Keighley Arts and Film Festival.

October 2019 was the first Keighley Arts and Oil Festival. I was invited to run community outreach workshops in relation to the theme of the Festival which was called Window On Our World. I worked with different community groups and primary schools to make hundreds of little people to go in shops around the town centre.

I really enjoyed working with a wide demographic of people. I was able to use a variety of materials to help meet the brief of the project. People tended to enjoy the clay work more than the drawing aspect. What was particularly interesting was how people responded better if I approached the task in a playful way. If I tried anything more formal, for example learning how to draw a face in proportion, the participants were more apprehensive and less confident. I suppose the approach off playing with the materials was more positively received. Clay is a really great medium because it’s not used much by people in general. It’s novelty added to the positive experience. 

It was also nice to see people communicating together about the experience of making things. They were describing what it felt like and then they would comment about how they were going to make their object. Some people had no preconceived idea and that made their work quite spontaneous. I tried where I could, to introduce a wider understanding of art referring to art history and culture. 

In the first session in the Sue Belcher centre I met Oliver and his grandad. It was a particularly lovely experience to see their dynamic in relation to making. Where the child became the director of the work and how grandad would ask the child questions and the child would then make the answers in clay form. 

Connections were made between individuals, curiosity and materials and this resulted in a positive making experience. I visited Eastwood Community School and I spent two days with them making collage people to go in the display cases at Cliffe Castle Museum. We made at least 250 tiny people. Cliffe Castle curators wanted to keep them in the cases longer than the festival and were kept over the October half term.

At the KAWACC centre a little boy was translating the instructions on how to draw a face to his mother who couldn't speak English. When I gave her some clay she had no problem making beautiful objects as she worked the clay like dough in her hands. It was very natural for her because she did a lot of cooking.

Overall I had a successful time working with these amazing groups of people and I am very grateful to have been a part of this community engagement.