Out of the Ordinary - An Arts Award Bronze Course in Needlecraft - Claire Hignett

Needlecraft with Claire Hignett

I had booked a recent graduate, Lauren Heakin to teach model-making in this mid-session, which was to collide with the half-term holidays.  Fortunately for Lauren, she had landed a post in commercial television, but unfortunately for us, she was unable to join us.

We were extremely fortunate, however, at very short notice, to engage the services of a very fine needle craft tutor, Claire Hignett.  The following is a snippet from her professional CV:

"My work fits very well into the heritage sector. Recent residencies at Islington Mill and Ordsall Hall Tudor Manor House have used the fabric of these buildings, their contents and stories to create a permanent piece at the hall and and an Installation - Secret and Sacred- in the gallery at the mill. I have also worked on a project with DIY Theatre Company "Picking up the threads" and with St.Clement's Church in Ordsall both funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund As part of the Happy Museums project I was involved in running a small art project at the Imperial War Museum in the North and I currently work for Retracing Salford on their recently acquired archive of glass plate negatives from the 1950's, again funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, "

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/claire-hignett-a2a15736

For the project which Claire had devised for the course, the pupils were asked to draw ordinary objects of their choice.  

 Next they were given five squares of felt 300 x 300 mm in different colours.  The pupils were allowed to choose the colours to use, except that one layer had to be black.  Each felt piece was layered on top with the black square on the bottom.  The pupils were asked to stitch around the edge of the square through to the bottom layer, in order to keep the layers together.  Each individual design was transferred to the top layer of the felt sandwich.  The pupils were asked to stitch around the outlines of thier objects and then to cut part of the design away so as to reveal a different colour and a part of the design as a whole.  One young person, Olivia,  was asked if she wanted to embroider a design on to reverse applique piece.

One or two pupils took their work home over the half-term holiday in order to work a little more on the felt designs.


There was a range of very different designs, all brightly coloured. and the results were stunning!

Destiny cutting out her design

by Olivia

 by Fanni

 by Destiny

By Naomi

Français: Les élèves ont essayé leurs mains à la couture. Certains d'entre eux n'avaient jamais fait ça avant et trouvé difficile même pour enfiler une aiguille. Toutefois, ils ont persévéré et sont allés de l'avant pour créer de superbes oeuvres d'art. L'un d'eux, la verseuse, a été transformé en un petit coussin.

Deutsch: Die Schülerinnen versuchten ihre Hände zu nähen. Einige von ihnen hatten noch nie getan und fand es schwierig, selbst an Gewinde eine Nadel. Nähen braucht viel Geduld und Entschlossenheit, und es ist ihnen zu verdanken, dass die Schüler nicht aufgeben, und alle haben ihre eigenen kleinen Meisterwerke

Polski: Uczniów spróbowało swoich rąk podczas szycia. Niektóre z nich nigdy nie zrobił tego przed i okazało się, że trudna nawet do nici igły. Sewing trwa dużo cierpliwości i determinacji i nie ma już na swoim koncie, że uczniowie nie poddawac i wszystkie utworzone własne małe arcydzieła

Español: Los alumnos trataron sus manos en la costura. Algunos de ellos nunca había hecho esto antes y le resultaba difícil incluso para enhebrar una aguja. Costura toma mucha paciencia y determinación, y es a su crédito en el que los alumnos no se dio por vencido y todos crean sus propias pequeñas obras maestras

Out of the Ordinary - An Arts Award Bronze Course in Printmaking Techniques.- Tutor Roisin Keown

Printmaking Techniques Course - Supported by the Arts Council
.
Following on from the painting techniques course,. the selected year 9 and 10 pupils (ages 13-15) at Oasis Academy, King William Street in Salford, were offered this printmaking techniques course by Roisin Keown.

