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.
