Live on the Drive

by admin | Feb 12, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Live on the Drive
2016

A Performance Project for girls aged 15-19, led by performance artist Katy Baird and visual artist Rebecca Lindsay – Addy at the drawing shed’s project space, LockUpNumber11, on the Drive housing estate E17.

Now with NEW Blog! Documenting the exciting Live Art created by the LoT-D girls and more!

Live on the Drive (LoT-D) has been running since September 2016 and is a series of live art workshops, discussions and visits to live events. These workshops focus around discussions and creations of Live Art, and all this encompasses, including visual elements and using this to extend ideas of performance . The workshops have taken place in a range of contexts including the estate, public events such as the Women’s March, and even at Walthamstow School for Girls helping to introduce Year 10s to the project and Live Art. The LoT-D girls work collaboratively and individually to generate artwork in new and exciting ways. The LoT-D girls are at the centre of the project, including passing on their experiences and new found skills to other girls.

live-on-the-drive-poster_final

“I learnt to think about the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’.”

“I loved it; it was a really different environment.”

“It was strange in a good way.” “I have an interest in performance art now and feel more confident about performing in front of other girls.”

Feedback from participants, November 2016

Social Art Practice, East London

by admin | Feb 12, 2018 | Participation

Social Art Practice, East London
2009 – 2012

the drawing shed is led by visual artist / directors Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd. Labern+Lloyd practice both collaboratively and individually; their work uses diverse media and engages with issues of resilience, resistance, commonality and displacement. Both artists are interested in the edges of spaces and their ‘shadows’ as well as the objects – art and otherwise – whose resonance is changed by interaction. Both explore ideas that interrogate ‘the edges’ of (often contested) places and communities, working with the unseen, the debris and the dis lodged. These are the pathways into a dialogue and creation of a new form and this is integral to our methodology around social engagement. Using mobile studios the drawing shed delivers socially engaged projects, while both artists also respond as individuals and in collaboration to commission briefs for site specific work that extends their ideas and work.

Social engagement

In their socially engaged practice Labern+Lloyd have worked together for the past few years, as well as on independent projects for the past two decades in East London and beyond, working with communities experiencing high levels of social exclusion. They often develop long-term relationships with individuals which allows complex and rich collaborations to emerge as trust develops. Integral to their work is a strong focus on developing dialogue and celebrating difference through the visual arts. Socially engaged projects can lead out of Lloyd+Labern’s collaborative practice and/or run parallel to it. Always the content works in tandem with the form and the work is ideologically charged; or indeed the converse can be true, collaborative practice triggered by the richness of creative and social interactions that unfold in the socially engaged projects.

the drawing shed mobiles

These were established in 2009/10/11 as an artist-led project/resource/collaboration, they form a central platform for Labern+Lloyd’s creative practice and are at the heart of the drawing shed. These three mobile studios – the drawing shed, ClayOven and PrintBike – live in the drawing shed’s two garages on The Drive housing estate E17, from where the artists currently run socially engaged projects both on the local estates, in the YMCA and across London. Through these mobile projects the drawing shed is able to go to where people are rather than waiting for them to arrive, also using online tools, such as Twitter/Blog, where and when it fits.

Well London and Be Creative Be well

As part of the Be Creative Be Well (BCBW) Well London programme in E17, 2009-2011, the drawing shed took a strategic community development role working alongside UEL and London Sustainability Exchange to develop catalytic projects and access to training that could support behaviour changes for local residents. The resulting real changes in the well-being of individuals created the foundations for community led projects by a ‘Delivery Team’ of residents who then set up a new community group (‘…Ask Freda’) to continue and sustain this grassroots development. the drawing shed wove creativity and well-being through a community cohesion approach to supporting a healthier community.