Roisin Keown is a recent graduate of Manchester Metropolitan School of Art, who specialises in painting.. She makes gigantic paintings using a technique, which consists of painting stretched calico with an oil-based primer, so that the surface is extremely smooth, and she allows it to dry thoroughly before use.  To make her paintings she uses a wide variety of scrapers, and tools to spread oil paint onto this smooth surface.  The effects which are realised are of the elements, the weather, storms, rivers, and clouds..
Truly breathtaking!

 www.saatchiart.com > fineartamerica.com/roisinkeown › 



Deutsch: Roisin Keown, Malerin, kommt aus Nordirland. Sie war Studentin in Manchester, und sie malt zuhause und lehrt auch an der Schule.

Im Jahre 2015 unternahmen12 Studentinnen einen Kurs von mehreren Arten der Kunst.  Das war etwas sehr anspruchsvoll  fuer solche Kinder und Jugendliche, da sie nach dem Schultag noch ein Paar Stunden weiter machen mussten.  Dies geschah ueber einen Zeitraum von zehn Wochen, fuer zwei Nachmittagen pro Woche.

Español: En 2015 las jovenes estudiantes de la Academia de Oasis en Salford, Manchester han participado en numerosas actividades artísticas apoyadas por el Consejo de las Artes de Inglaterra.

Français: De jeunes étudiantes de l'Académie d'Oasis à Salford ont travaillées dur pour parvenir à leurs Arts Award Bronze.

Polski:  Kurs został zaprojektowany z dwunastu młodych nastoletnich uczniów w umyśle. Każdego tygodnia będą 4 godziny kursów: wire rzeźby, malarstwa i proste drukowanie,, needlecraft , animowany/akcja rysunek rysunek i, wreszcie, jubilerstwo.

Twelve pupils were selected to take part in this project supported by the Arts Council, whereby five tutors delivered eight hours' tuition over a fortnight each.  The course was ten weeks in duration but the pupils also found that, in order to achieve the Arts Award, they would have to complete their portfolios, and include evidence of their experiences during the course.  

These printmaking sessions took place in the second week of Roisin Keown's teaching.

The pupils were shown a demonstration by Roisin of various printmaking techniques.  Poster paint was used, as this gives a similar effect to printing inks,  but dries a little quicker, so fast action is required.

Paint is rolled into a tray until well spread out. A piece of paper is placed onto the rolled paint and an image can be drawn with a pointed object, such as a pencil.  Pencil is a good choice as the image is unlikely to be duplicated if another image is required to be drawn on the same paper.  The pupils were drawing images of, amongst other things, ordinary objects, based on the exhibition Out of the Ordinary - Works by Colin Rodney Burrows.

Another method the pupils were shown was to draw images in the rolled paint and to lay a piece of paper on the top of the image and to apply even pressure with a roller. This is called monoprinting..

After being shown these methods, the pupils made numerous prints, not always adhering to the methods demonstrated, but also inventing some of their own.  They later used some of these prints as backgrounds for their drawings and entries in their portfolios, which are to be submitted for Arts Award Bronze.

Out of the Ordinary - A course in Painting Techniques for Backgrounds

Painting Techniques for Backgrounds - Tutor: Roisin Keown  - Week 3

Following on from the wire work course, and while the pupils' wire sculptures were on display at Eccles Community Art Gallery and also during the final week of the Out of the Ordinary exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Greater Manchester, UK,. the selected year 9 and 10 pupils (ages 13-15) at Oasis Academy, King William Street in Salford, were offered this painting techniques course by Roisin Keown.

Roisin Keown is a recent graduate of Manchester Metropolitan School of Art, who specialises in painting.. She makes gigantic paintings using a technique, which consists of painting stretched calico with an oil-based primer, so that the surface is extremely smooth and allows it to dry thoroughly.  To make her paintings she uses a wide variety of scrapers, and tools to spread oil paint onto this smooth surface.  The effects which are realised are of the elements, the weather, storms, rivers, and clouds..
Trulybreathtaking!

 www.saatchiart.com > Roisinkeownfineartamerica.com › Artists › Roisin Keown › Imagesfineartamerica.com › Artists › Roisin Keown

Deutsch: Roisin Keown, Malerin, kommt aus Nordirland. Sie war Studentin in Manchester, und heutzutage malt und lehrt.

