2016 Jan – Feb Workshops – Reflections from Glen

2016 Jan – Feb Workshops – Reflections from Glen

As the new year of 2016 commenced our Venture Arts artists returned to their workshop space in Hulme. Every Wednesday our five artists – Barry, Sarah, Lesley, David and Horace – have the space and time to explore ‘their art’. Tanya and James – our lead artists and facilitators of the sessions – oversee and suggest different techniques, media and ways forward with their work. I pop in to the sessions at least once a day to explore what the artists are working on and to see how their work develops from week to week. Having this unique insight into their artistic journey I feel very privileged. It’s not often you get to see an artist grow week after week and I get the chance to see five artists grow into their work and their work become so individual.

This way of working for most of the artists can be quite new for them. Within Venture Arts a lot of the artwork produced is workshop led. So the finished product and the content of the artwork is very individual and of a very high quality the starting point of their work doesn’t necessarily come directly from the artist.

With OutsiderXchangeS the work produced comes truly from the artist, with no time pressures or group pressures. Because of that we are seeing our five artists starting to produce work of an even higher quality than they have in the past.

Over the past two months we have engaged with artists across the North of England all of whom had shown an interest in collaborating on the OutsiderXchangeS project. We now have 5 artists who are joining us on that journey in Manchester in our dedicated artist studios in Chorlton and one artist who will be collaborating in Newcastle in our tandem project with BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. All artists will be coming together to start collaborating by the end of March till August, and we will introduce you to each of them in the coming weeks.

But looking at some of the work already produced by our Venture Arts based artists the artwork that will be produced in the next few months, through collaboration (that collaboration facilitated by Tanya and James), should be really exciting. I know personally I can’t wait to see what’s produced and I’ll be keeping you up to date here with their progress.

From next week I’ll be posting updates on how each Venture Arts based artist has developed their work in the past four months. But in the gallery below you can see a few examples of the artists work.

Coming up soon:

Artist Profiles

Full artists studio collaboration updates

Newcastle Updates

and more…