In E17 Labern+Lloyd continue to use the existing signage that looms large and loudly punctuates the estates, creating text/visual posters with participants, developing skills of local people to forge deeper connections with their neighbours. The new Twitter-based ‘conversation’ in the public spaces on the two estates (which are separated by a wide road) changes their tempo and shifts them into ‘common’ space with Labern+Lloyd as artists negotiating the content of the posters as they are made, and working with residents – children, teenagers and adults – to change the conversation.

the drawing shed has also set up a teenage Girls Estate Based Theatre project supported by partnership organisations as part of the Communities Against Gangs, Guns and Knives, building on the positive vision and aspirations of the girls, the families and the community. This project has seen the coming together of five partnership organisations and the local Hoe Street Well Street (HSWS) Network as co-producers, with the girls taking the lead.

We have also worked with local partnership organisations to co produce projects Eg. With Learning Mentors of three schools and an ‘…Ask Freda’ Volunteer we ran a Monoprinting project in the community to attract 20 hard to reach families; we worked together to create an exhibition which went up on the signage on the estate acting as an art trail leading other local people down to the opening of a new community garden created by and for residents at the back of two sets of flats.

the drawing shed seeks to achieve its vision of challenging preconceived ideas through:

Developing projects and the drawing shed ‘mobiles’ in other public spaces also using digital/Social Media tools (GPS, Blog, Twitter, film, sound) with particular communities, that are as accessible to adults as to children
Setting up ‘the drawing shed’ workshops in ways that create open access and an atmosphere of sharing, understanding of difference and tolerance within the community ; Fostering community networks to share new experiences and the understanding of the value of innovative arts projects and creativity to Well Being

The VALUES which underpin the drawing shed’s work include:

PARTICIPATION – increasing access for people to enjoy drawing, and to confidently use drawing/art making as important tools for imaginative communication and Well Being.
Co-producing contemporary arts projects with communities is central to our work as is INCLUSION ensuring that ‘the drawing shed’ activities and marketing are accessible, relevant and attractive to a culturally diverse audience and that ‘the drawing shed’ continues to seek new participants for creative projects that lead to creating new dialogues within and across communities
COLLABORATION strategic partnerships with local community groups and organisations (voluntary,arts,educational,community, corporate), developing projects with those who share complementary aims.

READ THE PROJECT’S EVALUATION: Click here

Some[w]Here Now – Pump House Gallery

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Gallery, Installation / Films, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Some[w]Here Now – Pump House Gallery
2015

www.somewhereresearch.wordpress.com

Some[w]Here Now invites artists, local people, and others interested to join the drawing shed for open conversations at Pump House Gallery in Battersea Park, exploring how artists may work collaboratively, with ‘local’ communities and in ‘public’ places, in the context of Now.Co-hosted by a collection of artists, local residents, critical theorists, architects, activists, public and mental health professionals, THE DAY OF SMALL CONVERSATIONS invites participants to talk openly about ideas of ‘social responsibility’ in regards to collaborative making and to collectively question the role of contemporary artists within opposing cultures of resilience, resistance and regeneration.

The frame will be set by the drawing shed‘s playful and critically informed Some[w]Here contemporary arts project over three housing estates in Nine Elms, and will feature video documentation, materials and research gathered over the past nine months of the project. The estates – known locally as ‘the island’ – are situated in the shadow of the Battersea Power Station Development, London SW8 close to the gallery; an area that throws into question the very meaning of public space and value of community in our contemporary society.

THE DAY OF SMALL CONVERSATIONS will be co-hosted by a number of artists and thinkers, including Sally Labern, Bobby Lloyd, Jordan McKenzie, Barby Asante, Daniella Valz Gen, Professor Adrian Renton, Cara Courage, Dr. Debra Benita Shaw, Shahed Saleem, Dr Chris Wood, and Lois Keidan and Katy Baird (Live Art Development Agency). The days agenda will then be shaped by all of the voices in the room, with conversations passing between small groups throughout, looking towards future possible projects, shared actions, and collaborations. Please bring thoughts, questions, agendas and an openness to unpick.

Amidst these conversations there will be a large communal picnic lunch provided in the park and a drinks reception at the end of the day for further conversation and informal networking. the drawing shed will also launch the Some[w]Here publication: Manual for Possible Projects on the Horizon.

Pump House Gallery is wheelchair accessible on the ground floor only. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss access requirements.

