Rapidly approaching the end of yet another ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ summer, this really is the end of the road for the holidays as I return to work this week. Just as well really as there will be a new group of first year Level 3 Art and Design students demanding my full attention in less than a week and I have but three work days left to prepare for them!
| It’s been a busy summer on many fronts as I push forward with key aspects of my practice as well as wrap up and move on from a couple of other projects. On the 26th of July I visited the Wythenshawe Games Festival where I was pleased to run an updated version of a previous workshop which encourages participants to reflect on their local areas whilst learning and developing craft techniques. Last time I ran something similar the workshop was titled My City Would Be Better With and focused on aspects of the locale that could be improved. This time round, with so much celebration of all things British going on left, right and centre, it seemed only appropriate to re-title it The best Thing About My City Is and I took a different stance by asking prospective crafters to think about things that were already deserving of recognition. The workshop was well received, with queues out of the door and some disappointed later arrivals, so it is with optimism that I look forward to my next appointment in Wythenshawe; a glass painting workshop at the Garden City Festival on September the 15th. | 
Craft Outcome from The Best Thing About My City Is...
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| That was not the only workshop of the summer and I have now really got the ball rolling on This Place Is, a new interactive project aiming to provide a platform for people to reflect on and share their favourite (or at least most noted) places. It was a genuine pleasure to re visit the Hulme History Society this month and it has been with them that the first more formally completed This Place Is booklets have been produced. There are now two finished contributions in the dedicated gallery with more on the way from those who felt that they needed just a little more time. I’m really looking forward to receiving up to five more booklets from members of the society as I have already seen the content of many of the pages and know that they will contain some real gems. This Place Is will continue to grow and develop through September when I visit some more old friends at Venture Arts to work on new booklets with them. With two workshops planned at their studio, I’m hoping for lots of creative responses to add to the galleries before long. I am also planning a couple of public workshops as part of Nexus Art Café’s SketchCrawl programme and these will opportunities for people to get involved by using the Placemaking Boards and This Place Is booklets. Sunday October 28th is provisionally booked in for the first of those so drop me a quick message if you’d like further details. |
| Anyone who has been keeping up with my recent posts will remember me mentioning a series of canvases that I started in the summer of 2009 but which were temporarily abandoned while I completed an MA in 3D design. Though I couldn’t justify taking the time out to paint during that period, the paintings are still loosely related to many of the same themes (interaction with urban spaces) and grew directly from the same research sketches as the installation series, which can be found a little way down the Sketchbook page. I have now completed the fourth and final canvas; Shunk (50x50 cm, acrylic on Canvas). Though I don’t have any immediate plans to produce more paintings or develop this work further, the series did raise some interesting questions and while I really should be focusing on more fundamental aspects of my practice I can’t help feeling that it won’t *quite* be as final as that in reality. Other paintings in the series can be found in blog pages categorised under 'other work'. | 
Shunk 2012, acrylic on canvas, 50x50cm
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Other little bits of news include the continued existence of CRITgroup which has kept itself up though out the summer. Attendance has been a little more sparse than I might have liked but with speakers lined up for September and October I’m hoping that it’ll pick up a bit when everyone is back from their summer breaks.
Last but not quite least, (and this doesn’t seem like entirely the right place to share my final update but it’s also quite fundamental to my long terms plans and philosophies on creativity generally) last year (after finishing the MA) I enrolled on an evening course to re sit my GCSE Maths. I had multiple reasons for doing that, not least of which was a growing desire to prove wrong anyone who had ever hinted, asserted, assumed or stated that if one is capable in areas of visual arts that one must be necessarily less able in areas perceived to be unrelated (or vice versa). I didn’t complete the full GCSE courses when I was at school because I experienced health problems during much of the last three years of Secondary education and despite gaining A-C grades in everything else, only managed a D in Maths. When I enrolled, I was placed onto the Foundation course (you can achieve grades F-C on the exam) but was moved onto the Higher paper after a few months (meaning it is possible to be awarded A-D) and was predicted to achieve a B. Despite wondering what the hell I was doing on more than one occasion, I managed to bend my brain around various totally new concepts and can only describe myself as being utterly shocked to discover last week that I had in fact managed to achieve an A grade. This should have prepared me well for my next educational project; I am hoping to enrol on an Astronomy course in the next few weeks. Some of my other reasoning for re sitting the Maths might now be a bit more self-explanatory and I hope to eventually tie in more instinctive visualisation skills with my learning in that area. That, however, is a little way off for now and must remain to be seen…
More updates soon; until then, I think it’s time to pack away the sun cream…
Last but not quite least, (and this doesn’t seem like entirely the right place to share my final update but it’s also quite fundamental to my long terms plans and philosophies on creativity generally) last year (after finishing the MA) I enrolled on an evening course to re sit my GCSE Maths. I had multiple reasons for doing that, not least of which was a growing desire to prove wrong anyone who had ever hinted, asserted, assumed or stated that if one is capable in areas of visual arts that one must be necessarily less able in areas perceived to be unrelated (or vice versa). I didn’t complete the full GCSE courses when I was at school because I experienced health problems during much of the last three years of Secondary education and despite gaining A-C grades in everything else, only managed a D in Maths. When I enrolled, I was placed onto the Foundation course (you can achieve grades F-C on the exam) but was moved onto the Higher paper after a few months (meaning it is possible to be awarded A-D) and was predicted to achieve a B. Despite wondering what the hell I was doing on more than one occasion, I managed to bend my brain around various totally new concepts and can only describe myself as being utterly shocked to discover last week that I had in fact managed to achieve an A grade. This should have prepared me well for my next educational project; I am hoping to enrol on an Astronomy course in the next few weeks. Some of my other reasoning for re sitting the Maths might now be a bit more self-explanatory and I hope to eventually tie in more instinctive visualisation skills with my learning in that area. That, however, is a little way off for now and must remain to be seen…
More updates soon; until then, I think it’s time to pack away the sun cream…
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