Jane Ponsford, visual arts organiser
Reading Louise’s last post here I think she is underselling herself. On Monday I visited the studio to chat to her about activities and materials for the upcoming Big Draw and while I was there one of the teachers from the school where Louise’s most recent workshops had been held, came in enthusing about them and asking for more involvement with this and future projects. All the feedback has been extremely positive. However there is no doubt that running workshops for children or even the general public is very different from running what might be called masterclasses where the participants already have a high level of interest and or skill. Perhaps that is one of the useful things about the residency; it gives a framework to the project with the opportunity of testing various ways of engaging with audiences and gaining experience.
This last few weeks have been taken over with personal events and so I have only just today finished threading the heddles of the loom. I hope that now I can start to make progress and move forward.
Last week I also taught two workshops in schools. Both of which had some positive results and feedback. Teaching a workshop as part of a class activity it is quite different to teaching workshops I have taught at St George’s partly because of working with larger groups but also the teachers are still very much in command of the class. However I enjoyed imparting my skills to eager children.
Jane Ponsford, visual arts organiser, St George’s Arts
While Louise’s residency has been the main focus of our attention we have also been looking at our future plans as an arts organisation. Over the last few months we have been researching other organisations that have something in common with our own; whether it is being based in a heritage building / redundant church or perhaps having as we do a programme which is based round a residency. This has lead to all sorts of interesting conversations, some quite bizarre. I’m thinking here of one in particular when I visited Fabrica with the Chair of our ‘Friends’ group to assess, of all things, their kitchen! We have a potentially useful but undeveloped sideline as a venue for events like wedding receptions and I wanted to show her that you don’t need the most up-to-date kitchen to make this sort of thing work. There have also been a series of very useful meetings with Jim Shea from Shea Debnam Associates to help us form a strategy for a sustainable future. Of course this particular year is maybe not the one to have chosen to have ambitious plans so we might take things a little slower than originally envisaged.
Jane Ponsford, visual arts organiser, St George’s Arts
In the next few weeks Louise will be running several of her community outreach days and will be visiting schools and day centres aiming to involve local people in her project. This is also the lead up to a ‘Work in Progress’ exhibition at St George’s Arts and The Big Draw. After this (very busy period) until January she will have a much calmer time to work on her final piece. It has been very interesting watching her initial ideas growing and changing during the residency and we are very excited to see her final response to the colours and light of the spaces at St George’s. Her previous work has often been extremely delicate and fine but working at St George’s she has been experimenting with a more substantial linen yarn and concentrating on structure. The time consuming and repetitive nature of the work chimes with the enduring atmosphere of the building and it seems rather appropriate that her last outreach in November will be a one day workshop on natural dyes, making use of the types of pigments that would have been used when the building that houses the residency was new.
Winding of the warp.
This week I have really begun to appreciate all the knowledge that our technicians gave us at uni (University for the creative arts Farnham) in the textiles department. Now that I am struggling to wind a large warp.
When you wind a warp on to a loom you have to make sure all the threads are wound at the same tension very tight, and that the threads are evenly spaced. You do this by running it through a raddle. Which is like a big wooden toothed comb.
The linen am using is unruly compared to the cotton I usually use as a warp yarn. The linen is heavy and hard to grip onto without getting red hands as the linen fibres are much courser.
When I wound the warp last night I needed two people pulling the warp very tight at the front of the loom. Wailst I wound the warp at the back checking the tention was even.
It is now ready for me to thread. I have also added some shafts to my loom so now I am weaving on eight this should mean that the linen is spaced out more the new raddle I have bought should also help the linen run smoothly.
