Exhibition In Braille Sneak-Peek (by sarah)

Tomorrow Saturday 24th September 2011 sees the Exhibition in Braille a touchy feely art attraction set up by Centre Arts to raise money for the Gloucester County Association for the Blind. Tickets cost £5 and are avaliable at the doors which are open 12-7pm.

There are some really cool things there for you to touch and feel and an interactive braille table to boot!

Here are a few sneak peaks but you can not know the majesty of these pieces without actually going and feeling them!

The exhibition has been put together with the blind and visually impaired in mind and as such bright vibrant and therefore easier to see colours have been used in some of the pieces and there is also a bueatiful light sculpture.

Then we come to my piece - the giant coral I have been working on for what seems like forever!

Which I set up last night 🙂 Complete with beads for the molecular sand! There are also MP3s of some of my poems that I felt where a good counter point to the visual/textural piece there to listen too 🙂

September Challenges/To-Do’s (by sarah)

September has snuck up on me and sees me papier mache-ing like a mad thing - my aim? To create a piece of textural science art for the visually impaired and the blind.

This piece of art work does not just involve papier mache though - it involves knitting, sewing, clay sculpting, sugru, polymer clay, wire work, metal casting, wood carving, stone carving, geology and acrylic paints not too mention lots of recycled pots and tubs and our mountain of graze boxes.

This all needs to be ready for the 24th of September for the Centre Arts Exhibition in Braille. And yes I am panicking - it is a play on the tree of life but I have gone for a more coral/byozoan feel and hope to have life in various forms sitting in the polyp tubes (what I have instead of branches). A relief of the scientific creation of life will hopefully be feelable along the base along with an audio poem/story of life.

Apart from that I am researching stuff for my Punk in Pink series and generally trying to take the musical me forward.

Poetry-Craft etc… (by sarah)

Saturday ie tomorrow I will be doing a quick poetry reading in the Waterstones in Cheltenham with some fantastic other poets (it's a quick one as I'm running away to a family wedding!). This event is organised by the Cheltenham Poetry Festival who have been putting on some fantastic events through out the year. The readings in the Waterstones are going to be the first Saturday of each month 11-2pm.

Another event that they are running is Poetree in the Park - the last one got in the news paper along with a cute picture of Jean holding up a poetry dragon 🙂

I'm going to be running an number of workshops and courses mainly for kids for the Festival and the new Center Arts in Cheltenham on top of the craft workshops I do for festivals anyway 🙂 They are also holding an Exhibition in Braille in September which I hope to have a textural art piece in (made of papier mache of course!).

On top of that I hope to have the poetry book sorted soon and also take the Monster Writing Game to the next level. I do however need more outlets for my art work - I may get an exhibition soon but I need to be in shops and stuff more than doing craft fairs each Sunday. The trouble with that I've been finding is that you have to spend money out in the first place to buy shelf space very few places do it on commission. I would also love as I think I mentioned about three years ago now :/ to become a member of the Gloucester Guild of Craftsmen but again it takes money and I am still only braking even as I am still building up my equipement and stocks at the moment.

I will confess to having gotten carried away with making educational games and designing crafts to help the kids engage in writing workshops but I finially feel I am heading in the right direction here 🙂

Oh and also some of my local kids poetry is going to be on display at the village Flower Festival this weekend which is well just lovely 🙂

August New (by sarah)

You may or may not have noticed a dirth of posts and onlineness from me - this is due to a slight no computer issue 🙁 But I've got a temporary solution currently!

So what shall I be upto in August? Well like the rest of the summer so far it will be full of craft and writing workshops - mainly for kids 🙂

I am also back on the papier mache thing and having made a giant sheep last month am working on a piece of textural art work for the visually impaired which I hope will be exhibated in September.

If I can extract stuff of my broken laptop there will be the long awaited for poetry book and of course there is a family wedding for which bunting is being made 🙂 There is the village feast, boundary walk, and Jean's birthday which is going to be in Essex this year hosted by my aunt 🙂 as there is a Christening on the Sunday we are going to!

Alaric's family are visiting too which is exciting as they haven't met Mary yet!

I do of course have lots of other things to share and write about which will be coming soon 🙂

June’s Challenges (by sarah)

Looking at what I have achieved since the New Year I have decided that June's challenges are going to be a Finishing Projects Month and a Game Design Month.

FiPoMo and GeDeMo - I did a GeDeMo last year which worked really well and I got a beta version of a card game I use for writing workshops out of it. I also got it a fair way towards the sellable version. It is part of a group of games that can fit together to make a bigger game and as it looks like I'm in the running workshops business now I really need the game completed.

I'm going to start of by making a large slightly altered version to use at children's writing workshops. Then I want to get the poetry card pack actually out there and selling - after that there is a lot of other things like making the next card packs and designing and testing the board which is going to be heavy on the graphics side of things I feel.

For the FiPoMo I am going to focus on getting the illustrations for the Little Books of Poetry sorted out and editing the poems - yes the first week of May I wrote 70 children's poems - mad, insane and it melted my brain!

I have a deadline for some of these. I think that will take up all of the time to be honest.