Respect Festival Cornwall Community work

I was introduced by chance one day to a group of women who are currently working on the organisation of respect Festival who were part of the colourful woman's network.

They were looking for someone to help with creative ideas generating for the respect festival and workshops for the festival. I was asked to join the group and communicate with the members of the group craft ideas, creative ideas and design ideas as well as come up with workshops for a youth group in Newquay, as well as doing photography for the lead up to the festival and photography on the day. 

They wanted me to come up with an idea for documenting the work that they did in workshops and for the festival.
I was also asked to design the logo for the colourful woman’s network, who were part of the group. They wanted something that represented diversity and that represented colourful women, in discussions we came up with the idea of using a rainbow effect for the women symbols. Keeping it bright and bold with the text colourful women’s network on it.
Here are the first ideas that I came up with:- 

 This is idea 1

 

This is idea2 

This is idea 3

And here are the final ideas, which the group went with:-

Hands of Respect!

Other ideas for the lead up to the festival were to create flags and banners with the youth group, craft stand, art work for the festival day its self, art and craft sales, and so on. 

One project that I thought would be good fro the youth group to get involved with was to make flags and bunting to go up at the festival with the letters that spell out respect festival. And to make Flags, which stand up right in the ground, that has their own versions of what respect should look like.
For the day its self the group asked for craft workshops, which the public can all get involved in. I came up with the idea of little flags which people will draw around there own had and decorate it in a way that represents themselves and then put it on a stick to make a flag that then can be taken through the town on the parade.

 The Cornwall Respect Festival is a one day festival to celebrate the multi-cultural aspects of life here in Cornwall.
Cornwall Respect wishes to acknowledge the many different cultures in our area.  We are committed to using the arts to celebrate diversity, and as a way of raising awareness of, and challenging prejudice.
This year’s festival will be held in Truro on the 29th of August.  It will start at 10am in Victoria Park, followed by a carnival procession through the streets to Lemon Quay where there will be entertainment.
When we first sent out the details of this year’s festival we proposed that we would have a ticketed event to round off the day.
However thanks to endless begging, borrowing, and heartstring pulling.  I am more than happy to announce that this year’s festival will now be absolutely free, yep that’s right FREE.  So here is the line-up for the evening’s entertainment on Lemon Quay.

www.legendlive.co.uk

www.myspace.com/legendlive

Baka Beyond 

www.bakabeyond.net

The Harpaphonics Ensemble www.grissanderson.com/nyckelharpa.html

Kernow vibration 
www.myspace.com/jahkernow

There are two licensed bars, and food & market stalls.

Because the event is absolutely FREE, I believe that this has provided us a great opportunity to raise some money for a worthy cause.

I am happy to announce that all donations this year will go directly to ‘Shelter Box’
In Victoria Gardens there will be music, stalls, theatre, information, face & henna painting, artwork, and much more at Victoria Park.  This part of the event will be alcohol free, and family focused.  There will also various workshops including;

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  Drum workshop

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  Belly dancing workshop

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  World dance workshop

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  Children’s marquee

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  BME health marquee

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  T’ai chi workshop

There will be a reggae sound-system, food stalls, film show, circus performers, live entertainment, DJ’s, Dance, pleasant surprises, and much more.

One thing has not changed, the Respect Festival still believe’s in saying no to racism, bigotry, and segregation; And yes to love, understanding, and acceptance.

Many of us who are a part of, or work with the many diverse communities here in Cornwall, often witness the emotional distress and consequences of racism, prejudice, and discrimination.  This can at times overshadow the vibrant, exciting, and rewarding experiences that come from living in a multi-cultural society.  We hope that the annual Cornwall Respect Festival will provide all of us from the youngest to the eldest with an opportunity to celebrate, talk, laugh, dance, and generally have fun together.

Cornwall respect believes that throughout the process and organisation of this festival it is vital to engage with young people. As well as offering a chance to showcase local talent, we hope to offer young people a chance to shadow the organisers, media, bands, and so on.

