Artist in Residence at The John Henry Newman School

I've started a new project within the residency. It's to do with ways of learning and developing and a number of teachers from the school are doing projects and we have meetings and evening sessions to discuss our ideas. Anyway, I've decided that my project is to based around the idea of a 2-way collaborative exchange (if that makes sense). When I began the residency, it was my hope that my work would influence the pupils work, and vice versa. So far it has I believe. To kick off my 'research' I took a group of year 8's, about 27 of them, and after giving a presentation of my work and my influences, I asked them to 'set me some homework', for them to give me instructions for what to do on a blank canvas that I presented to them. Now, I did make suggestions and give them a materials list as I didn't want to do anything crazy. I ended up with an interesting batch of instructions, and I can safely say that this will be an odd piece of work, but this is a test run. They seemed really keen to give me a task to complete, as they are used to being told what to do by a teacher, I'm not sure how it has effected their classwork yet, but they have made visits to my studio which is probably the most important thing. I next plan to do some quicker tasks with different groups.

It's been a while since I last posted, so mainly I wanted to show my face and say hi. I've been extremely busy since December, and the two week break at Christmas was much needed. I've mainly be sorting out stuff and working on a few plans/ideas for later in the year.

I'm quite excited by my current work with that see-through fabric though, I'm even adding bits of wood to my biggest piece, it looks quite different/more resolved than my other stuff which is positive.

I've been doing lots of work with the kids at school, this major project will run to the end of March, but it's all good experience and very inspiring seeing their work being produced under my guidance. They got really excited on Friday when I enlarged and projected some of their work for all to see. I've been pretty flat out with this and my own work, almost so that my own work is developing without me even noticing. There is so much I want to make at the moment so I think it's a good start to the year, especially as I think that I know what my work is about now!