I had the opportunity to install my work at the beautiful Bridlington Spa building for the Artwaves festival in June.
The team there were amazing! It took 5 (some inside the dome!) to get the installation in the correct position.
The piece is made from layered laser cut mount board and tissue paper….
Oh my goodness I consider myself a bit of a stately home expert! and when I say expert i just mean I have visited a lot of them!
We had the best time visiting Harewood House and best of all it suited me and my three year old perfectly (for different reasons). I knew there was a farm and bird house, but I did not realise that meant flamingos and penguins!!!!
Not only did I get to see the stunning interior, which gave me so much inspiration, there was also the ‘Useful/Beautiful, Why Craft Matters’ exhibition displayed in the house. I must admit what with the ceilings and Ruby saying, “Mama come on,” I did not get time to take it all in. I`ll blog about all the inspiring artists later…..but now ceilings!
I was so excited to pick up items from Bolton Museums` wonderful natural history collection; the group at Inspire will be so excited to see and touch the items….Ruby was very excited about one item too! ( the tarantula-me not so much!)
I`m really interested to see which objects group members are drawn to and why. We are going to be using these objects to create different patterns.
A Buzzard`s wing…so beautiful
A Cone shell, which has to be my favourite…the pattern is so beautiful
Coral…I love the texture and pattern
Ibex horn…
A Sheep`s spine…
And a Tarantula, which is encased in acrylic luckily for me!
I had been informed about a sports day that would take a lot of the participants away from the group, but to avoid people turning up and me not being there, we decided to still go ahead. I was secretly looking forward to a quieter group!
Three group members turned up; the atmosphere felt very calm….we began by doing another writing exercise, which we all did together, then we did doodle exercises with these words, which brought up unexpected things. Small groups always feel very different to larger ones; there is more space for people to talk and usually people feel more comfortable sharing in a more intimate group. I felt priviledged to be part of it; the sharing that happened felt really important. Experiences were shared and common ground was found, which led us to talking about feelings of shame. I have no experience of addiction, but talking about what to me is a core human feeling, has increased my understanding, so I feel I have greater empathy for an addict`s experience, so thank you!
It`s impossible to pinpoint exactly what brought about this sharing; lots of factors no doubt, but maybe writing feelings down as a small group was one of these factors. One group member said. “I have never felt this open in a group before; they`re always trying to get you to open up about how you feel.”
There was a hopeful feeling to the group, as they reflected on past events that brought them to this point, whilst looking to the future.
Last week felt really powerful; participants were really focused on their artwork, so maybe I was expecting a similar experience this week!
The atmosphere felt completely different; the group was really busy, people turned up at different times, which meant I had to keep repeating what was happening, so there was a stop start feel to the group.Adding to this there was a lot of new group members who had not been before, so that meant explaining what the project was about.
This left me feeling frazzled! I`m sure this had an impact on the group members who were settled from the start. This made me think do I need to limit this kind of disruption? The group has a start and end time and this session made me wonder how much I should be keeping this boundary?
The ideal group situation where everyone comes on time every week just does not exist, so is it about limiting these disruptions or accepting them!? One of the things I love about creativity is you can socialise, whilst creating; you don`t need to go any deeper and the therapeutic value of creativity can still be at work.
We began the group with a very thoughtful writing exercise, (which in hindsight would have been better at the end!), this was to generate ideas and themes for their mantras. Group members who had experienced the ink and bleach moved on to explore working with other inks, acrylics and masking fluid, whilst new group members tried out the bleach. Beautiful things happened….