At the moment we are running a design a logo for respect competition and any young person, school, youth group etc.   We will also be working with schools. We hope to offer workshops in theatre, costume & musical instrument making, and dance.
Please contact me for further details

Most importantly it is not too late to be involved with, what is rapidly growing into the largest multicultural celebratory event in Cornwall this year.

It is of the highest importance to us that the festival is an inclusive event.  We would welcome any ideas, and input that you may care to offer.  Whether as an individual, community, organisation, institution, agency, school or college, trader, business, club, society, all are welcome.

So say no to racism, bigotry, and segregation; And yes to love, understanding, and acceptance by celebrating with us.

 DOTT Cornwall

Not that long ago I was invited to attend the DOTT Cornwall talk by the people who organise the project. I found it really intresting wiht the way that they comunicate with poepole and comunities about design. 

 

Dott (Designs of the time) is a national programme devised by the Design Council. It aims to encourage the best use of design to drive new thinking and ideas that produce innovative solutions to complex problems and help make the UK a more competitive, creative and Sustainable nation.

Dott is based on the principle that innovation thrives on the creativity of many. It is a programme, which brings people together with designers to identify, and then create practical solutions to the issues which affect their lives and environment.

Cornwall is on its own ambitious trajectory. With the goal of establishing a more knowledge-based economy, Cornwall is ideally placed to both benefit from and to inspire a Dott programme. Dott Cornwall would be built on the interplay between creativity, community and innovation and would help Cornwall find a new way to develop sustainable solutions to its social, environmental and economic issues.

How does DOTT work?

People of Cornwall. It will work alongside existing initiatives and add value to projects in a number of ways.  The Dott Cornwall Partnership has agreed these initial aims: How does Dott work? Dott is developed with host partner organizations to respond directly to the region’s own priorities and challenges. Content is shaped with a local programme team, exploring links with existing initiatives and projects.

Design teams work with local people to co-design the programme’s projects, drawing on a range of design tools to analyses and understand the community’s issues. Then they use visualization and prototyping skills to generate ideas and solutions.

To effect cultural change in the way organisations approach Where has Dott been tried? The first Dott happened in the North East. Around 200,000 people, including 16,000 school children, were either directly involved or experienced the activities in some way. Citizens acted both as clients and co-designers of sustainable solutions in areas such as rural transport, health, energy and food. The resulting projects delivered long-term benefits. To find out more about Dott 07 go to 

www.dott07.com

t
 

 

 

 

Serendipity 

"Is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely unrelated"

The word has been imported into many other languages (Portuguese "serendipicidade" or "serendipidade";  French  "sérendipicité" or "sérendipité" but also heureux hasard, "fortunate chance"; Italian "serendipità"; Dutch "serendipiteit"; German "Serendipität;" Swedish, Danish and Norwegian "serendipitet"; Romanian "serendipitate"; Spanish "serendipia"

Post Secrets 

After posting a Blog on post secrets I thought that I would post some more post secrets on here as I think they are so inspiring, and an encouraged way to deal with things which have not been dealt with or secrets that haunt you or play in the deepest depths of your mind.  I think that the whole idea is a way forward for us all.

It all Started when Frank Warren set out with an idea for community art project, “Post Secrets” initiallyit began as a commission for art installation in 2004, But has since turned into a full-time career for him.
  

In November 2004 he printed 3,000 postcards inviting people to share a secret, something that was true, some thing that they had never told anyone, and post it back. After several weeks he stopped passing them out but the secrets kept coming back.

This idea become his project and in turn captured the world’s imagination. The instructions were simple,
but the results were extraordinary.

He began posting the postcards on a web blog, the secrets were both provocative and profound, the cards them selves become works of art. To this day he has thousands upon thousands of
“Post secrets” sent to him, which he has exhibited and had it made into books

Home-made postcards made from cardboard, old photographs, wedding invitations, and other personal items artfully decorated arrived from all over the world, with secrets written in all languages.

The extraordinary collection brings together a selection of bits of strangers personalities.
Collectively it exposes individual yet personal human emotions.

