The Project Group, Oswestry

I am in the midst of working with the lovely folk at The Project Group up in Oswestry Shropshire. You can read all about the fantastic creative work they undertake with their members here. They are an arts based community organization working on commissions for the public and private sector.

The collaboration has been instigated by Design Nation and the Eureka Project - set up by the late Peta Levi. And my role is to help facilitate creating some products using their surface patterns from their archive and the workshops that I will be running. I was the proud winner of the Eureka award back in 2006, so it is an honour to work with this group both in the memory of Peta and to help continue to promote British Design and manufacture.

So here are a few pictures from our first session.. i asked them all to create designs to represent the ELEMENTS in some way - Earth, Fire, Water and Air and members then chose to work in a particular medium i.e. screen printing, string art, wax resist, sewing etc. and here are a few pictures to illustrate....

these lovely prints are based on pebbles - to represent EARTH

here is one stencil waiting to be screened 

and here is a similar one once printed

this image was a very inspired idea for AIR - a tornado with the eye of the storm driving into the black hole... this was all made out of hand dyed string

and then they chose to depict the same image out of pebbles.....

here are some of the lovely designs using wax resist and ink, designed to represent the EARTH, everything from road markings to tractor marks, when positioned all together like this my mind wonders off to flying over beautiful patchwork fields on a clear day.

               

..... here are a few examples of their wonderful string art - these birds are part of one of their commissions which I will tell you more about after my next visit.  

If you want to see more do watch their inspiring video here I shall update you further as we progress with the workshops.
Bye for now.