For more information, please email: thedrawingshed.projects@gmail.com

Mary Osborn 07792292605

THE SOAPBOX ARTS LAB

6 – 8 June | 11am – 5pm
Pump House Gallery

Some[w]Here Now – THE DAY OF SMALL CONVERSATIONS follows the drawing shed’s The SoapBox Arts Lab taking place at the gallery in the three days preceding. Here the artists will be taking over the gallery for individual and collaborative making of mobile soapbox structures. These will further be used as a platform for conversations on June 9. The SoapBox Arts Lab is free; please turn up on the day to join in, or email for further information.

Leena Chauhan

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Leena Chauhan

LiveElse[W]here, resident artist Leena Chauhan answers questions by E17 Art Trail blogger Amy Wevill about the work she has developed during her residency and the LiveLunch event on Saturday 31st May.

Could you tell us about the work you will be showing during this year’s E17 Art Trail?

As an artist in residence and part of the drawing shed’s LiveElse[W]here I am showing a series of enlarged screen-prints of Clothing Labels that are placed around the The Drive and Attlee Terrace, covering some of the pre-existing council signage. These labels are from the inside tag in (nearly) every garment stating where it’s from and what it’s made from. My prints have been made from my photographs of the residents’ labels on what garment they happened to be wearing at the time. I enlarged the labels to increase their visibility, especially of where the garment was made, to bring to attention its origin and the trajectory of its arrival here. I screen-printed upon these photographs, layering the details tags found inside the differing garments.

A finale for our project and a place to show the works development was theLiveLunch – an event open to residents and Trail goers alike; I made food on site,Cooking with my Mama. We cooked Kenyan-Indian food and served it to the locals whilst sharing my mothers short stories of her time growing up in Kenya moving to England. Essentially, through using clothing as a focus of this project, I am engaging with sense of identity and belonging and where we (or things) are coming from.

How have you been preparing for this year’s trail?

I have been commissioned by the drawing shed to make work for theLiveElse[W]here Project which was being actualised over the last few months. My work has acted as an instigator for developing interaction, thought and discussion. I have been working in and around the Estates getting familiar with the area and the locals; for me, the essence of the work was with the engagement of residents by having a real dialogue as an inspiration for the beginnings of the project itself. The work provoked conversations of “quality versus affordability; high-end clothing labels versus cheap labour; identity formation and clothing becoming a cultural identity; human value versus clothes carrying ‘identity’.”

Being a recent graduate from Central Saint Martins, a self-contained environment with latest gadgets and gismos, was very different to working in-situ on Attlee Estate and The Drive. I have been learning to improvise and adapt with what we have and how we can use what that is. During the Print Screening workshops I organised, along with sterling guidance from artist Joseph Kopiel, I had support from the locals: a person offered a gallon of water to aid the cleaning of the mesh screens; another resident offered homemade foods to help keep our stomachs full, whilst other parents encourage their children to partake in the process – it was moments like these that were charged with awareness and positive energy. Nevertheless, this residency has been a short period which has involved a process of gaining some trust and connections between residents and myself.

Could you tell us about an artist/ artwork that particularly inspires you?

Can I say this I wonder…? I’ve been so very fortunate to work by Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd who’ve both made vast amount of works both collaboratively and individually. On this journey, they’ve both helped me facilitate my project, ground my ideas and help me develop my thinking with intensive talks and contributions. I got talking to them about the some things they’ve both achieved and details of past projects that have been sensitive in approach. Watching them work, being around them, for me personally has been inspiring. Two women: genuine, real, compassionate who both mean what they say and say what they mean.

How does inhabiting a community like Walthamstow help your practice?

When I started university, I lived near Walthamstow market, a place that reminded me of my home. It was the place I strolled when I had to adjust myself to the privileged others from university; what I understood here was how I wanted to be a positive part of this cohesion. Undeniably, the differences that occur due to class systems set an obvious bearing to our daily choices. This was the reason for which I could imagine myself working creatively amongst the crowds, not disrupting what already is, but in my small way helping to strengthen the identity of The Drive and Attlee Estates, and developing myself and my practice as an artist through this process.

What are you most looking forward to during the E17 Art Trail this year?

