About us
We started Sparks because we want to encourage kids to be creative in all that they do. We believe that creativity is one of the most important and beautiful gifts in life - being able to make something new is so exciting!Â
Who we are
Hello, I'm Abz!
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I've spent my career exploring creativity in as many forms as possible. I trained as a dancer, completing a masters degree in Contemporary Dance with a focus on screen dance, and worked as a workshop leader teaching dance to children and young people in schools and community settings, before becoming a choreographer for a theatre company in South Devon.
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Music has always been part of my life too — I have a degree in Commercial Music, which led me into music tuition and singing teaching. In my 20s I toured the UK with my own original music, performing at festivals up and down the country, and was lucky enough to have songs featured on ITV's This Morning and BBC Radio.
Alongside all of this, I've always loved making things with my hands — jewellery, paintings, and photography — selling my work at local craft fairs and events over the years.
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After having my two beautiful boys, I retrained as a music therapist. These days I split my time between music therapy work, creative arts education, and working with young carers in Edinburgh — all alongside being mummy to my boys.
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Sparks brings together everything I love most: dance, music, making, and helping children discover their own creative spark, just as I've spent my life discovering mine.
Hello, I'm Dave.
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I've spent a lot of my career being creative in less obvious ways. I've worked in marketing, where I loved being creative with words — telling stories to help people understand how a product could help them. I've also worked a lot with numbers, doing something called data visualisation, which is where you turn complicated information into a graphic or picture that's easy to understand.
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Not everyone is creative in the obvious ways, and I want to encourage young people to explore what creativity means for them — maybe they're creative thinkers in different ways too, just like me.
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I've also spent time working directly with children and young people in other settings. I've done youth work in local community settings, and even taught snowboarding to children as young as 3 or 4 during time spent working as a snowboarding instructor in Canada.
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Alongside all of that, I worked as part of a trauma recovery team, completing a course in therapeutic mentoring and supporting young people who had experienced trauma through play-based interventions. That experience taught me how much creativity and play can help children process and express things words sometimes can't.
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When I'm not doing this, I enjoy looking after mine and Abz's two boys.