A Mouse on a Mission...
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Winter Spice; a Variety of Projects for December 

2/12/2014

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Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus
Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus, Acrylic on Board, 2014
A few little ‘nuggets’ in what will probably be a final update for 2014! The Serenity Series continues to trickle out like a little brook bubbling up from its source; slow but steady.  I’m currently about a third of the way through a new piece in this body of work which combines elements from the 'Big Bell' temple in Tamana, Japan, (also featured in the piece ‘Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus’) and an interpretation of Persian textile designs, themselves inspired by Chinese stylised depictions of the lotus blossom. I’m hoping to find time over the Christmas break to complete that, which would give me 5 paintings to the series and would seem like an appropriate point to pause and consider the direction that it could move in next. I’m slowly coming round to the idea that these are not, as I have previously described them, a self-indulgent tangent, but are going to form a fairly important part of my practice, if not an especially prolific one. I’m finally allowing myself to relax into it and not be overly concerned right now with the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’.
I’m not even pressuring myself to necessarily get lots of them produced or work at a specific scale, or worry about consistency. I’m really just letting it come out as it feels like and I’m sure the confidence to do this has come from recent discussions at CRITgroup. Voicing doubts and finding that others are perplexed at the cause of them is very liberating and I feel I’ve given myself permission a bit more as a result to just let it flow.
As well as this I was delighted to agree to help out a running friend with a design for the logo and branding of a charity event in the planning for January. This is really only just happening over the last 24 hours and certainly not in any state to be shared, but it’s good to be working on a variety of areas, with distinctly different styles. It’s an overused cliché that ‘variety’ is the ‘spice’ and all that but it’s certainly the best way I have found of staying interested in life! The work I do for this project will be far more illustrative and will be more in the vein of the design work I did earlier in the year for Up & Running.
U&R Design Work
Ladies T Shirt Design for Up & Running

The most exciting update however; and a really enjoyable end to my creative year came in the form of a weekend of PlaceMaking workshops with students of the International School of Creative Arts in Wexham, near Slough. 
We actually started off with a day out in Central London, where as well as gathering a range of research drawings and photographs, the group used This Place Is PlaceMaking boards to respond to two specific locations; The British Museum and the North side of the Thames near Embankment. These were recorded and used along with their other materials on day two (back in the studio), where they generated small scale sculptures designed to reflect their perceptions of and relationship with London. I was genuinely impressed with how sensitively they engaged with the concepts presented to them and they appeared to turn out idea after idea quite effortlessly. Their self-motivated approach to generating outcomes was also notable and their intelligent discussion of the outcomes did not undermine the successful visual communication that they had all been asked to carefully consider.
It’s impossible to pick favourites so this is a fairly random selection just as a flavour. Please do check out the project pages to see all the work and read a little about the ideas behind each of the sculptures.

That's all for now. December is upon us and shaping up to be as busy as ever. It seems like only a month or so ago that I was reflecting upon the conclusion of 2013 and wondering what was in store for 2014. It hardly bears thinking about that a whole new twelve months will soon be upon us! Nevertheless, I'm optimistic. Finding out is half the fun!

