‘Connecting Faces’ was a portrait commisssion for Out & About, a summer of celebrations in Sheffield’s Cultural Industries Quarter (CIQ)
This project used free sewing techniques to bring the faces of the CIQ together. I ran accessible free workshops at Foodhall Project and sewed 80 portraits that were part of a hung installation. I also did free sewn portraits of those that came to visit the exhibition over the weekend. This made the final connections between by art, the subject and the community.
Sheffield Covid Memorial Ribbons
Installation March – August 2023
The Sheffield Covid Memorial Willow Tree was commissioned by Sheffield City Council and designed by George King Architects. It has been installed in Balm Green Gardens and unveiled during an opening ceremony on 23rd March 2023, the national day of Covid remembrance.
Sarah Waterhouse and I have been commissioned to create 300 memorial fabric ribbons to hang from the tree. The ribbons have been hand printed and embroidered with memories, drawings and stories from the pandemic, submitted by the people of Sheffield. We designed public engagement workshops at Millennium Galleries that were designed to help people share thoughts and stories through marks. These have now been sewn/printed onto Ribbons.
They’ll be added to the Sculpture in August
I curated a clay and conversation workshop for Ark Sheffield. I used creativity to ease people into conversation about the climate crisis and what form the flood took for them. We paired this with delicious food from Foodhall Project and managed to engage lots of interesting conversations that were then recorded and used in an installation at The Octogan.
Find out more here
Dog life drawing started at The University of Sheffield and was inspired by an image I saw of the illustrators at The Walt Disney Studios drawing a live dear for the film Bambi. I’ve been running these workshops for about 3.5 years now and worked in Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Lincoln and Nottingham.
Please get in touch if you’d like me to host a class for you!
Follow @dog.lifedrawing for recent updates
Creative life drawing based in Sheffield. My collective aim is to explore, encourage and expose creative flow. I have collaborated with the creative design business Sumo Digital and The University of Sheffield. Here, I provided tailored life drawing classes for staff and students, encouraging individuals to expand their skills and explore creativity as a means to access relaxation and mindfulness.
Life drawing is a brilliant gateway into developing techniques and skill in drawing and to unravel and delve into your inner creativity and expression which can be applied to any creative platform and your daily life. I ran a weekly themed life drawing class in Kelham Island, feedback received from these classes expressed Anomaly’s positive impact in people’s lives from body positivity, creative development to mindfulness.
Follow @anomalylifedrawing for recent workshop updates
About the project
The Threads that Connect Us uses mycelium as a
metaphor for the mutual aid networks and social
infrastructure of the Foodhall Project, with curiosity
towards a number of questions:
How can we map mutual aid networks as ecological
systems? / Who or what are the component parts, or
bodies, of this network and how are they connected? /
Can ecological thinking give us new perspectives on how
they can be nurtured, or grown? / Can we use ecological
thinking to emphasise care? / How can we care for
environments and ecologies through mutual networks
and systems?
Across Summer 2021, a small team at Foodhall - Liah
Edwardes, James Harrington and Isabel Moran used
various arts approaches to engage with and explore these
questions with its extended community, responding to a
number of activities,initiatives, and research,carried out
by the Foodhall Project, the National Food Services, and
its collaborative network of individuals and organisations.
All these pieces of artwork have been made using a free sewing foot on the sewing machine. I don’t pre draw anything, just work from life or photograghs I have taken. I love that this kind of sewing really has a mind of it’s own and creates texture to the material or paper.
‘FORM’
The Practice Of Life Drawing:
Observation, Connection and Entanglements
‘FORM’ was a solo exhibition that marked the end of a 6 month residency at Jo Peel’s studio. My practice focuses on life drawing and centres around abstract representation of the human form. My fascination with the encounter between artist, subject, and medium, and how art spreads through the community has led me to curate life drawing classes that enable the artists to focus and express themselves freely through their drawings.
Covid brought to light the importance of human connection and our relationships with one-another. The interactive ‘draw me’ element in this exhibition aims to explore how life drawing can be a place for social entanglements, creativity and experimentation, as well as a much needed opportunity for relaxation and mindfulness.
The artworks capture repeated, patterned forms and allow for the overlapping of multiple figures in order to evoke new shapes and ways of looking at the human form. What can you see?
Kindly supported by Yorkshire Artspace
Myself and Lily Mercer worked closely with 8 women to create a series of creative portraits that helped these women view their form in a more positive way. The aim was to celebrate the beauty and distinctivness of the female form. During the exhibition projected the music video of ‘BODY’ by Before Breakfast that also explored these themes.
Repeated colour pastel forms, drawings made with only seconds on the clock. Here I use the shorter poses to try to capture movement, shape and experiement with different colour combinations.
An on going collaborative project with Nazusk exploring digital figure and pattern blending our styles to create something dream like and unique.
Taking colour inspiration from our surroundings and capturing interactions with friends.