"It touches on every aspect of the human experience"

  

The idea was personal to him; he was struggling with secrets in his own life and used the project to allow him to reflect with parts of the past that he had been hiding from

This made me think of how an initial idea can change dramatically, how personality and experience reflects within the reasons for a design and how the response can change outcomes entirely.

He quotes ;

“Maybe growing up I felt that my family had some hidden, deep, dark secret that I never found out about, and now
as an adult, I’m trying to search for this possible secret –whatever that might be. I don’t know. My background is in business. I have no artistic training or education and sometimes I feel like this project kind of found me. I really don’t have a good explanation as to why I am doing it. I feel like I’m on this journey that’s very gratifying.”

 This inspires me because it has come from a conceptual idea which turned in to a collective collaboration of everyone’s personal life experiences,which in turn allowed him to map and plan his subject terrain creating a serendipity that almost goes full circle

The demise of the commons

He has turned the concept of normality which is common in society into something questionable.
Using the concept of Art/design, Abnormality is more prominent in personal experiences of different individuals.

"Design is a form of
expression of an individuals personality"

Some times the initial idea can be quite different to the end result

Frank Warren personal experience was What influenced his initial idea Using the ‘imperfect’ personality (personal experiences) of other individuals to ‘comfort’ his own ‘imperfections’ Within the collection are his own “Post Secrets” but nobody knows what they are.

I personally found it a knowledgeable way of communicating individual thought patterns, shearing, “secrets” of his own personality but at the same time showing the changing thought patterns of society as a whole.

Design as Art 

 

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

Bruno Munari was an Italian artist and designer, who contributed in many fields of both visual (paint, scultpture, film, industrial design, graphics) and non-visual arts (literature, poetry.)

Summer Schools

 Summer Schools Doodles
 

Her are the creative table coverings that the groups decorated with allsorts of notes drawings and doodles, they took on a life of there own.

I could see this type of doodles transformed in to some sort of stitching or cut up in to different sized squares and framed as an exhibition in its self. I loved theses table coverings it gave the students chance to draw and writ what ever they liked with no restrictions on content and it just took on a life of its own and got them communicating with each other in a different way. 

It made me think of Thomas Campbell and his work;

Thomas Campbell 

http://www.thomascampbell-art.com/

I found that it reminded me of the film and book "Beautiful Losers"

Most of the work in this exhibition catalog is not beautiful by traditional standards. Nor can its makers, artists whose work is now displayed in museums and top galleries around the world, really be considered losers. Yet the loosely affiliated group of skateboarding and punk music aficionados represented in this book seems to have a considerable amount of cachet invested in their outsider status, their ability to see the beauty in being a "loser." Many of the painters, photographers and cartoonists in this book appear to be taking a cue from the most famous insider/outsider of them all, Andy Warhol: witness Harmony Korine’s photo-collage of a disaffected Macauley Culkin, Terry Richardson’s photo of a young man sitting on a toilet or a scarf design by Mike Mills titled "Fight Against the Rising Tide of Conformity." The artists consume popular culture and then spit it back out in a highly personalized form to express their alienation from the usual boogeymen (suburbia, capitalism, middle-class middlebrow culture). Bucking the traditional art school route, these self-taught artists prefer a more laid-back, "D.I.Y." ("do it yourself") attitude. This approach involves doodling, spreading graffiti and taking snapshots of their friends naked. The book’s accompanying essays narrate the development of these street culture artists with an absurdly exacting level of detail, the kind usually reserved for the lives of geniuses who’ve been dead for at least 10, maybe even 20 years. And while the book is excellently produced and the works in it are a lot of fun, it’s hard not to wonder if these artists enjoy posing as outsiders a little too much, especially given their newfound success. 200 color & 200 b/w illus.

Person Thomas Campbell

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Work Experience, and Workshops

Post Your Future

One last thing that I asked the groups to do was to right a post card to them self 's, about their stay with summer schools.

"This post card is for you to illustrate what it is that you have most enjoyed about your stay here at Falmouth over the last week. And to explain what you would like to achieve in the future, this can be as outrageous or simple as you like

Make the post card as decorative and interesting as you can, and in a way that represents you."

