May 2012

Danbo is tempted by the fresh summery snacks...

It was quite a small group this month but no less varied for it. Tammy Leigh, James Sharp and I started off chatting informally about craft stalls before I’d even really noticed we were properly ‘in session’! We mostly discussed the reasons behind lower than expected sales at local art fairs and festivals and tried not to point the finger too exclusively at the recession without being more widely questioning. We all agreed that there was a tendency for such events to attract visitors who have no intention of buying anything at all, but while these may not be immediately lucrative opportunities they still present a useful method of raising interest in work. This interest can later manifest as online sales or interest in workshops. Additionally, we talked about the benefits of making whilst supervising a stall to be time efficient and more importantly provide talking points and interest for potential shoppers. This can also be an effective way of demonstrating that the work is genuinely hand made. The potential for selling and running workshops simultaneously raised both pros and cons; a problem if it makes you inaccessible to make a sale but of benefit if you can make sales relating to the workshop content (such as craft kits, etc.)

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!

The other work James brought along was the latest development in a project which we have started that references the writing of Mitsuri Senda who discusses ‘circulatory play systems’ when designing playgrounds in urban spaces. Senda summarises this in a series of 7 points, which our project looks at applying to Manchester City Centre by identifying existing environmental features with the potential to be used in such a play system.  Ultimately, we aim to design a route for use by visitors to Manchester, though we are still in the early stages of this.

The group view the plans so far

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

Danbo notes the next CRITgroup meeting while the others look at maps

To conclude the evening, I briefly shared the final draft of the proposed This Place Is booklet which has been developed in response to feedback from the group at several previous meetings. That is now ready to be printed and it would not have been half as robust an outcome if it had not been for the input and the suggestions from CRITgroup sessions so it was good to be able to share it one last time before sending it off.

Finally, I invited the group to the ‘opening’ event of a show I am hanging tomorrow at the Nexus Art Café in Manchester’s Northern Quarter; though the work will be up from Friday (25th of May), the actual Private View isn’t until the end of June which coincides with the opening of the Nexhibitionists show, in which I will also have some work. The show, titled I Hope To See presents the conclusion of a series of workshops with various community groups in Hulme.

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