The painting techniques that Roisin showed us used pre-mixed acrylic paints of assorted colours, but thinned down even further with water, so that a fairly runny consistency was achieved.  The pupils were shown how to apply blobs of two or three selected colours onto a piece of paper and move it around in the air, to create their patterns.  This was executed enthusiastically by all the pupils and a wide variety and copious amount of work was done in a very short time.

The above was also printed with blue rings.                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

1. 

Another technique was to dip one or two pieces of string in the same paint and to place the string between the folded paper (Roisin brought with her an assortment of papers) and then to weigh the paper down and trap the string inside by placing a heavy book on top of the folded piece of paper..  The pieces of string were then pulled out of the paper, leaving a symmetrical pattern on either side of the paper.

                                                                                           

                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

A different technique used watercolour paint on thicker paper.  A variety of materials were placed onto the wet colours to create different effects.  Materials used for this were rice, cling film and salt amongst others. The pupils were shown how to change a drawing of a cat from a naturalistic image to an abstract one, using these paint effects.  Roisin used some printmaking ideas in her final workshop.

Arts Council of England funded Wire Sculpture Project based on the Out of the Ordinary Exhibition

During the months of September to end of November, 2015, an Arts Council funded arts project, using National Lottery monies, was arranged to take place at Oasis Academy Media City in Salford.  The idea was that the pupils would be working towards an Arts Award Bronze qualification, which is roughly equivalent to a G.C.S.E. grade C-D.

The project was intended initially for year 10 pupils, although several year 9 pupils also took part.  The pupils followed a twice weekly course over two weeks in five disciplines: sculpture with wire, painting techniques, drawing cartoon characters, textiles with felt, and jewelry.

Each of the selected pupils, together with their art teacher and community liaison officer, visited the Out of the Ordinary exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, where they gathered leaflets and postcards and took photographs of the paintings and drawings by Colin Rodney Burrows.  There was also some biogrraphical information in two display cabinets to which the pupils also had access for research.

Wire Workshop with Lorna Fellas

Lorna Fellas is a former Art and Design tutor at the University of Salford.  Lorna is a multi-discipline artist, with an interest in glass, lighting design, ceramics, together with painting and drawing.  She has been in several group exhibitions recently, and delivers workshops in wire sculpture and other disciplines.  

http://www.lornafellas.com/

Following their visit to the Colin Burrows' exhibition at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery, the pupils began drawing from ordinary objects which the tutor, Lorna Fellas, had brought into school. The pupils began constructing 2D wire sculptures from their initial drawings, and, in the second week they set to work on 3D sculptures.

                                                                                              

The final pieces were mounted and displayed in the Langworthy Gallery in Salford Museum and Art Gallery, alongside the Out of the Ordinary exhibition and also in Eccles Community Art Gallery,Greater Manchester..

Out of the Ordinary Exhibition - Colin Rodney Burrows' Paintings - Aftermath

The Out of the Ordinary Exhibition was taken down on 2nd November, 2015.

It was the end of an era for our family.  Colin Rodney Burrows (b. 1945) had passed away in April, 2002 and I had wanted to do something in his memory for a very long time.  This exhibition, when it finally happened, fulfilled all that I had hoped for.

Over the span of the exhibition, from 18th July until 1 November, the exhibition had many visitors.  There were over sixty at the preview, mainly friends, family and members of our various art clubs.  The then Director of Salford Museum and Art Gallery had arrived towards the end of the afternoon, very  apologetically, saying that he had been waiting for his car to be returned so that he could travel from Liverpool to attend.

