Following our summer hiatus, we met this month in MadLab’s temporary home at New Federation House, currently managed by Castlefield Gallery. The primary aim of the meeting was to review recent feedback from CRITsurvey 2014 and make some key decisions on the future of the group to make sure it continues providing motivation, support and social contact for those pursuing a creative visual practice in Manchester.

Our main concern is that we want to continue to see regular involvement in the meetings; not necessarily huge numbers or the same people coming every single month, but enough to provide varied and meaningful feedback discussion for those who do attend. We had previously tried to achieve this consistent interest by running collaborative and research projects, one of which culminated in a group show, as well as hosting a series of speakers. Whilst these had been successful in many ways, it was noted that numbers were starting to drop off throughout 2014. Feedback from the survey and analysis in our discussion tonight suggested that aside from practical reasons like timing, this might be because the format had become a bit too formal and structured. We also felt that some people who had dropped in to see what we were about found it difficult to engage with a group who was already involved in a project spanning several sessions. The main thing we concluded was that due to our focus on these additional activities, we had started to run out of time to for informal critique on practical work; the very thing we originally set up to achieve. Without wanting to make accidental political references, it was unanimously agreed that the key to the ongoing success of the group was in going ‘Back to Basics’ and refocussing on this critical discussion as the primary function of the group.  One suggestion was to have less frequent but longer sessions, possibly meeting for a full day every 6 months; however it was decided that meeting for the same length of time but at only slightly longer intervals would be more practical. As such, we shall be moving to a bimonthly schedule. We hope this will allow those who wish to attend a bit more flexibility in meeting other commitments as well as feeling that they can still be fully active in the group, at the same time as giving everyone a bit more space between meetings to make progress on their projects or develop their practices.

We also plan to be less rigid in formatting any other activities. Whilst we intend to continue supplementing our critical conversation with events such as speakers, topic specific discussions and skills sharing workshops, we will arrange these in a less structured fashion on a month by month basis. The bimonthly move should also make it easier for us to organise things such as gallery visits at times outside of the established meeting pattern. We agreed to stick to the Last Wednesday of the month 7-9pm standard as it was generally felt that there was never going to be a time or day where everyone could be present anyway and there was not a significant bias towards any other specific option in the survey feedback.

We ended the discussion on a positive note and considering there to be ‘no time like the present’ to act on our new convictions, we then spent a bit of time looking at some new developments from those present! James Sharp has been developing an extensive range of distinctive textiles products that he sells at crafts events in and around the Greater Manchester area. He is very responsive to feedback from his customers and has recently developed a leather-bound book to supplement his art journals range.  He brought one of these to show us and we were pleased, but not surprised, to hear that they have been selling well from his stall. These are also available from his online shop.

Given our agreement to adopt a bimonthly format, the October meeting will be skipped and we will next get together in November. We'll also give December (our December meetings tend to be all about the mince pies anyway!) over to more festive engagements and shall then begin a new year of alternate months in January.  The January meeting will be the first in the fourth year of CRITgroup and it is with optimism in relation to our refocused intentions that we look forward to welcoming many new and old friends to our conversations. We hope you will be a part of it!

We have had a quiet couple of months at CRITgroup as people take time out to make the most of the summer, both in creative and other senses.

I have had an especially exciting time of it, though I don’t want to give too much away as I shall be giving a talk on my recent PlaceMaking project work in China at the next CRITgroup on September 25th. While you can see this work on my website, it will also be briefly on display at the Chinese Arts Centre from the 10th to the 14th of September with a late night opening on Thursday the 12th; CRITgroup members are of course warmly invited to the opening!

One project I will share that I have also added to over the summer is This Place Is. A public project launched last year, it aims to build up a physical record of personal responses to a variety of places, starting from the UK and hopefully including places all over the world. I was in a good position to increase the global reach over the last couple of months and you can see my own use of the project booklets by visiting the This Place Is Summer 2013 gallery.

Christine Wilcox-Baker has been getting political with a public art exhibition designed to raise public awareness and support for Asian Elephant conservation. ‘Elephant Parade’ is coming to Manchester before stomping off all over the country and arriving in London next summer. Christine has designed and painted one of the elephant sculptures titled ‘Stop the traffic’ that is the size of a real baby elephant! You can see it, at the Trafford Centre until the 12th of September.

James Sharp has also been keeping busy attending crafts fairs and running workshops. You can find details of his activities in textiles, artists’ books and journal keeping on his blog.

As mentioned, the next CRITgroup will be on September 25th, when I shall be transporting you overseas with an investigation into Chinese approaches to public spaces. In October, we will be getting back up and running with our second collaborative project; Crafting by Committee.

It seems Summer is well and truly underway (despite the weather!) with many people on holiday (or conversely being so creative they were too busy to make it!) I do however; have a couple of recent updates of my own that I shall share before including news from a few of our other regular attendees.

On the 15th of June, I was delighted to take the PlaceMaking and This Place Is workshops that I have been developing along to the Magpie Thunder Bureau Pop Up as part of the Barnaby Festival. In the morning, we took the PlaceMaking boards on to the streets of Macclesfield and gathered some thoughts on local perspectives, especially in light of the recent approval of some major town centre redevelopments. This took a slightly new approach to previous sessions and rather than working as part of an existing workshop group, we approached Saturday shoppers and arts trail visitors. We got some interesting conversations going too, once we had persuaded people that we weren't trying to sell them anything! In the afternoon, I ran a This Place Is demo session back at the Pop Up Shop and rather than asking for completed booklets there and then, they were made available for the duration of the festival for visitors to take away and return at their leisure. If you are interested in participating yourself, you can request a booklet online and find the return address on the project page.

James Sharp shared three new journals with us today, a Cook Book (with pages for notes and recipes), a Stuff Stash (a book-based format of an existing textile product; for keeping notes and loose pages together) and a Lazy Journal (for those who enjoy the aesthetics of his work but are not inspired to generate their own content!). James will be giving a live painting demonstration at the Creative Recycling Gallery this Saturday (26th of May) as part of the Chorlton Arts Festival and will have a stall at Much Wenlock in Shropshire on the following Saturday (2nd of June).

James Pashley then introduced us to the newest member of the group in the form of Danbo (see above!); a card model robot who will be helping us keep up to date with James’ imminent adventures in Japan by posing for a series of photographs for section headings on the new (and rapidly improving) instantpash site (link soon). I then spent the next 10 minutes working with Dambo on a series of glamour shots and completely failed to support James in explaining our recent collaboration to the others!

One key consideration raised was the need to be aware of health and safety restrictions, though it was also recognised that this was being deliberately set to one side temporarily in order to avoid prematurely capping the creative stages. It was also argued that allowing children exposure to supervised and calculated risk is an important part of facilitating healthy development and that opportunities to encourage outdoor play could be seen as especially responsive to recent news items regarding a lack of exercise and over use of screen based media. The next big challenge facing us in this project is the actual design of the map as we have a proposed route and a suggest list of features, all of which tie in with the source reference to Senda

The next meeting is June 27th and you can find details of months up to October including guest speakers on the home page.