Sarah Appleton - Textile Artist Blog

Last week I was invited to teach a craft session at Forest Arts Centre for some local schools on the theme of 'Ubuntu'. If you don't know (I didn't), then Ubuntu essentially means 'I am because we are'; feel free to investigate more after you've read this if that has activated your curiosity zone. There were a small group of lucky students chosen from each of 4 local primary schools and along with dance and drama teachers in other areas of the building, I was to deliver 3 x 20 minute art sessions with the children rotating around each class every half hour. Essentially like the artistic version of speed dating! There aren't many arts and crafts that you can satisfactorily complete with minimal mess in 20 minutes (in my opinion) whilst keeping within the theme of Ubuntu, so I chose a simple collage class.  Many of the children knew what collage was, some being experts and some being complete beginners. I had collected a range of old books and magazines fo...

This week I was honoured to be invited along to Queen Elizabeth School with artist Sarah Redmond-Fareham to help work on a super exciting outreach project called Her:Story - a project about inspiring women throughout history (get the pun?!) Each artist was assigned a different female to study, and they all came armed with sketches and photographs ready to create a bust of their subject out of clay. Sarah setting up! [The secret is that the face is already in the clay, you just have to remove the parts that are not face]:) Most of the students had never worked with clay much before, but neither had I; Sarah is the expert and was a fantastic teacher as all the students ended up with great results. I was on hand for moral support, suggestions and cleaning up duties! At first, the students worked tentatively, but after the initial features were put into place, you could see the confidence grow and a lot of recognisable faces came out. Here are some of the works in progress (all work by stu...