Painting Pebbles 

This is the images from the workshop i did with the children at the "Colourful women's Network" where i collected lots of different types of pebbles and took them along for the children to decorate.
The them of the pebbles was "Things" and "Creatures" with goggly eyes and funny faces this is what they created.

And they all did a fantastic job! so proud of them and love the out come. 

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.

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

 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.

Work Experience, and Workshops

Documenting their week's with SLR Cameras
Summer Schools workshops

All the students on summer schools were inducted on film SLR cameras so that they could document the week from there own point of view. It was interesting as so many had never even seen a camara like this as they were used to cameras on their phones or digital cameras. One student asked me how to look at the photo she had just taken on the camera which was odd to me but just shown how new technology is growing so fast.
Ever student each week was issued with a SLR camera each with black and whit film to document their time at summer school. They were all shown how to load up their campers with the black and white film, they were shown how to work out the light meters, so they can get the light right in the photos for both inside and out side.



Some of the student brought their own digital cameras to take photos of the week .




My job through the week was to make sure they new what they were doing with the cameras showing them different ways of taking photos, i also had a digital camera which was documenting everything.
I allowed each student chance to help take photos with a digital, one of the projects I set them was movement photography her is one of the photographs taken by one of the students that represents movement.