So September did not disappoint in its characteristic tendency to be one of the busiest months of the year! To be perfectly honest, the last few weeks have been something of a difficult time with a strange mix of both personal and professional highs and lows. However, concentrating on the professional, the lows (a couple of rejected applications) do not negate the highs and so it is on those that I am pleased to focus.
On the 15th of September I returned to Wythenshawe for my second year at the Garden City Festival and the second incarnation of the developed crafts workshop The Best Thing About My City Is. I first ran this at the Wythenshawe Games Festival in July this year, however it is based on my contribution to Wythenshawe Garden City Festival 2011; My City Would Be Better With. I’m pleased to report that this year was just as popular as last (in fact it felt even busier!) and you can see the contributions from both the Best Thing… workshops here.
Hot on the heels of that event, I was glad to revisit some old friends at Venture Arts and took along some This Place Is booklets for one of the groups to have a look at. I visited for a total of four hours across a period of two weeks and really appreciated their thoughtful and careful input to the project which gives a completely different (and generally far less local) perspective on the project. You can see their contributions in the dedicated Venture Arts; This Place Is gallery.
Upcoming events include not just the on-going CRITgroup gatherings (last month we had an excellent speaker in Hannah Mosley and look forward to welcoming Jo Scorah in October) but a couple of other dates for the October diary.
On Sunday October 28th I will be running a new Placemaking workshop as part of Nexus Art Café’s SketchCrawl programme. The session will be an opportunity to use the Placemaking Boards as seen in the recent Hulme Workshops in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The workshop will begin at 3pm and take a leisurely meander through the streets around Nexus before arriving back at 4.30 for refreshments and a discussion of the afternoon. The session costs £4, the price of which includes coffee and cake as well as PDF copies of your contributions and your work displayed online at www.glittermouse.co.uk. Sounds like a bargain for any aspiring urban artists to me!
On Sunday October 28th I will be running a new Placemaking workshop as part of Nexus Art Café’s SketchCrawl programme. The session will be an opportunity to use the Placemaking Boards as seen in the recent Hulme Workshops in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The workshop will begin at 3pm and take a leisurely meander through the streets around Nexus before arriving back at 4.30 for refreshments and a discussion of the afternoon. The session costs £4, the price of which includes coffee and cake as well as PDF copies of your contributions and your work displayed online at www.glittermouse.co.uk. Sounds like a bargain for any aspiring urban artists to me!
If you fancy getting involved in the project but can’t make the 28th, there’s another opportunity to use the Placemaking Boards on the afternoon of the 31st (that’s a Wednesday) when MidConversation collective will be taking their recent contribution to the Free For Arts Festival out of the gallery space and into an as yet undisclosed location for a bit of urban intervention. The Placemaking boards will again make an appearance as a tool for facilitating conversation and photographically recording the event in the streets of the Northern Quarter. I’ll publicise more information about that as soon as I have it.
A couple of miscellaneous things to leave you on, firstly, this rather charming picture of a particularly chuffed Julian Birtwell, who informally commissioned me to brighten up some glass for displaying his wood turned bottle holders at various events around the Greater Manchester area. I’ve not done any glass painting myself for such a long time that it was rather refreshing to have a reason to dig the paints out outside of workshop times!
Secondly, returning to the aforementioned personal and far sadder note, I have dug out this silly digital illustration that I submitted to the Newschool Graphics competition at Sundown 2010. It was a hasty reworking of a Halloween party invite and aside from being something of an ‘insider joke’, features portraits of a couple of my very best friends including (second from the front) the irreplaceable Giles Constant.
Secondly, returning to the aforementioned personal and far sadder note, I have dug out this silly digital illustration that I submitted to the Newschool Graphics competition at Sundown 2010. It was a hasty reworking of a Halloween party invite and aside from being something of an ‘insider joke’, features portraits of a couple of my very best friends including (second from the front) the irreplaceable Giles Constant.
I met Giles in 2002 whilst doing a boring office job less than a year after leaving Uni. I used to sit on the front desk, drawing whilst failing to hide my disinterest in office workers’ holiday allowances, however being an incredibly inclusive person, he soon invited me to the pub and quickly became one of my best friends. His social and intellectual enrichment of my life ever since through introductions to various concepts such as the demoscene and the idea that maths could in fact be beautiful, has made a real and meaningful impact on the person I am today.
He died suddenly last week and I don’t believe I have yet even begun to deal with it. I don’t normally include personal reflections on this site but this seems of sufficient gravity to justify it.
My world, and those of the many other lives he influenced, will simply never be quite the same again.
He died suddenly last week and I don’t believe I have yet even begun to deal with it. I don’t normally include personal reflections on this site but this seems of sufficient gravity to justify it.
My world, and those of the many other lives he influenced, will simply never be quite the same again.
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