The January Challenge

Weird Auto-Collage of The January Challenge images

In my 'end of year' blog post I wrote about the Instagram challenges I'd taken on and how I'd found it a good way of keeping up with a regular creative practice. With this in mind I decided that I'd do 64 Million Artists 'The January Challenge' to kick off 2018. The basic premise is that everybody is creative (something I believe very strongly) and the challenge gives you a prompt/small task everyday to get you thinking and creating. I'm also trying to keep up my daily drawing (so far, so good) so I was hoping that the two might tie in together quite nicely. 

Day 25: Potion
Solar Dye Jar

Day 28: No Place like Home

The challenges were not at all like I expected, I had been expecting more of an artistic challenge but many of the challenges were much more along the creative/try something new line. This is not a bad thing, it just wasn't quite what I expected. Some of the challenges I really didn't enjoy; mainly the ones to do with dancing and noise but what I did like is that all of them made me think. I've enjoyed having a 'focus' each day as often it's been something I wouldn't have come up with myself. I didn't share all of the challenges but I did do them all, even the ones I didn't like. Doing the challenge is definitely good for mindfulness and I think there are a lot of things I've seen and learnt from this challenge that I'll continue to think about and maybe develop going forward. 

Day 10: Paper

Day 14: Sink or Swim
Boat made from baking parchment and yarn

Day 24: Quote

Not surprisingly the challenges I enjoyed most were the drawing and making challenges. I particularly enjoyed Day 19: Over my Shoulder challenge which was to draw with your non-dominant hand what you could see over your right shoulder. I really liked this as it made me draw things I wouldn't normally and pushed my drawing practice. I also really liked Day 10 which was to create something from a sheet of paper. I twisted and wrapped a piece of A4 paper to make a little bird, something I've been meaning to experiment with for a while but not got around to so it was nice to have that incentive.

Day 19: Over my Shoulder

Day 2: Five faces in five minutes
Five 'blind' self portraits

Day 20: Advert

I also surprised myself by really enjoying the writing challenges. I like writing and spend quite a lot of time doing it but I rarely do any 'creative' writing. I often write things in my head but I never get them onto paper so I enjoyed the challenges as it gave me a chance to do this. I really enjoyed the challenges involving poetry, as I created 'accidental' poetry and I really love the random, unpredictable nature of the process. For instance, for Day 12 I created a poem using lines from the books by my bed. I chose a line from page 64 (for 64 million artists) and then pages 12,1,20 and 18 to make up the date. The resulting poem was mostly nonsensical but I enjoyed it! 

Day 12: Our Poem

Abominable is described,
Wearing a pretty painful glove
And over every living thing
Dare to suggest
The most important rule

Day 23: Blackout Poetry
Page from a gardening magazine

One of the things that I have enjoyed most about the challenge is seeing how other people have approached things. Part of the aim of the challenge is to share what you do and I've been really inspired by seeing how differently people approach things and I've enjoyed being part of the community, sharing ideas and inspiration and quite a lot of humour. I've enjoyed taking part in this challenge but I must admit that I'm pleased it's finished! I'm looking forward to keeping up with making a little creative time for myself each day but I'm also looking forward to focusing more on my drawing again.

Day 26: Spirit Animal

Day 16: Story

The light fades fast, the sunset unseen behind dense banks of cloud drifting at speed across the wide sky. Still she sits, waiting patiently, a solid still point in a spinning world.

Darkness gathers but street lights and headlamps keep it at bay. Waiting still, the world slows a little as curtains close and doors shut.

Then the turn of the key in the lock, the sound she has been waiting for. Slowly, carefully, she gets up and stretches out, ready to greet him. They have stories to share and the world keeps turning.

Recent Textile Based Antics

Setting up for a workshop

I originally began this blog as a way of documenting all the different creative things I was doing. Over time it has grown and changed and it's become quite a reflective place for me and as social media has grown and grown I've been using other platforms to share and record my work. (If you have a little look on the right of this page you can find a link to some of those platforms.)

Making Suffolk Puffs with the WI

Making Suffolk Puffs with the WI

Making Suffolk Puffs with the WI

Recently I've been blogging less and less about the workshops and participatory projects I'm working on and I think there's a couple of main reasons for this. Firstly, I've been using Flickr to share images of the projects I'm working on and as I've shared the images (a picture paints a thousand words and all that) I've been writing less. Secondly, I've been working on lots of 'ongoing' projects so there isn't always a definite start and finish so I've tended not to blog as I think "I'll write a post when..." but of course the 'when...' never happens!

Making Suffolk Puffs with the WI

Making Suffolk Puffs with the WI

I don't think that sharing my work on these other platforms is a bad thing in any way but I do find that sometimes I miss the writing up and regular writing practice that blogging provides. There is an obvious and easy way to solve this and that is to get back into the habit of regularly blogging! So, with that in mind here's a summary of a couple of recent workshops that I've run.

Making Suffolk Puffs with the WI

Suffolk Puffs with the Women's Institute (Warwick Bridge, Carlisle)

This was a really relaxed evening with a very lovely group of ladies. Making Suffolk Puffs is fairly easy so my main focus was showing the ladies what could be made with them; in particular textile jewellery. I'm always quite nervous working with groups such as the WI as often I'm working with people who have much more knowledge and experience of sewing than I do but I always find that what I can bring is a bit of inspiration and a different way of looking at things which encourages people to be a bit more creative.

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

This is one of my favourite workshops to run and this session was so relaxed and enjoyable. The ladies were so engaged in embellishing their fabrics that at times the room was almost silent but in between those times we had some really interesting conversations about needlework and how the way something is taught makes such a huge difference to not only your understanding but your enjoyment (or otherwise.) I'm really pleased to have been asked back so in September I'll be running another of my favourite workshops for the group: Sketchbook Making.