I am interested to see the works of my fellow resident artists too, who have been working alongside my project. Most of all, I looked forward to the LiveLunch on Saturday 31st May. It was the first time for me to work with my mother, Minaxi, too. This is a project my mother and I have been talking about for some years! My Mum and I cooked on site, delivering the food, welcoming people whose families come from all over the world – those who both live on the estates and also visitors like us, all of which was very exciting! I guess, she was the centre of my show, as she raised me the best way she knew how, which of course has been a crucial part to the early formation of my own identity and something I wish to cherish, considering family cohesion an important part of social cohesion.

LiveElse[W]here

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Participation, Performance, Residencies & Commisions

LiveElse[W]here

In March 2014 the drawing shed put a call out for proposals from Live Art / Performance practitioners to undertake residencies as part of LiveElse[W]here. Based on two housing estates in Walthamstow E17, the residencies culminated in a mini symposium / LiveLunch as part of the part of the E17ArtTrail 2014 and as an on-going part of the ‘communities of Imagination’ project that preoccupies the drawing shed.

The two residencies were awarded to artists Leena Chauhan and Pablo Perezzerate, and alongside artist / LiveElse[W]here co-curator Jordan McKenzie they worked in residence in the drawing shed‘s new project space LockUpNumber11, developing projects that responded to, and engaged with, the diverse local communities. In parallel local people were also in residence in the project space, trying our their own creative ideas and becoming part of a dialogue with other artists and residents about the value of creativity in all our lives and exploring and extending the possibilities for practice in non traditional art spaces.

As Leena and Pablo developed their projects for LiveElse[W]here they also fed their ideas, work and responses into the IdeasFromElse[W]here project blog, a space for artists and collaborators of the drawing shed‘s arts lab project to experiment and share creative ideas alongside working in the project space at Winns Gallery E17.

For his residency Pablo developed Sound Maps comprised of stories and interviews compiled from members of the community living along the Drive and Attlee Terrace estates. The map, essentially a simple graphic representation of the layout of buildings and neighbouring streets, shows different numbers corresponding to specific locations of importance to the stories of the area. Each number represents a “Sound Track” in a “Track List” containing all the stories and interviews. The intent for this project is for listeners to explore the urban environment from the perspective of the stories told by the residents who live there, with listeners going to the estates in Walthamstow E17 and following the map while listening to each track as they arrive to the corresponding spot on the map.

Listen to Pablo’s Sound Maps here:

The Past – This first collection focuses on oral history about the area, detailing stories from recent and distant pasts.

Living Here – This collection focuses on testimonials from local residents about their experience of living in the Estates and the difficulties and joy of creating community.

Home Sounds – This third collection focuses on the music that reminds local residents of living in the area, and how these sounds affected their lives whilst living there.

For LiveElse[W]here, the drawing shed worked with the project’s advisers, LADA, who are keen to support the conversation about the value and role of arts practice which takes risks, may challenge received ideas and can support mutuality of dialogue with local people around contemporary arts practice, diverse creativity, the value of difference, and the culture of day to day life; the intentions for this project are that any artists who work with us will become part of a dialogue which will valuable to us all and extend the possibilities for practice in non traditional art spaces.

Live Art Development Agency (LADA) http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/

E17 Art Trail (under the umbrella of Artillery) http://www.e17arttrail.co.uk/

Click here to see the original call out for the LiveElse[W]here residency proposals.

Live Else [W]Here LUNCH

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Live Else [W]Here LUNCH

For LiveElse[W]here, and at intervals throughout May 2014, artists Leena Chauhan and Pablo Perezzerate worked in residence in our project space LockUpNumber11, alongside artist Jordan McKenzie as co-curator – engaging residents across different spaces in sound, film, drawing, tailored-made performance in people’s homes and print. In parallel, several residents took up residency in LockUpNumber11 as a space to develop their own work and creative ideas.