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Maintaining Serenity

10/10/2014

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It was with mild embarrassment yesterday that I noted my last post was in August. The cause of this embarrassment was mostly due to the fact that at the time I was using my own blog as a quick example to a student, upon whom I was pressing the importance of regular updates to engage with an audience. Whoops. Physician Heal Thyself. Fortuitously, I was also but a few brush strokes away from completing the fourth painting in the unexpected tangent that has been The Serenity Series and so today I felt I actually have something to post about. In my defence, September is always a very busy month (Yes, I know, we’re a third of the way through October) and so it’s been a genuine challenge to squeeze the painting in at all, let alone find time to write about it!
Yongzou Lotuses
Yongzou Lotuses, Acrylic on Canvas, October 2014
As mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been experiencing some bittersweet feelings about my current practical direction, which is quite removed from my previous work in a Social Practice discipline. The paintings of The Serenity Series are developed from the Peaceful Places collection of photos (still on display at the Earth Café) taken in China and Japan during 2013 and I really didn’t expect anything to grow from these. At the time, they were really just a way of recording my experiences, as is the way with much travel photography and I felt quite self-indulgent to be producing pieces that are not aiming to achieve some form of social purpose. At the last CRITgroup meeting, I found it useful to discuss my discomfort around working on pieces that didn’t seem to have this social function. 
Whilst I was pleased to know that others could identify with having experienced something similar, the fact that the origin of those preconceptions were questioned by others was also a reassuring point of view.  Why can’t the act of producing a creative outcome be at the same time enjoyed by both artist and audience? Though I am yet to fully resolve this in my practice, the discussion has at least given me some motivation (permission!?) to carry on. This new painting is titled Yongzou Lotuses and is composed from photographs taken at Yongzuo Temple and pencil drawings made on site at Chong Shan Si Buddhist Monastery, both in Taiyuan, China.
The recent work has been part of a bit of a reset period for my creative practice, I think and this is something I always struggle with. Though I recognise it is perfectly natural for things, work, creativity, life generally, to reach natural conclusions or fallow periods, I find it incredibly difficult to not do something. Whilst I know that rest and reflection is essential for progression in many fields (here I am specifically relating this to my experiences of running and training plans!) that doesn’t mean I’m any good at it. I’m coming to the conclusion that this recent series of paintings is something of a displacement activity as much as it is an exploration of the photographic material; something creative to do while I rest my artistic muscles and store up some psychological glycogen to power me into a new socially creative phase. I do have some genuine ideas for this that are slowly coalescing around the edges of my consciousness. Needless to say they involve running, community engagement, art, and… well I’ll see if I can squeeze some cake in there too and hit all my favourite things in one project!
I do have one ‘Social Practice’ update of course, since my last post; the aforementioned invitation to return to the Hulme History Society to run a PlaceMaking workshop with some of their newer members who hadn’t participated in the project previously. There won’t be a physical exhibition of these images but you can see all the new contributions in the Hulme Revisited gallery.
Hulme Revisited
Happy Running
Only Happy When I'm Running, Digital Illustration 2014
As the boundaries between my passions continue to conspire to shift and blur, I have also completed some new illustration work for Up & Running. I was asked to produce some T-shirt designs for their own brand clothing range, Sub4. These haven’t been produced yet but I think I’m safe sharing one of the designs that won’t be used… It also illustrates one of the factors that is encouraging me to shift focus and plan some new projects to get people in cities interacting, exploring, creating and, of course, running!
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More on Places; Peaceful, Imagined and Revisited

4/8/2014

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Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus
Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus, Acrylic on Canvas Board, August 2014
The decorative detail on the right of the composition is an interpretation of designs that feature frequently in surface pattern on Persian textile and ceramic pieces. The particular design  I developed this from was in fact based upon Chinese decorative arts and is an interpretation of the lotus flower.
It seems hard to believe that it was a full year ago since I was actually at the temple, but this slightly sad realisation is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that I have continued to enjoy the experience through the production of these pieces.
Today I finally made time after returning from various summer travels (none as exotic as this time last year when I was still in China!), to complete  the latest in what is now a series of three acrylic paintings titled The Serenity Series. The series is based on photographs from the Peaceful Places collection, and I started to produce the paintings following positive feedback on the photographs. This piece, titled Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus is an impression of a large statue of the Buddah at the 'Big Bell' temple in Tamana, Japan, which I visited in July last year. The giant statue is situated at the top of a large flight of steps (see below) and cut a striking figure against the (almost) cloudless sky.
Picture
Big Bell Temple, Tamana, July 2013
In other news, I have continued to be productive in alternative areas. Just occasionally, though I've always felt it is something to aim for, you get to combine passions. Sometimes, one can be lucky enough to actually get paid for this. In June I was fortunate to be commissioned by Up & Running to produce a design for the front cover of a promotional give away notebook that they plan to publish before the end of the year. As an avid runner, I didn't need asking twice and it was a genuine pleasure to spend time working on the brief in close discussion with one of the directors of the company. It was a smooth process as we understood each other well and this is the resulting piece. If you want to get your hands on a copy you'll need to head in to your local Up & Running store (there are branches across the UK) sometime from the beginning of the autumn season and see what the deal is! Even I'm not sure yet!
Hopefully I will be working with them again soon to produce artwork for further projects. Watch this space for that one, but in the mean time I must try and make the most of a few last days of holiday to get a bit more painting done! I have a couple of new ideas for The Serenity Series already on the simmer!

