A Mouse on a Mission...
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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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Arts through the summer...

25/7/2012

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Far from winding down for summer things have in fact been just as busy as ever on the arts front so far!

Though the I Hope To See exhibition came out of Nexus on July 4th,  the very next week all 6 photos (and 44 more!) were whisked off to the other side of Manchester where they are now on display at Rolls Crescent Primary School.
Rolls Crescent Display
I Hope To See on display at Rolls Crescent Primary School
Rolls Crescent Display
It’s much more appropriate that they end up there as they can now be enjoyed by the children who participated in the workshops and who were no doubt pleased to show off their work at the recent parents evening. I was also delighted to join an important prize giving assembly at the school on what turned out to be a very lucky Friday 13th for some pupils who not only received certificates to reward them for their ideas but also copies of a smart brochure containing all the photos for both classes.
A Scene From the East and West
Scenes from the East and West of the Mancunian Way
The following week saw the first opportunity to get the This Place Is brochures out and working.  A collaborative event organised through CRITgroup, a few of us met in Manchester to take a reflective tour of the Mancunian Way. As well as a series of activities provided by Kevin Linnane designed for interacting with the environment, participants were asked to use This Place Is booklets for recording their responses to the space. The workshop ran for about 3 hours and the contributions are recorded in the This Place Is Public Gallery. It’s always interesting to discover the reality of a participative project (no matter how flawlessly it runs in your head!) and needless to say I have not been disappointed by the responses so far. So many interesting stories and visual records came out of such a seemingly limited space and time and it’s probably just as well that I am able to report that I also enjoyed completing my own booklet!  None of that of course, is to undermine the activities set by Kevin; I certainly didn’t expect to spend Sunday afternoon dowsing next to a motorway and I think I shall be eternally grateful for my reintroduction to the largely forgotten art of wax rubbing! All the contributions to This Place Is are now live for browsing so head on over if you fancy discovering just how inspirational a dual carriage way really can be!

This has all been happening over and around a new job that I took on last month. I am now delivering arts workshops on Saturday afternoons at the brand new Blackburn Youth Zone. The centre was featured recently on North West Tonight and really is a stunning facility for young people. I’ve been really enjoying using the space, getting to know new colleagues and having an opportunity to share my love for visual arts in an alternative environment to formal educational contexts. There are always one or two people who, for various reasons, don’t get on with the structure or pace of Further Education Courses and it’s good to know that I might be part of a different solution for a wider range of people.

Despite all the busyness I have still managed to find time to complete the third canvas of the outstanding series of four (a quadtych!?) that I began in 2009 before starting the MA. The (delightfully titled) Suck My Ballsack is 50x50 cm and is acrylic on canvas. The series is loosely related to many of the same themes as the installation series, and some of the initial sketched can be found a little way down on the Sketchbook page.

This evening we have a special guest at CRITgroup who will be taking about his recent work in Hong Kong and tomorrow I am off to deliver two workshops; painting on glass and then on metal  at the Wythenshawe Games 2012. I’ll expect to be posting updates on both of those events (Check CRITblog for details of CRITgroup meetings) and with further This Place Is workshops lined up through August and September I expect to have even more to share soon; hopefully before this latest snap of warm weather runs out!

Suck My Ball Sack
Suck My Ballsack, July 2012, 50x50cm, Acrylic on Canvas
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I Hope To See at Nexus Art Café

24/5/2012

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The main update for May is the current exhibition I Hope To See which I have just finished hanging this morning. The show at the Nexus Art Café is of a selection of photos from recent workshops with Rolls Crescent Primary School; the final sessions in a series of interactions with various groups in Hulme. The work is up until July 5th and can be found downstairs in the café area of Nexus (Northern Quarter, Manchester city centre). The prints will then be moving to a display of the full series in the school itself, to coincide with Parents’ Afternoon. There will also be a presentation of souvenir brochures to the classes who participated.
Nexus Show
Nexus Show
I Hope To See exhibtion at the Nexus Art Café
Though this marks the end of the Hulme Workshops, it is really only the beginning for the Placemaking Boards and these will next be aired in the Nexus Art Café itself. In June I will be attending a meeting of the staff and community groups who use Nexus and we will be utilising the I Remember, This Place Is and I Hope To See boards as a creative alternative to paper based questionnaires in a feedback gathering exercise. It is hoped that the outcomes will help the café reflect on its successes as well as providing suggestions for improvements from those who use the space.
This is a very exciting development as it demonstrates an alternative application of the boards and it’s great to be able to get involved in something with such a clear aim. Photos from the session will be displayed as part of the upcoming Nexhibitionists show, which celebrates the different groups that have used the café. This opens on June 28th and coincides with the Private View of I Hope To See.
The CRITgroup project continues to bloom and though we had a small group last night it was still useful. Though you can read a full write up of the session on the CRITblog, I will share the most useful thing for me, which taking along a final draft of a new interactive project looking at place that I have been developing with the help of feedback from the group. This was the first session that the mock-up booklets weren’t met with an ‘I think this would be better if’ response, so I feel I am finally ready to get them properly printed up! You can see the group contributions in an earlier trial run on the Sketchbook page.
CRITgroup May 23rd
A new CRITgroup member makes a note while others discuss a project!
I have also confirmed guest speakers for the CRITgroup meetings in July, September and October. You can find more information about these on the home page as well as register your interest to come along to the June meeting if you are a creative practitioner within traveling distance of Manchester.
Mmm...
Mmm... May 2012, acrylic on canvas

On a tangential note, I have completed a new canvas since my last update. I began this series in the summer of 2009 but it got put on a back burner when I started the MA because I really couldn’t take the time out of the 3D design practice to paint. It is loosely related to many of the same themes though and grew directly from the same research sketches as the installation series, which can be found further down the Sketchbook page.


Next update due in June or July… Here’s hoping the weather holds out!

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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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