LiveElse[W]here culminated in our LIVE LUNCH on May 31st, 12-3pm, during which Pablo prepared and shared Mexican food while simultaneously sharing family stories and memories, and Leena cooked Kenyan/Indian style food with her very own Mama. Attended by artists, curators, commissioners, local residents, and members of the public exploring the E17 Art Trail, LIVE LUNCH was also a space for seeing some of the work made by the artists involved in LiveElse[W]here, acting as a springboard for discussing the value of performance and visual artists working on estates such as those on which our project takes place in E17.

Feedback from a participant on the day: “When I walked down The Drive in Walthamstow yesterday afternoon after a lengthy drive of another nature, I knew from first glance how worthwhile it had been to be stuck in traffic from the scene that I was to become a part of in the coming moments. There was artistry not just in the wonderful array of colours decorating the area, but in the cohesion of colour and style of people coming together in exactly the way that I would have hoped, as an informal artist’s assistant connected with the work being produced by the drawing shed group, resident artists of this community.

Grey pillars were decorated with crimson tape, mounted with coloured lines from which hung dazzlingly produced prints in eye-catching hues, and covering the signs issuing commands to the residents about prohibitions, were prints of clothing labels from all over the world, that were worn by local residents, to draw attention to how much diversity was gathered in this small area. Fate could not have produced a more perfect day for the occasion. A lovely, warm, slightly breezy day compounded the warmth that I felt from people of various origins, artists and residents, people of advanced ages, people young and carefree enough to seemingly live effortlessly in the moment, people of all ages in-between, relaxing together after sharing a lunch that was a culmination of interactions on the estate for this project.

There is a world of art that is glitzy and commercial, that perhaps at times makes a deliberate effort to “be more accessible” that I personally feel somewhat alienated from. The artwork of this project, with which I was engaging today, was so much more than the money-making highly commercial stuff. It was real. It was meaningful to me. Pardon my wide-eyed lyrical reflections, but they are induced only because I find this so rare: it really touched me. I’m writing this partly just to capture, in the way I prefer, something of the experience, for my journal, and partly as a simple act of appreciation that I wish to share with the organisers and artists responsible for what I came to enjoy so thoroughly yesterday afternoon. So, the drawing shed with Bobby, Sally, Jordan, Pablo, Angelique, Esther, Jayne and Will and last and for me personally definitely not least, Leena: thank you, and may there be more of a similar nature to come, and take pleasure from.”

Amy Wevill from the E17 Art Trail also joined us for the LIVE LUNCH – read her blog piece here

Cultural Wellbeing 2013

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Participation, Research & Proposals

Cultural Wellbeing 2013

Image from post 2011 riot exchange on the estate during the E17 Art Trail.

In September 2013, we were invited by Wandsworths Arts Council to join other artists, academic and cultural commentators and leaders Cultural Well Being Provocation Lunch on SW11 to discuss what the term ‘cultural wellbeing’ might mean and how it can (or not!) be useful for the work of arts and culture leaders. Bobby gave one of the provocations in response to the questions.

The key objectives of this project were to explore and come to some fluid conclusions about what we mean by cultural well-being in Wandsworth and further afield – moving towards a possible working definition.
The questions were:

How can a clear understanding of cultural well-being inform work across a broad range of areas including: Public Health, public realm and environmental design, place-making and regeneration, participatory arts practice…?

How can we most effectively measure and evaluate the impact of ‘cultural well-being’ initiatives?

This is the wdwth_wellbeing_final-3 document that came out of the process.

Some[w]Here Research

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Some[w]Here Research – 9 ELMS – Wandsworth

www.somewhereresearch.wordpress.com

the drawing shed’s new project Some[w]Here Research is underway, opening up new imaginative spaces through engaging residents across the Wandsworth estates of Patmore, Savona and Carey Gardens.

Together with performance artists Jordan McKenzie and Daniella Valz Gen and designer-makers George Williams and Nozomi Nakabayashi, the drawing shed will be working in and between the three estates’ public spaces, activating these outdoor spaces within and across the estates through the visible process of making a series of mobile structures. Exploring the history of the area, including the old soap box factories and go-kart culture, and learning from older people living on the estates Some[w]Here will explore the platforms from which stories are told and conversations take place across the estates, cultures and generations, with the PROJECT BLOG – www.somewhereresearch.wordpress.com – providing further space for residents to share and explore old memories and new ideas. Rethinking, reworking, reusing, retelling, remaking.