 
 "Gravy Jug",  acrylic paint on cotton duck

"Hot Water Bottle Stopper", acrylic paint on cotton duck

"Sir Anthony Blunt, former Keeper of 

Queen Elizabeth II's Paintings", 

 "Soldiers", water colours on paper

One of Colin's best friends, a former student of the Slade School of Art, Jackson, he used to call him,  arrived on the dot from the South of England, and he was visibly overwhelmed by the wonderful display of Colin's paintings and cartoons, some of which he had never seen before, as the friends had lost touch for several years.  Jackson, who owns the Chapel Gallery and Book Shop in Saxmundham, Suffolk, was kind enough to lend the exhibition two early paintings, which Colin had either sold or given to him.  One was a large, rather abstract self-portrait in their flat at Highgate in London, and we were able to show a black and white photograph of Colin painting this, in a display cabinet.  The other borrowed painting was an early still life of many of the objects which had been important to Colin when he was a student at the Slade.                                                                            

The items consisted of pipes, medicines and other personal items, painted in a naive style.  This still life  is a really beautiful

painting which I am loathe to return, but I have no choice, unfortunately, as Jackson loves it too.  I had never actually seen these paintings before, but I had seen slides of them.

Cover of the Catalogue for the "Out of the Ordinary" Exhibition, July - November, 2015

Something rather peculiar caught my eye one day, as I turned on my personal computer to view some photographs of Colin's works.  There were a couple of black and white photographs which I didn't recognize, but, on closer inspection, I realized one of them was of me, eating a meal at our kitchen table in the mid -1970s, just before our first child was born.  The other photograph was of a girl in our living room.  I then realized it was one of my friends from Secretarial College.  On researching further, I found numerous photographs sent to me by Jackson, that he had taken during several of his visits to our house in Higher Blackley in Manchester.  What was interesting was that some of them showed Colin's set-ups for several of his paintings, for instance, of the Trousers and Shoes.   Colin had dressed the bottom half of a tailor's shop dummy in black tights, a pair of let-down trousers and a pair of shoes from that period and stood it on a wash stand in front of a picture window.  Many months later, when he had nearly finished the painting, our neighbour inquired whether Colin had finished painting the ceiling. 

As a growing family, we had to live around the set-ups of Colin's on-going painting, and I didn't realize it was that unusual.  I just took it for granted.  Visitors and tradespeople were visibly shocked when they stepped into the cramped room, with this strange activity going on by the window.

I am very indebted to Jackson for loaning the exhibition the two paintings and for all the photographs he sent to me prior to the exhibition.

The Exhibitions Team from the Gallery designed and installed the displays.  I was asked my opinion on their suggestions beforehand, and was very happy indeed with the result.  The Artists and Illustrators magazine chose this exhibition as one of the best in the North of England to visit for both September and October, 2015, so we were all very pleased and proud.

The Exhibition wascommended in the "Best Exhibitions" in the North of England for both September and October, 2015 in the "Artists' and Illustrators'" magazine.

  "Washing Up Tubs", acrylic paint on cotton duck

"China Flowers", acrylic paint on cotton duck      

Exhibition "Out of the Ordinary", paintings by Colin Rodney Burrows, in summer, 2015 at Salford Museum and Art Gallery also with works by Lorna Fellas, Sean Caherty,

    Fiona Moate, Jo Carlon and Gerard Highland

Colin Rodney Burrows' "Out of the Ordinary" Posthumous Exhibition Ends 1st November, 2015

The exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery, in Greater Manchester, UK, of Colin Rodney Burrows' Paintings of Ordinary Objects, together with his Family Portraits, Cartoons and Ephemera comes to an end this Sunday, 1st November, 2015.

This follows a summer of activities based on the theme of Ordinary Objects, including a course of six family workshops held in Salford Museum's School Room during the Creative Sundays slot. Children of all ages and their parents created objects made from pipe cleaners, illustrated giant postcards and made small postcards to take home, modeled seaside objects in air-hardening clay, drew funny spaceships based on ordinary objects decorated cut-out shoe cards and, finally, painted self-portraits on canvas.