Up & Running
Illustration for Up and Running Promotional Material
Though the PlaceMaking work has taken something of a back seat to the The Serenity Series of recent months, I have also been invited back to Hulme History Society to re run the I Remember workshop I first delivered to them in 2011. As they have many new members who were not involved in the original session, they have asked me back to work with them again in sharing some new perspectives on the local area. This will take place in a couple of weeks, on August 14th and I shall look forward to sharing the resulting photos soon!
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Quick March!

11/3/2014

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Just a quick one; a couple of little updates!
Regular readers of my updates will recall my last exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre in September, in which I displayed photos from PlaceMaking  workshops in the UK and China. Part of the agreement in this collaboration with Tameside College was that the work would also be exhibited in the Art Department’s gallery space on the Ashton campus. That work has now also gone up, so the prints are currently enjoying a brief resurrection through the month of March. If you’re local, you can pop in to the gallery which is situated in the Waterloo building at the site on Beaufort Road, otherwise you can still find all the images and further information about the workshops on the project pages of this site.
UK PlaceMaking Tameside
UK PlaceMaking at Tameside College
UK PlaceMaking Tameside
With thanks to Dave Bennett for photography and editing
Tamana Lotus
Tamana Lotus; March 2014; Acrylic on Canvas Board
I also mentioned a new series of photographs recently that came out of my travels last summer. Titled Peaceful Places, they can be purchased as individual prints or as a photobook. These are currently on display at The Earth Café underneath the Manchester Buddhist Centre. Although these images have been something of a tangent from my recent practice, I have enjoyed working with them so much that I was already considering making some paintings from them and having received some very positive feedback from the show at the café I was motivated to produce this new piece. It is a reasonably direct representation of a lotus growing at a Buddhist temple in Japan and I have explored the concept of ‘peace’ further through the application of paint by employing calm, soft, almost meditative brush strokes and trying to stick to a light palette.
It’s been refreshing to get back into painting, especially as I have come up against a couple of rather frustrating dead ends in pursuing other areas of my recent practice, so while this may be the first painting I have made for a while, I have a feeling it probably won’t be the last!
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Summer 2013; Mission Complete!

19/8/2013

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Dalian PlaceMaking
Summer has certainly not disappointed in meeting expectations, in terms of both content and apparent brevity! I arrived back in the UK this weekend following a reasonably lengthy bout of travel through New Zealand, Australia, Japan and China, slightly jet lagged but freshly armed with a few updates to share!

By far the most exciting of these are the outcomes of the PlaceMaking workshops I ran with the kind support of English First language school in Dalian, Peoples’ Republic of China. I ran three workshops with different age groups of summer intensive English language students, who used the opportunity to explore the area around the school, share their thoughts about the place and practice a bit of English, sometimes in conversation inspired by the workshop, sometimes in written form on the boards themselves. As well as being available in the online gallery, photographs from the workshops will be on display at the Chinese Arts Centre in September. As well as (I hope!) being an enjoyable and valuable experience for the participants, The workshops were an exciting new opportunity for me to extend the project work beyond the shores of the UK and start to question the role that cultural and geographical differences may play in our perceptions of public space. Along with my own observations of certain key differences, the responses have allowed further reflection which will in turn fuel the evolution of the project work.

IFP
To enrich this further with some other perspectives, I paid a visit to meet the director and residency artists working at the studio of the Institute for Provocation, on my way through Beijing. The IFP is an initiative which aims to provide a physical and conceptual opportunity for sharing ideas and questioning the boundaries between different art forms. Primarily a research project at this stage, the Institute hopes to set up a free local workspace and that through making opportunities for conversations between artists, creatives and local self-employed people it will be possible to find common ground from which to recognise differences in cultural backgrounds. These differences and exchanges can then, it is hoped, be utilised in order to ‘provoke’ personal creative changes, reflections and responses.

I shared my recent work with Director Max Gerthel as well as current residence artists Maja Bekan and Angela Serino and spoke about contemporary art in Beijing; there is currently a small but dynamic creative community but this does have a clear western influence due to visiting artists and local artists who have travelled or studied outside of China. Smaller artists’ communities in the suburbs have a more traditional Chinese leaning. As well as talking about public space, we discussed the differences between Chinese approaches to art as a craft, the concept of making copies in order to achieve perfection of trade, and Contemporary Western perspectives where unique outcomes tend to be more highly valued. The former is of course not a uniquely Chinese perspective and we come dangerously close to the ‘What is Art?’ question in this territory but it was interesting to have this discussion from a new specific perspective.

