Jane Ponsford, visual arts organiser
Tomorrow (Saturday 10 October) we are running a day of drawing activities as part of The Big Draw. This is always slightly nerve wracking beforehand as it’s impossible to know how many people will drop in. However it is always fun to actually carry out. Our theme this year is Looking from Another Point of View and our artist in residence, Louise Nason will be encouraging participants to look through viewfinders and magnifying glasses, look round things and under things to see things in a different way. Much of her project here at St George’s has been inspired by the textures, colours and details of this old church building so we will see what our visitors make of it in their turn.
Louise Nason Artist in residence.
Monday 5th October.
An interesting day at the church. Three visitors. The first was the piano tuner. I haven’t before sat in the church and heard live music. It wasn’t music as such just notes, but it was interesting to hear the acoustic qualities of the church.
The second visitor was a student from my old university. She was basing her own work on an abbey and looking at light and shadows. It was interesting to hear of another weaver’s ideas.
The third was a artist who is also an artist in residence so it was good to hear of her experiences, she got me thinking about bringing my work to an audience instead of trying to get people to walk into an unknown building. We also talked about St Georges being the next art centre and following along the lines of ‘Fabrica’ and ‘Aspex’.
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.
