Over the past few months SSW has been busy working with our Community Advisory Group making plans for our 24/25 community programme. This has included meeting with local partners, taking part in a range of Inspirations talks from Manoeuvre, The Portland Inn Project and MyVillages and sharing our needs and ambitions. We are now busy putting the finishing touches to the Community Programme and look forward to sharing this later in May. In the meantime Mara, our Community Arts Organiser, shares a wee insight into what happened during our Easter Art Club this April.
From 8 – 10 April I worked with a great group of 11 young people for Easter Art Club – Becoming Easter Beasts. This was a three-day activity-filled holiday club held at SSW, led by Tyler Lewis and I and supported by some of our amazing Community Advisors – Claire and Moira, and SSW’s Ceramic Technician, Amy. It was wonderful to work with many regular young artists and also get to know some new faces too!
For this Easter Holiday Club, we linked to our wider themes of the Community Programme of working with local materials. For this club we also connected with local mythology. Working together and independently each young artist created an elaborate costume based on a mythical beasts hailing from Scotland; a Shellycoat, a Ghillie Dhu, or a Heather Pixie and created a series of photographic artworks at the end.
Following our introductions and a few games we got down to business and used storytelling to introduce where each of these mythical figures came from and our connections to them. A lot of questions and analyses came from the young people, curious about the mythical beasts’ peculiar behaviours and what they might do in hypothetical scenarios today. Everyone was very amused about which beasts like to play tricks on people, and we discussed ways to stay on their good side!
We commenced with some team foraging; collecting moss, shells, tree bark, wooden sticks, wool, felted wool, feathers, yarn, and a lot more all available close to SSW. With these beasts began to develop and characters emerged taking form and life. Naturally, we couldn’t work on the costumes straight through the three days, so we had fun breaking it up with healthy lunches and snacks, team building games and a scavenger hunt around the SSW yard.
On the final day everyone added the finishing touches to their beast creations and it was photo-shoot time! Tyler brought as much “pro” camera equipment together as he could find and we set up our studio where our young artists modeled their creations. It was great to celebrate our creative achievements of the week and it’s great to share some of this hard work below. I particularly like the group photo with everyone looking like a rowdy bunch of mythical beasts, ready for anything.
Well done to all our amazing young artists – the effort, time and creativity they have shown is always inspiring and I can’t wait till our next holiday club. We will be at the Mary Fair in Lumsden sharing some of these brilliant images/ artworks and we look forward to launching our new programme soon.
All photos by Tyler Lewis