Taiyuan Belongs ToTaiyuan Belongs To Glittermouse!
I will discuss these conversations further, alongside a more in depth analysis of the recent PlaceMaking work at a scheduled presentation as part of the CRITgroup autumn programme on the 25th of September, from 7pm at MadLab, Manchester.

It will be a busy September, with the show going up at Chinese Arts Centre, open from the 10th to the 14th with a late night viewing on Thursday 12th. I will also be returning for the third time to the Wythenshawe Garden City Festival on Saturday the 14th to run a ‘Greening the City’ workshop, which will utilise practical crafts techniques to incentivise young people to explore getting their fingers a bit greener (and pinker, yellower, bluer if my experience of kids and paint is anything to go by!)

So; it is with positivity that I bring the summer of 2013 to a timely close. I find the experience of travelling exhilarating and to be able to combine this with my arts practice and educational interests is like a career dream come true; however, I can be a bit of a home body at times and it is with a deep sense of contentment that I reacquaint myself with the familiar and settle back into a routine that will see the fruits of my international work flourishing in time for harvest in Manchester this Autumn!

The next CRITgroup meeting will be on August the 28th (that’s next Wednesday for anyone reading this in ‘real time’) and I will also have an few updates to add to the This Place Is project soon… Bet you can’t guess which places they will be!


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A Last Word Before the Summer Hiatus

5/7/2013

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UK PlaceMaking Flyer
For the last few years, especially while studying, the summers have ended up being an extended period of time to ‘get more done’ rather than anything much of a break, however, this year I have finally managed to schedule a bit of an adventure. Next week I shall be leaving the UK (whatever the weather!) and going on a mission that sees me spreading myself across a couple of continents until mid-August! I’m keeping an open mind about what I might come back with but I should certainly have some interesting new inspirations in relation to public spaces and how different countries and cultures manage them. With any luck, I may even have one or two new contributions to my current projects, depending on who I bump into while exploring!

A couple of quick points before it all goes quiet though; bad news first, the UK PlaceMaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre has had to be cut short and will now only be running until September 14th. The opening event will still be held on Thursday 12th but it will all be coming down a bit quicker as they have some exciting new building works that have been moved forward.


Nexus Happiness
On a more positive note, if you happen to be in Manchester at any point between now and August 11th, you could pop in to Nexus Art Café on Dale Street (Northern Quarter) to see their Happiness exhibition, in which I have four paintings!

Have a great Summer… Now where’s that Passport…?

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June... The Sequel!

18/6/2013

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Macclesfield PlaceMaking

As this is my second post for June, I don’t feel too apologetic about it being a fairly short one!

The main update is the PlaceMaking and This Place Is workshops that I ran this weekend at 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!

This Place Is Macclesfield

In the afternoon, I ran a This Place Is demo session back at the Pop Up Shop and rather than asking people to complete the booklets there and then, they have been made available to take away and return. You can still collect a booklet from the shop between now and June 30th (that's at 2 Church Mews, Churchill Way, Macclesfield, SK11 6AY) and can then either drop the completed work back into the shop or post them to me using the address on the project page.

I also now have four paintings on display at Nexus Art Café as part of their Happiness exhibition and they will be up until August 11th. If you drop in for a coffee you won’t be able to miss them; they are smack bang in front of you as you come down the stairs!

This is probably my last update for a while as I am off on a globetrotting jaunt this summer; I’ll be back in time for the UK PlaceMaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre in September though and who knows what additional inspirations I shall encounter over the summer months?! No doubt the time will fly and you’ll be reading all about it soon enough!

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May through to June

6/6/2013

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Picture
One of the features of May was the first showing of work by members of CRITgroup, which marked the end of the first of a series of collaborative projects seeking to investigate the perceived differences between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. As this has been a feature of our conversations in several meetings, we started the collaborative projects to question how the apparent need to ‘label’ oneself as a particular kind of practitioner (a ‘photographer’, a ‘craft worker’, etc.) affects individual practices and how those descriptions of discipline relate to differing methods of producing work. The May CRITshow event was the culmination of the Creative Whispers group project, in which each collaborator began by producing an item intended to represent their practice. These were brought along to each meeting (beginning December 2013) and passed on to a new artist. The task was to respond to each piece and bring it back the following month. This pattern repeated for 5 responses, with the intention being to discuss and review the outcomes in order to research the characteristics of practice, though we also knew we would have some interesting pieces in their own right.