I was inspired by the pronominal "post secrets"  project

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

 

Post secrets all Started when Frank Warren set out with an idea for community art project, “Post Secrets” initially it began as a commission for art installation  in 2004, But has since turned nto a full-time career for him.

In November 2004 he printed 3,000 postcards inviting people to share a secret, something that was true, some thing that they had never told anyone, and post it back. After several weeks he stopped passing them out but the secrets kept coming back.

This idea become his project and in turn captured the world’s imagination.
The instructions were simple, but the results were extraordinary.

He began posting the postcards on a web blog, the secrets were both provocative and profound, the cards them selves become works of art. To this day he has thousands upon thousands of “Post secrets” sent to him, which he has exhibited and had it made into books.

 

 

Work Experience, and Workshops

 VJ ing Workshop for summer schools

VJ ing workshop The term "video jockey" is a derivative of the term "disc jockey", "DJ" (deejay) as used in radio. The term was popularised in the 1980s by the music teliveishion network MTV.

A VJ is a Performance artist  who creates moving visual art (often video) on large displays or screens, often at events such as concerts , nightclubs and music festivals, and usually in conjunction with other performance art. This results in a live, Multimedia  performance that can include music, actors or dancers as well as live and pre-recorded video

All the students were shown a documentary  on V J ing and was shown exactly what and how to create a image and a set. They were split up in to small groups some did some dance workshops to be projected in to the visuals and other controlled the music and the visuals from the VJ ing desk.

Work Experience, and Workshops

Hands of knowledge

Hands of knowledge are simple, on a piece of paper draw around your hands. In the inside of the hands write and draw all things which are important to you, things that you know, and things that you like. This could be anything such as, your favourite game, place, person, lesson, music, possession. It could be things which you are good at, things that you have learnt, important people such as friends or family, or someone famous; so everything about you now. Then on the out side all the things which you would like to achieve, this could be as extreme as becoming an astronaut, swimming around the world or even just as simple as coming back here next year. Decorate and colour them to illustrate you and who you are, write enough to show who you are now and what you would like to achieve in the future.

Work Experience, and Workshops

Pinhole Workshop for Summer Schools

I Planed and took a pinhole workshop for the summer schools groups on different weeks, part of this was to show the students how to make a makeshift dark room with the environment we had.
As the students were staying in halls accommodation we had a couple of spare rooms which I transformed in to a dark room. I felt this was important to do for the students to see just how an easy it is to create photographic images the original way with out the use of digital technology.

So. . . . I took a room and blacked out the window with black out material, each room has an on suite so I used that as the was room.
Once the room is fully blacked out I then put the portable red light it it, this was the safe light.
On the desk in the room I set up the DEV STOP and FIX chemicals in the trays and labelled them with extra tray's to take the photographs to wash.
The rooms were big enough for the whole group to fit in and load up each pinhole camera with the paper which was useful as well as for them all to develop the images.

once the room was set you and the students were shown how it was done and I had explained how to use the chemicals and the dark room we then had to make the pinhole cameras.
I had previously mad an example of a pinhole camera and had collected a variety of matirials and containers for them to make a camera each.








we had a selection of small box's and large box's and different sized drinks cans and circular containers.




I was impressed with the neatness of the pinhole cameras that were made by the summer school students.

I was also excited by the imaginative and effective images that they created, the workshop went on longer than anticipated as the students were enjoying it so much.

here are some pinhole images from all the workshops;

Work Experience, and Workshops

Filming and documenting the summer schools experience

As part of the whole experience the students get to create their own film which they have to writ and film all them selvfs. Part of the filming is to document the activities they take part in and part of that filming is done by staff like myself HA!

This was brilliant to learn, I feel that I learnt so much and if I had not have taken part in summer schools then I wouldn't have learnt so much of theses things. I did quite a bit of filming through the whole summer school experience and i really enjoyed it as well as learning how to edit and what goes in to putting together film and sound, and learning how to put together a live script and film and capture it all on DVD.