Surveying the scene on Thessaly Road

Beautiful garden path on Savona

Whose in goal on a sunny afternoon

9elms13.web Out and about – all things mobile

Over the wall to Covent Garden Market

Watching Battersea Power Station changing before their eyes

#BasicSeven7

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Gallery, Installation / Films, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

#BasicSeven7

#BasicSeven7 is an ongoing project for co-lead artists Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd of the drawing shed and was originally funded by London Borough of Waltham Forest, Hoe St Ward Funding alongside the UCL Bartlett Wild Screens research project (see below) which allowed us to extend and deepen the use of social media as a creative tool, holding complicated conversations around the issues of work, mental health and housing, inviting personal and network responses to questions of responsibility for homelessness.

the drawing shed artists fed into project engagement through their historical experience and community contact with people living on and off the streets in Leytonstone, in Hoe Street, Waltham Forest and in Camden – so as to ask the following questions:

• Can the situated screen and online social media (twitter) and Instagram be of any relevance to particular challenges such as a community discourse on street homelessness?

• Does the use of Instagram and other Social Media as a creative tool allow the drawing shed artists to synthesise and transmit ideas related to their own critical practice and engage a wider audience as participants in major debates of our time?

http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/graduate/screens-in-the-wild/Artists-in-Residence

HOMELESSNESS

Under the banner of Irregular Stage, the drawing shed worked on two projects in London in relation to homelessness:

• Irregular Bulletin was a 6 month residency at Arlington House in Camden, with Space and One Housing, using the drawing shed’s mobile PrintBike alongside the Social media tools Twitter/Instagram with long/short stay residents, January-July 2013;

this is linked and feeds into/is fed by:

• Basic Seven#7 which took place in E17 in Waltham Forest as a series of critical and inclusive arts events/workshops/exhibitions and encounters on the theme of ‘homelessness, housing, mental health and work’, February 2013 to January 2014

many joined the conversation:

#homeless #sitw @wordinthehand @wildscreens

the drawing shed tested out these questions initially during March in the following four locations:

· Tuesday 5th March 1.00pm – 4.00pm – Streets of Leytonstone E11

· Tuesday 12th March 9.30pm – 12.30pm – Soup Kitchen and homeless hostel, Walthamstow, E17

· Wednesday 13th March 10.00pm – 1.00pm – Islington, N1, we proposed to work alongside a long-term Arlington House resident selling The Big Issue but inclement weather deferred.

· Tuesday 19th March 1.00pm – 4.00pm – Streets of Leytonstone E11

We continue to work on this project and earlier in 2014, we attended a day of presentations and discussion involving many partners across London, led by the Christian Kitchen, a group local to E17 who run the soup kitchen whose pitch in the centre of Walthamstow and remit to support both hungry and homeless families, was being challenged by the Local Authority. Stella Creasy MP joined the debate.

The Irregular Bulletin

by admin | Feb 10, 2018 | Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Participation, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

The Irregular Buletin

the drawing shed co-authored The Irregular Bulletin a contemporary arts project using its iconic PrintBike – a mobile pop up printmaking studio activated by it’s sponsored Brompton Fold-up and artists Bobby Lloyd, Sally Labern, and Joseph Kopiel. Space Studios and Arlington were our funding partners. Arlington provides temporary hostel accommodation and services for homeless people.

The artists consistently led and supported the workshops with Arlington residents, creating a community workshop atmosphere around the ideological concept of ‘The Irregular Bulletin’ – inspired by and rethinking the work of avant garde artists and drawing from popular culture and radical forms of poetry, [lending a contemporary take on William Burroughs Cut-Ups, John Cage ‘s Rules, Corita Kent’s Open Studio ethos]. Here the ‘making and re-making’ of rules allows us to work with whatever is brought into The Creative Space in Space Studios: Studio5 by residents taking part.