It was a successful day with lots of discussion and plenty of time for further collaboration. We also discussed our next project; Crafting by Committee. You can see a full account of the day with photos and find details of the new project on the CRITblog post.

Picture
That’s the main update for now, though as ever there are a few bits and pieces in the pipeline! Next weekend I shall be running Placemaking workshops at the Magpie Thunder Bureau Pop Up in Macclesfield, running as part of the Barnaby Festival. In a slightly new approach, the morning will comprise of a walkabout with the Placemaking Boards before returning to the venue in the afternoon for a second session of completing This Place Is booklets. It is hoped that this will be an opportunity for local residents in the area to creatively voice their concerns relating to major changes to the high street and commercial areas in the vicinity. There will of course be an update soon after!


In other news, I have finally conceded to remove the canvases I finished last year from the walls of my flat and temporarily donate them to Nexus Art Café for their exhibition exploring ‘Happiness’. The paintings grew from earlier stages in the development of my recent work, which began by looking directly to the urban environment for inspiration. An initial visual starting point was the contrast between interventions which exist either inside or outside institutional control. For example, No Parking signs and graffiti. They loosely link to the theme of happiness in that I am interested in the concept of graffiti being used as a tool to assert control over city spaces in a subconscious attempt to affect feelings of ownership and a counteraction of urban alienation and unhappiness. The 4 canvases will be on display from the 13th of June until the 11th of August.
Picture

I have also now confirmed dates for the UK Placemaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre. Photographs from the recent workshops will be showing from the 13th to the 21st of September.

Finally, I should like to thank all the sponsors who supported me in running the Bupa Great Manchester Run on the 26th of May. I completed the 10 km course in 45:31 and raised a total of £360 for Venture Arts, whose participants I have worked with in the initial stages of the Placemaking workshops. They will be using the cash towards a new gallery space in their venue and it’s not too late to add a few extra pennies to that total on the fundraising page!


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An April Shower of Workshops!

25/4/2013

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SketchCrawling
In my last update just over a month ago, I promised an update from the This Place is The Northern Quarter SketchCrawl event so I’ll start with that! Hosted by Nexus Art Café, the workshop was an opportunity to spend an afternoon exploring and recording personal responses to the Northern Quarter area of Manchester City Centre. We were blessed with good weather (finally!) and I was joined by seven participants who enjoyed a leisurely stroll, drawing, chatting and taking photos before heading back to Nexus to collate individual This Place Is books and tuck in to some free tea and cake! The booklet pages from the workshop can be found in the These Places Are public gallery.

This Place Is The Northern Quarter
Pikes Lane
The next SketchCrawl I will be facilitating for Nexus will be on Sunday the 5th of May (Bank Holiday weekend) and will be a fresh chance to get stuck in using the PlaceMaking boards with hopefully better weather than the last one in October!

The PlaceMaking boards also had an outing to Bolton at the beginning of the week, where pupils of Pikes Lane Primary School took part in the workshops to kick off their Arts Week on the theme of ‘Environment’. The sessions were a great opportunity for them to get started thinking about their local area by using the boards to stimulate thought and discussion of their memories, current experiences and hopes for the future of their school and local environments. It never fails to amaze me just how quickly even very young people grasp the concept of how to use the boards and there is a real mix of both fantastical and genuinely practical ideas and observations. There are a lot of images (I worked with 120 children!) but they are  worth flicking through when you have a minute as many are guaranteed to raise a smile whether or not you know the area!

Jiangbin PlaceMaking
Whilst that was a most enjoyable (if somewhat exhausting!) day, the cherry on the cake that has been April just has to be the PlaceMaking Workshops that I ran last week with 2 members of staff and 7 students from Hangzhou Jiangbin Vocational School (The Chinese equivalent of UK Further Education colleges) in Zhejiang Province. The educational delegation were visiting Tameside College and York St John University as part of ongoing relationships between the institutions and as I was involved in delivering an arts brief to students in Hangzhou in 2011 I was very fortunate to be able to accompany the group on their trip round the UK. Using specially made PlaceMaking boards in Mandarin (as well as a few English versions) the group allowed me to record their perspectives on the UK cities we visited. You can see all the photos here for now (with translations!) but I am also very excited to announce that they will be exhibited at the Chinese Arts Centre in September! I will be going back to China myself before then so who knows, there may even be one or two additional photos by then!


