We Skate, We Vibe

A Exhibition and Film created about our community, for our community, funded by a-space arts.

About the film

Skate films with women and their experiences as a focus are rare… so we decided to make one! The film was shot over the last 12 months, with a few clips from earlier thrown in too. You’ll see what it’s like to skate with us, hear from some of our community about what We Skate means to them and hear Emily and Amy talk about how the group started, how it has grown and their hopes for the future.

Filmed and edited by Dave Sands, a video producer with over seven years of experience creating videos for TV, brands and social media. He’s worked on everything from true crime documentaries to short-form branded content, but his real passion lies in telling stories that bring people together. When he’s not behind the camera you’ll probably find him skating a curb, cruising around on his board or filming my friends as they hit new tricks. Skateboarding has been a big part of his life, it’s not just something he documents but something he lives. He was excited to work on this documentary and shine a light on the energy, creativity and camaraderie that makes this skate community so special.

Exhibition at Gods House Tower

Mini ramp

Can you believe we put a mini ramp in a 700 year old medieval monument?! Amy suggested it, half joking… then we decided to ask the team at GHT if we could do it, and they somehow said yes!

The next challenge was getting a miniramp… fortunately one of our community members, Em has skated with the crew at Malmesbury Skate Park and let us know that they had a ramp and suggested we reach out to them. Matt from the group let us borrow the mini for free! (what a legend) He was super excited to help us out! A 150 mile round trip in a van later and we had it.

We wanted to turn the space into something more active, and give our community a sick place to skate. We broutght the vibes and showed Southampton how much fun skating is.

As part of the exhibition we hosted lots of free skate sessions, some lessons and a jam on the opening night.

Basic ramp skills with Emily
Level up ramp skills with Ida

Reclaiming the comment section

Our content makes some men angry, they don’t seem to like us celebrating girls, women and the queer community skating. And even less so us celebrating beginners. Because of this our posts often receive negative comments, some more hateful than others. Sometimes it’s difficult to know if we should interact with these comments, we’re hopeful that we can start a conversation and understand why the troll is getting so mad about what we are posting. Unfortunately, more often than not, this doesn’t happen and we get more abuse. We find we get more negative comments when we are highlighting experiences we have had and usually get told that we are not sharing the truth. You won’t see these comments on any of our posts. We decided to remove them. Although part of us didn’t want to do this, as we wanted to show the comments we receive. But a bigger part of us didn’t want these comments to overshadow the amazing skating and achievements we are sharing online. We thought we’d reclaim the comment section and turn some of the comments into designs we could wear. And poke fun at the trolls that are jealous of all the fun we’re having! Huge thanks to our models (and community members) Emily, Bethan and Becky, who are wearing shirts with comments that they received on videos showing them skating. You can find these for sale on our website.

Troll character and text designed by Becky Baldwin.

Becky was 15 at the time of making and had been skating for 3 years. She finds peace in both skating and art and finds that her two hobbies compliment each other well. She has always been interested in street art and graffiti, and seeing this at skateparks made her want to try it herself. Around September of this year her dad (who is also a street artist) started taking her with him to paint memorials, and this sparked a love of creating. She focuses on cartoon characters and bringing them to life. She has painted some tributes to artists in bright, funky colours and loves injecting colour in all aspects of her work. When designing these t-shirts she wanted to ensure they were bright, colourful and impactful.

Photographs and editing by Amy Scott-Pillow
Amy is an artist and co-founder of weskatesoton

Community Zine

We invited our community to be part of something creative and hands on, considering the history of skate-zines. We hosted a number of collage making sessions and invited people to rip, stick and draw to create something inspired by skating.

We chose collage as there are no rules, no pressure to create something ‘perfect’ and ‘proper’ and most of all they are super fun! The community enjoyed it and as a result we had over 50 collages submitted! Each collage was compiled into a diy zine, inside you’ll find collages, some written pieces and more. These were available to take home with you in the shop downstairs and each zine came with some stickers, (because who doesn’t love stickers?!) All the money will go right back into the community and will support us in introducing more people into skating! We still have some available if you’d like to buy one to support, just e-mail us and we’ll sort it!

You could also enter a raffle to win a limited edition Lovenskate Lucy Adams deck, designed by Lizzie Heath!

Huge thanks to all the contributors:
Emily J, Amy, Georgia, Zoe, Lucy, Emily, Becky, Nora, Nancy, Ozzy, Sarah, Ben, Charlie, Rose, Millie, Alex, Jade, Sophie, Ash, Ozzy C, Cruz (from Mbnarts), Emily N