibach has had over twenty solo exhibitions and many group shows in England, Scotland and worldwide. Her works are in museums and private collections.

Counselling in the Community is an independent charity responsible for their own funding. They do this through donations, grants and fund raising. The service they provide is free of charge. More and more people and children are suffering with mental health issues, which has risen dramatically since the pandemic.

It is now more then ever with the economical pressures and challenges we face in our daily lives that finding support for mental health sufferers is

crucial. Counselling in The Community provides that. They provide face to face counselling, which is direct and caring, giving reassurance and establishing trust by their professional counsellors. Their supportive and reliable information can change lives, empower people and children to understand their condition and the choices available to them.

Conselling in the Community

Counselling in the Community was founded in 2017 as a Community Interest Company. We became a Registered Charity (1195816) in September 2021.

Initially there were 2 of us offering counselling to 6 people a week, now our 40 amazing volunteers work with over 130 people, 6 days a week!

Demand for Counselling has never been higher, Covid has added more complexities and loss to people’s lives from losing a loved one to enforcing a permanent unwanted change into a household or family.

Since opening we have worked with over 1000 vulnerable and disadvantaged adults, last year alone offering 6000 hours of counselling sessions.

Counselling in the Community is a counselling service that offers adult, children and young persons’ counselling in the Blackpool and the Fylde area.

Blackpool is an area where there are difficult to access mainstream services due to demand and private counselling is costly; we offer an accessible service that is self-referral and donation based, but only if you can afford to, approximately 40% of our existing clients do.

Our service is unique as although we have a closed caseload for people who have accessed help for a range of crisis and entrenched issues, we never turn them away if they need to re-engage for further help, we have re-occurring physical ailments and illnesses so why wouldn’t we have the same with mental health?

There has also seen a huge increase in demand for children, with over 50 young people on our case load

currently with a large proportion of these being referred from the Blackpool Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

Following the uplift in clients we have opened a new premises in South Blackpool to help meet rising demands, taking the pressure off Derby Road, where we frequently run out of rooms to offer sessions, this also gives our clients the option to attend a counselling session nearer to their home.

I hope you can get a sense of how our charity operates and what it offers to the local (and wider) community