Picture
A little closer to home and the CRITgroup Creative Whispers project is drawing to a close with our last swap taking place last night. My responses for April can be found here, while the whole series for response four are on the CRITgroup pages here. We now turn our attention to organising the CRITshow one day event at MadLab on the 25th of May, which will be a conclusion but also a further investigation into the questions raised by the project; those of ownership, boundaries between disciplines and the contrasts between the sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting perspectives of ‘artists’ and ‘crafts people’. The event will be open to the public so I will share more details of that soon!
On the very next day, the 26th of May, I shall be running in the Manchester 10k to raise funds for Venture Arts, who you may remember I have worked with a couple of times before to run PlaceMaking and This Place Is workshops for. I have never participated in an event like this before so it is going to be an interesting experience! I have been training for a few months now and am confident with the distance… it’s just the speed I am working on now!


It’s just as well I think that I managed to submit the final assessment for my Astronomy studies this month as I would be hard pressed to find a spare minute to work on it at the moment! Results for that will be out at the end of June I believe but so far, so good with my individual assignment grades. Now all I need to do is sit down and think about my wider aim; finding a way to combine my new understanding into my arts practice… Hmmmmm…. That’ll give me something to ponder while I am pounding the streets of Manchester!

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Marching Ahead with Plans for April, May and June!

18/3/2013

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Creative Whispers
I realised today that I had quite a bit to be sharing about the various things coming up throughout the year and that it felt like ages since I’d last posted an update, but I now see that actually it’s only been a month, which is about usual of late!

So first things first; some dates for the diary! We now have a date for the CRITshow; a one day event which will showcase the Creative Whispers outcomes and much of the process (which is arguably more important anyway!). We are also hoping to host a series of investigative workshops which will continue in the theme of the entire collaborative project and encourage participants to reflect on the relationship between their own practices, the disciplines they subscribe to and the work of other practitioners. We’ll use the day to explore the outcomes of Creative Whispers but will also hope it can form something of a launchpad for the next part of the project; Crafting by Committee! This is all part of the artists’ networking group I manage in Manchester by the way; If you’re not sure what that is, check out CRITgroup, we always welcome new faces!

This Place Is Mine
There also two new SketchCrawl dates with Nexus Art Café approaching ever closer. The first is on Saturday April 6th and will be a two hour opportunity to become involved in the This Place Is project. We will spend an hour walking around Manchester’s Northern Quarter and drawing ‘on the hoof’ before returning to the café for tea, cake and some more time to work on the booklets, either printing photos we may have taken or adding other materials to our drawings. The outcomes will all be displayed on the online gallery and will be collated too as I hope to exhibit all the contributions physically in the future, when I have gathered a good number. If you are interested in attending, drop me a message or contact the café directly!  The following Sketch Crawl will be on Sunday May 5th (that’s the bank holiday weekend) and will be another opportunity to participate in the PlaceMaking workshops. Hopefully the weather will be a bit more clement than last time!


The following months also involve even more PlaceMaking workshops! I am hoping to work with Pikes Lane Primary School in Bolton as part of their April Arts Week on the theme of ‘Environment’(it still needs confirmation to be fair but it is looking hopeful!). We hope to use the boards at the start of the week to physically explore the local area and make a record of the pupils’ memories, perceptions and aspirations for their local environment. In June, I hope to take the workshops to Macclesfield where Magpie Thunder will be hosting a temporary arts space as part of the Barnaby Festival. We hope the workshop will be of interest to residents who would like to explore, express and record their concerns regarding proposals for retail-based town centre redevelopment in the area.
Jiangbin Vocational School
And last, but very certainly by no means least, I am looking to September with great optimism as I have just entered into planning talks with the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester to exhibit photos from a series of PlaceMaking workshops I will be running with a group of visitors from Hangzhou Jiangbin Vocational School in April. The group is visiting Tameside College as part of on going links between the two institutions and has agreed to participate in the workshops whilst in the UK. As well as enriching the experience for the delegates, I am hoping the contrast of perspectives on public spaces across our cultures will form an important development for the whole project.

Thankfully, my final submission for the Astronomy course is at the end of April so whilst I must crack on with that in the meantime, it does mean I will be significantly freer to keep pursuing all these opportunities by the time I get there!  
 
Whew, 2013 certainly means business! I shall be back in a couple of weeks probably with updates from SketchCrawl!

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    Glittermouse has a background in  visual arts and education. You can read more on the 'home' page of this site. 

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