Family Art Project 2008
The Awards for All funded Family Art Project workshops
were held over consecutive weekends in July and August last year. We
worked in partnership with local organisations including North Devon
Arts, the Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon, Dartmoor National Park
Authority and the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, to
set up and publicise the workshops widely . The Barnstaple workshop run by Paul and Tanya Morel used natural and found materials such as pine cones, shells, seaweed, fleece, twigs, leaves, flowers and bits of plastic and metal to create animals and fantastical creatures. The finished objects were displayed in a perspex fronted Curiosity Box built specially to house them.
Yuli Somme and Tian Kalouli ran their workshop at the Postbridge visitor information centre on Dartmoor and taught participants how to make felt using local Dartmoor fleece in different colours.
The felt was shaped into leaves each with a unique design. The leaves were then tied to a specially built ‘tree’ created by basket maker Linda Lemieux using local birch and willow.
Exeter artists Lucy Rockcliffe, Jess Carvill and Lucy
Burch ran workshops in mosaic and ceramic tile making at CCANW. The
mosaic panels, ceramic tiles and footprints were used to decorate a
large door and door frame.The front showed the positive aspects of Devon open countryside, recycling, wildlife and the back showed the negative aspects such as waste and pollution.
Feedback from all the workshops was extremely positive and they were hugely enjoyed by all ages. The youngest participants were infants of 3 and the oldest was a gentleman in his 80’s.
The opportunity to work alongside professional artists and learn new, enjoyable skills was much appreciated and many people commented that they would like to attend similar workshops in future.
We are planning a further series of Family Art Workshops for summer 2009. Details will be available on the website later this year.
Family Art Project 2009
The Family Art Project was held at Morwellham Quay near Tavistock as part of the Devon Open Studios event in September and was led by artist and maker Chrisy Wallis. The theme was 'Outside.' The project was to decorate a table and pieces of crockery with a mosaic of 'dock dung pottery.'
This comes from the manure-rich street sweeping of Devonport, Plymouth in the 19th century. Barges full of this street manure journeyed up the Tamar and were unloaded at Morwellham Quay where local farmers collected it to fertilise their fields. The street sweepings contained other waste such as broken and discarded household crockery which then lay in the soil for over a hundred years. Chrissy has been finding and collecting pieces, many of which were used in this project.
The Morwellham archaeologist paid a visit to the workshops and was able to identify some of the mosaic pieces. These included examples of pottery from the Ming dynasty (1600- 1680); Bristol(Blue Scratchware1780-1810), Staffordshire (imitation porcelain 1780- 1810), Spanish Majolica (1680 -1750), Porcelain, Delft (Earthenware 1700-1750) and Wan-Li Porcelain (1700-1750).The finished piece, Afternoon Tea, was exhibited at the Tamar Valley Centre Trail Festival at the end of October.
The Big Draw workshops
The theme of the workshops was 'wildlife arts and crafts' and the artists interpreted this in a variety of fun and imaginative ways.
DAN was delighted to have this opportunity to work with Devon Libraries in this way and we look forward to working with them again in the future.
The images below are from a workshop held at Tiverton Library by Clare Schmidt-Norris.