 Within the Langworthy Gallery a space dedicated to the young was constructed and an outline of a house with empty rooms is now filled with drawings of household object which have been coloured in by the visitors.  On another wall is a space for original drawings of objects by the more adventurous child artists.

The widow and son of the artist, Colin Burrows, were present in the Exhibition space twice a week for eight weeks, drawing and painting objects which had been discovered by the Exhibitions Officer and her team.  Paintings by Robert James Burrows are now on show in the Langworthy Gallery alongside his father's work,as are paintings and sculpture by Jo Carlon, Lorna Fellas, Gerard Highland, Fiona Moate and Sean Caherty.

Continuing on from the theme of Ordinary Objects is a course which is running at the moment for twelve pupils from Oasis Academy, MediaCity UK,  This is an Arts Award Bronze course which is funded by the Arts Council England using National Lottery monies.

The schoolchildren are aged between 13 and 15 and are taking part in workshops using wire, paint, fabric, pen and ink/digital media, together with a variety of other 3D materials.  Work by Oasis Academy pupils is on display in the Langworthy Gallery and also in Eccles Community Art Gallery at present.  As more art work by the pupils is produced further displays will be on view at Oasis AcademyMediaCity UK, Eccles Community Art Gallery and the West One Foyer in Eccles.

 

"Out of the Ordinary" a new Exhibition of Colin Rodney Burrows' Paintings at Salford Museum and Art Gallery until 1 November, 2015

Colin Rodney Burrows lived and worked in Salford for most of his career as a lecturer at the University of Salford's Art & Design department. Shortly after joining the University Colin had a solo exhibition here at the gallery, so 40 years later it is fitting to have a posthumous exhibition.

The main theme of this exhibition is Colin's fascination with the ordinary and his attempt to elevate it in importance with his paintings and photography, by focusing on various elements such as increasing the scale, using everyday objects as the prime subject of a painting, incorporating household objects into a family portrait and, on occasion, being playful with the titles.

Shown alongside written memories of Colin, there will be artwork by ex-colleagues, former students and his son, Robert. This exhibition celebrates seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary with plenty of opportunities to have a go for all ages.

To complement the exhibition, Colin's widow and son, who are both artists in their own right, will be in the gallery every Tuesday and Friday throughout August and September doing painting and drawing demonstrations, with a chance to have a go at drawing yourself! View the event via our what's on for further information and dates.

'Out of the Ordinary' will be showing in the Langworthy Gallery at Salford Museum & Art Gallery from Saturday 18 July to Sunday 1 November 2015. 

Contact for further information, images, quotes etc:

Kellie Brown, Marketing Officer, 0161 778 0819, kellie.brown@scll.co.uk(link sends e-mail)
Amy Goodwin, Exhibitions Officer, 0161 778 0883, amy.goodwin@scll.co.uk(link sends e-mail)

Notes for the editor:

Salford Community Leisure provides sport, leisure and cultural services in the city. We manage a wide variety of facilities and activities across the eight neighbourhood areas within the city, including sport and leisure facilities, community centres, libraries, community use high schools, museums and the Music and Performing Arts Service.

Salford Museum and Art Gallery presents an exciting programme of permanent displays and changing contemporary exhibitions together with a range of events and activities guaranteed to inspire.

Ordsall Hall - Salford's Grade 1 listed Tudor manor house - was first recorded in 1177. Since then, it has been home to medieval gentry, Tudor nobility, Catholics loyal to the crown, butchers, farmers, an Earl, priests, scout troops, mill workers, cows and several ghosts!

Today, it is an engaging heritage site open to visitors 5 days a week throughout the year. Surrounded by landscaped grounds, it boasts hands on exhibitions, immersive rooms settings and a small cafe.