G is for Gathering

Creativity can bring together ideas from many different places.

Collaboration with others and through sharing ideas help us discover new ways to imagine and navigate our world.

The Whitworth is a creative environment that enables art, ideas and people to come together and is reflected in Nathan Coley’s artwork, Gathering of Strangers.

Gathering of Strangers is a light work that sits above the parkside entrance to the gallery and acts as a creative statement and a welcome to visitors.

Take a look up next time you visit the gallery via Whitworth park.

 

Creative collaboration and partnership are fundamental ingredients in exhibition making at the Whitworth. Gathering together people, art, and expertise enable new ideas to flourish. A recent Whitworth display that encompasses these values is Other Transmissions: Conversations with Outsider Art.

This exhibition gathers together the work of six artists – Joe Beedles, James Desser, Amy Ellison, Frances Heap, Andrew Johnstone and John Powell-Jones, initially responding to The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection (MKOAC), housed at the Whitworth. The MKOAC is the largest collection of ‘Outsider Art’ in a public gallery in the UK and features work by artists who are self-taught and have been historically marginalised from the art world. This year-long residency project was led by Venture Arts in collaboration with the Whitworth and Castlefield Gallery.

During the residency, a group of learning disabled, and non-learning disabled artists came together, on equal terms, to explore the themes of ‘Outsider Art’: labeling, categorisation and art world power dynamics. The artists spent time with the MKOAC, researching collection pieces and having conversations on how artists are labelled, and how this can sometimes define their work and themselves as ‘different’. They spent three months in a shared studio space at Venture Arts producing diverse pieces of work spanning sound, film, live art, digital artwork, drawings and sculpture, as well as costume.
  
The artists selected artworks from the MKOAC, which they co-curated into a display alongside their own work. Collection artists featured include Madge Gill, Albert Louden and Michel Nedjar. The exhibition has originated from a 2018-19 project, Conversation Series II, which was a project led by Venture Arts in partnership with the Whitworth and Castlefield Gallery. Conversation Series II was the second part of a four-part programme, conceived by Venture Arts, and a wider network of national organisations including Castlefield Gallery. Castlefield Gallery’s role throughout the Conversations Series has been to act as a critical friend and provided the artists with mentoring to encourage reflection at key stages. The programme extends across multiple years, curated as a discursive and art-making journey designed to enable and empower learning disabled artists

Other Transmissions is supported by Venture Arts. The initial project Conversations was supported by Castlefield Gallery.

Find more information on Other Transmissions: Conversations with Outsider Art, here

https://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/currentexhibitions/othertransmissions/

Get Creative – Art Activity

Artists Andrew Johnstone and John Powell-Jones invite you to gather old, unwanted everyday household items to create a crocodile puppet. Watch their films, here

H is for Have a Go

Starting unfamiliar activities can sometimes feel scary.

“I don’t know what to do”

“What will other people think?” or

Will I get it right?”

These are often questions that try to stop us from joining in.

The fear of the unknown or a blank page can turn into creative fun by having a go.

Learning through trial and error can be enjoyable if we accept that it is alright to go wrong!

Get Creative – Art Activity

Join our creative practitioner Luke and ‘Have a Go’ at his drawing workshop where all mistakes are welcome!

Get Creative – Art Activity

Have you ever tried to make pictures or images form random shapes or scribbles?

Why not take inspiration from the blot drawings made by artist Alexander Cozens and create an artwork from a smudge.

• Firstly, take a piece of paper and drop a blot of ink or make random marks and scribbles in pencil or pen.

• Take a moment to look at the shapes and patterns that have appeared.

• What do they remind you of?
• – A landscape, a place, a person, an object or an animal perhaps?

• Use creativity to turn your accidental marks into what you have imagined in your minds eye and then complete your very own masterpiece!

Father and son, Alexander and John Robert Cozens, were influential watercolour painters of the 18^th century. Alexander was a drawing master who dedicated his career to teaching young men and the aristocracy how to create landscapes without needing to attend the Royal Academy. This resulted in the publication of multiple guides demonstrating how to create the ideal landscape from a catalogue of features, such as clouds, mountains and trees. Consequently, many of Alexander’s surviving works are fictional landscapes. Alexander argued that landscape images could evoke particular states of mind or moral feelings in the viewer. He became known as the ‘blot master’ for creating improvised compositions from random markings, an idea first suggested by Leonardo da Vinci. His theories elevated the status of landscape painting in the 18^th century and helped propel art practice towards the freedom that resulted in Abstract Expressionism.