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

Embellishing Printed Fabrics with Brampton Art Club

Shadow Work Workshop

Samples and materials ready for the workshop

In February I delivered a Shadow Work workshop for the Cumberland Branch of the Embroiderers Guild. I was really nervous about this workshop as some of the embroiderers have been stitching longer than I've been alive! I wanted to create a workshop that focused not so much on traditional ways of doing things (as I knew many of the participants would be far better at it than me anyway) but on ways of taking the traditional techniques and using them in a more personal way.

Selecting and transferring designs

Selecting and transferring designs

Selecting and transferring designs

This workshop also inspired a piece of work, called In the Shadows, which I really enjoyed making. It was also good to have a big piece of work to show the participants as traditionally shadow work is worked on quite a small scale. I had also combined several techniques to show that we don't need to be limited to working with just one method at a time.

Tacking fabrics ready to stitch

Tacking fabrics ready to stitch

Stitching

One of the things that I often find when running workshops is that people are very nervous about implementing their own ideas and have little confidence in their own creativity. They are often worried about getting it 'wrong' and making sure they do things the 'right' way. Personally I find this an odd approach as for me it is a natural thing to want to experiment and try new things but I do understand why people feel that way. I hope in my workshops that I can give people the confidence and freedom to try something different and not worry too much about getting it 'right.'

Experimenting with fabrics

Pin Stitch

Stitch and tea...

To help limit people's worry about design and creating something I did provide several designs for people and encouraged participants to use these as a starting point to try out their own ideas. Because they were my designs they did of course largely feature birds so a lot of bird samples were produced during the workshop!

Pieces from the workshop

Pieces from the workshop

Pieces from the workshop

I really enjoyed the workshop, it was great seeing people playing around with fabrics and trying things out especially things that they might not normally have tried. For most the session everyone was very quiet, deep in concentration working on their stitching. This kind of silence in a workshop is very satisfying, knowing that you've shown people something they want to spend time learning. I always find I learn something new too when I run a workshop, whether it's a new artist to look at, a technique to try out or using something in a different way.

Pieces from the workshop

Pieces from the workshop

Pieces from the workshop

Giving and Getting

Blackbird Singing. Lino print, 2015

There are quite a few proverbs and sayings along the theme of giving and getting; you reap what you sow, you get what you give and so on. The moral of the majority of these sayings is that what you put into something you will get back out, so put a lot of effort in and you will get a a great reward. In real life this is of course not always totally true but I do believe that in the bigger picture it is more or less true. I think that our understanding and belief in this concept varies greatly depending on what we regard as a reward or 'getting.' I'm a firm believer that there is a lot more to life than material gain (as much as I love shiny things) and that often the things one gets from giving are intangible; a sense of well-being or satisfaction for instance.

At the start of February Prism Arts funded me to travel up to Dumfries for a symposium run by Upland. It was a full on and really interesting day with great speakers and discussions. Although Cumbria is generally included in the North West region of England I sometimes feel, especially in North Cumbria, that we have a lot more in common with South West Scotland. The English North West includes the large urban areas of Liverpool and Manchester which are very different to rural Cumbria.

One of the recurring themes of the day was networks and 'giving it away.' As we all know times are hard, cuts are everywhere and it is becoming harder and harder to secure funding for arts projects. Increasingly artists and arts organisations are looking at different ways of working and networks and communities are a core part of this. Throughout the day the organisations and individuals speaking showed a general unwillingness to address the financial aspect of their projects, which was a bit frustrating but understandable. The focus was very much on the benefits of collaboration and giving it away (whether 'it' was responsibility for an aspect of running an organisation or an idea or information.)

Traditionally, many artists, makers and organisations have been quite closed, guarding their secrets closely and have shown a reluctance to share skills and knowledge; often due to a very reasonable and legitimate fear of being copied. In my own practice I have always been very willing to share my skills and knowledge, I like to think that I have more to gain than to lose by sharing what I know and I enjoy helping other people try out new techniques. I have had my work copied and it is frustrating but I think in most cases if your work has honesty and integrity this shows through. Work that is copied without due credit does not have this and I think people can spot that.

Swans, colouring book page. Pen on paper, 2016

As I was writing this post I was thinking about how, apart from my participatory practice, I myself put the giving and getting idea into practice and two particular examples came to mind. In December Cumbria was hit by massive flooding, affecting thousands of people and devastating many homes and businesses. Whilst it was terrible to see the damage and destruction what really stood out was how people came together to support each other. In many cases this was in very practical ways such as donating food and clothes, tradespeople offering to work for free and people offering up spare rooms and holiday cottages.

For the less practical but more artistic amongst us Gavin Pollock came up with the idea of creating a colouring book which could then be sold to raise money for the flood appeal. This was a way I could definitely help so I contributed a drawing of a swan with her cygnets safely tucked under her wings sailing through stormy waters. I wanted to create an image that showed the caring and compassionate side of the disaster as well as the water. [The book is still in production, details will follow!]

The second example of artists coming together and using their skills to benefit those affected by the floods is the LoveCumbria Art Auction, held at The Halston on 11th February. A great many artists, including myself, donated work to be auctioned off to raise funds for the Cumbria Community Foundation Flood Recovery Appeal. Lots of big names donated work and the event was a great success, raising £12,000 for the appeal.

The moral of this post? Sharing and giving is good and whilst what you get back might not be physical or tangible you will get something: I gave artwork and in return I got satisfaction, a bit of publicity and the knowledge that I'd been part of something big and worthwhile.