RURAL ARTS

Here's a round up of what we've been doing this year and a few personal highlights too... Janice McVay The highlight of the year for me was the challenge of running the Community Learning ceramics project throughout the summer. We found out at the end of May that we had been successful in our funding application to North Yorkshire County Council and Your Consortium to work with 72 people and the project had to be completed by September! We had to provide 12 hours of training and the groups I had identified were Northdale Horticulture, Broadacres Women’s Refuge and Mental Health support group, Independus group, The Boot Shop in Easingwold, Jennyruth Workshops in Harrogate and Ripon Community Link.  We offered 2-day workshops in ceramics and some sessions were here at The Courthouse and some at the venues where the groups met.    Artists Angela, Debbie and Shirley provided patience, guidance and fantastic encouragement and helped each person to

We have had a great few months at Rural Arts. Full of excellent top quality performances, workshops and exhibitions. Here are a few of our highlights: Update from our Young Curators, November 2013 Our group of ‘Young Curators’ spent two days at Harrogate College, using the kiln site as part of their ongoing project. A blog post earlier this year reported on how the young people taking part in our Heritage Lottery funded project, spent several days working with a professional potter and a glass artist to create medieval inspired artwork.  Since then, more workshops have been held and a collection of fantastic work produced. The ceramics were given time to slowly dry out, and were then biscuit fired by artist Gordon at the college. The group had the opportunity to participate in the firing of a traditional wood fuelled kiln at the college site. They learned how to glaze the work and get it ready to be packed into the kiln. Friday morning saw an early start for tutors Gor