Find out more about Alexander and John Robert Cozens in Rhian Addison’s essay The Educators of Trees, here

Explore more works in the Whitworth’s collection by father and son, Alexander and John Robert Cozens, here

http://gallerysearch.ds.man.ac.uk/Browse/5913

Get Creative – Art Activity

Take festive inspiration from artist Mary Fedden and arrange a bowl of fruit, a vase of flowers or everyday objects into a still life composition.

Look closely – Draw or paint what you see.

Explore further artworks in the Whitworth’s collection with a still life theme, here

http://gallerysearch.ds.man.ac.uk/Browse/6040

I is for Inspiration

Inspiration fuels creativity.

Artists take inspiration from the world around them. Inspirational sources can vary from history, politics and people to the natural world, places and individual personal passions.

Artists are encouraged to look at the work of others to help inspire their imagination and inform their creative practice.

Get Creative – Art Activity

Pearl Alcock was born in Jamaica in 1934 and came to England in the 1950’s where she opened a dress shop in Brixton, London and later ran a café and shebeen (a place where alcoholic drinks were sold without a license)

Pearl only began paining in the 1980’s when aged in her 50’s and carried on right up to her death in 2006.

Pearl loved colour and would work with oil paint, acrylics, coloured pencils, crayons and felt tips, really whatever she could use.

She liked to paint flowers and birds as well as landscapes based on her memories of the Caribbean. She would also create pieces that she called her ‘Mood Pictures’ which were abstract.

You can try creating a ‘mood picture’ that reflects how you are feeling, this could be about now or a time in the past or even looking ahead to the future.

You will need: Paper and any colouring implement of your choice or that you have.

Use a strong piece of A4 or A3 cartridge paper if you can, but if you don’t have that you could open out a used cereal packet and trim off the edges then collage white paper or paint the inside of the packet in white to give a base coat.

Next, just let the mood of your thoughts guide you as you paint/crayon until you are happy with the finished piece.

Get Creative – Art Activity

Creative practitioner Ekua takes inspiration from the artwork of Pearl Alcock to design a sculptural alphabet letter. Watch her film and have a go yourself, here.

J is for Journey

Sometimes creative instinct can take us on an unexpected journey.

Artists often describe their practice as ongoing, an exploration that has no end destination.

Sketchbooks and journals have been tools adopted by artists and creative people to record their thinking and map out the journey of their life’s work.

Thomas Girtin was born the same year as J.M.W. Turner, both artists were pivotal in steering landscape painting in a radical new direction. Girtin’s life was cut tragically short, but his unrivaled skill led Turner to famously proclaim,

‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved’.

The Thomas Girtin sketchbook in the Whitworth’s collection is believed to be the last known surviving sketchbook by Girtin and is inscribed ‘T. Girtin’s Sketches From Nature / 1800’. Containing twenty-three sketches, including 5 which were used by the artist as the basis for his completed watercolours.

Browse the Whitworth’s Thomas Girtin sketchbook, here

http://gallerysearch.ds.man.ac.uk/Browse/6074

Explore more artworks in the Whitworth’s collection on a theme of Journey, here

http://gallerysearch.ds.man.ac.uk/Browse/6055

Get Creative – Art Activity

Take creative inspiration from our practitioner Oliver as he invites us to go on a drawing journey. Watch his film, here

K is for Key

Creativity has been in abundance during 2020. From the making and sharing of digital content during lockdown to the new approaches that are being tried and tested in response to the Covid19 pandemic.

Key workers in our hospitals, care homes, schools and supermarkets have had to re-think how they work to keep us safe. 

Get Creative – Art Activity

“Providing children with creative opportunities unlocks their potential for realising their talents, emotions and worth.  It connects us in a way that searches for answers; the process often being more rewarding than the end result.” 

Sarah Ackerley, Teacher, St Kentigern’s Primary School, Manchester

Sarah has kindly shared some creative and fun activities that she imagined during lockdown.

Idea 1:

Create a picture using everyday items that can be found around the home!  (bottle tops, toy cars, toy figures)   “I felt like Neil Buchannan doing this…Art Attack!”

Idea 2:

Look around your home for words of positivity and happiness! 

Draw or take pictures of what being at home has meant to you.

Photograph the objects that have been significant during this time spent at home!

Create a picture collage of them!