Corita Kent, John Cage and William Burroughs were working and active during at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti vietnam war campaigns in the 60’s. Sister Corita’s community screen print workshop with a pop up community cafe open to everyone and this became the hub for discussion, art making, teaching, the making of new rules, and shared community actions.

the drawing shed’s exhibition of The Irregular Bulletin at Arlington on 18^th and 19^th July 2013 as part of The Creative Space project, took the form of placards carrying screen printed image and text created with residents as both a personal and political take on the world, alongside a pop up café during the Private View in partnership with City Dining, and the more thoughtful and profoundly beautiful series of ‘lost prints’; These are created from the residual traces left on each screen as the prints are pulled. Some of these prints on A1 archive quality tissue reflect the fragility, resilience and endurance of participants and The Irregular Bulletin as the contemporary form chosen by the artists.

PrintBike itself was transformed into a huge lightbox; The Irregular Bulletin format mirroring the ad hoc lightbox created by a resident during a workshop, and showed a series of hand screened multiple prints on foolscap tracing paper.

Paper Stencils as multiple objects of the vast number of prints created throughout this project flooded over one wall of the Creative Space itself so that visitors can get a live sense of Space Studio’s Studio5 as The Irregular Bulletin space.

the drawing shed’s original proposal to Space for the Arlington Residency

“the drawing shed will take up residency at Arlington in Camden each Wednesday for a 6 month period in January 2013. In the Creative Space Studio the drawing shed will be using PrintBike, its fully equipped mobile print workshop powered by a Brompton fold-up bicycle, sponsored by Brompton, to create new work with residents, with content influenced and inspired by the work of (Sister) Corita Kent – the radical nun and avant garde artist known for her work in the 60′s around the civil rights movement and anti vietnam protests in the US. Kent’s extraordinary images were drawn from a collision of capitalist marketing on the streets and political community actions on the streets, capturing the dynamism of the struggles and ideas of the times.

Corita Kent was a passionate teacher and set up a screen-print workshop inside the convent which was open to everyone. Kent also created the ‘irregular bulletin’ – a multi-authored publication that took various forms from posters to papers, placards and political community protests, to happenings and performances.

the drawing shed will develop and deliver a project with residents called The Irregular Bulletin with an emphasis on cutting things in, rather than cutting them out. Using PrintBike, the drawing shed is joined by artist Joseph Kopiel, a highly experienced print-maker who will be part of the pilot phase of this project. Later in the year we anticipate Joseph Kopiel will join us, funding permitting as part of a professional development residency with the drawing shed’s lead artists to develop his professional art practice alongside a workshop programme at Arlington.”

“Consider Everything An Experiment”

Suban:
“The Irregular Bulletin project opened my eyes to my abilities and possibilities – it got me motivated to go out and do the creative things I’m doing. If it wasn’t for the drawing shed I wouldn’t have done my screen printing course, so it’s helped me do the things I found that I enjoy!
The Irregular Bulletin gives me space to be myself – get stuff down and into print…maybe in future I might do an Irregular Blog!
When you have peace and some space, your mind works wonders!”

Pasquale:
” I’m very glad to be back here, I feel okay here, it’s a good space for me, I like to be around people who think like me.”

Richard:
“I’ve discovered that I have an interest in art… and talent! …. I take inspiration from other people and I gain knowledge from looking at the artists ( Corita, William Morris, Cut-out poetry-William Burroughs), and i develop ideas from things I see around me. I think a lot so I reckon I’m a conceptual artist!”

Artists Notes :

Residents will use text and screen printing in particular to transfer expressions / visual / fluid text stories of ‘residence’ informed by identity, culture and personal experiences; workshops will be a social process, and build upon an expression of flow between imagination, ambition and the commonplace in all our lives.

The Irregular Bulletins will be created over the 24 weeks, divided into 4 X 6 week projects, and will focus on celebrating difference. These ‘bulletins’ will be created in a number of formats that will be decided with participants and may therefore include:

PAPER

News Paper – Bulletin – Headlines
TEXT – ‘From the Street to Poetry’
PORTRAIT ‘Self’ – Photocopy, photograph to cut out to make stencil
and PRINT, screen, mono-prints

OBJECT

a story, a Platform, a Stage
Signs Placards Protest
stories, lost and found
experiences, real and aspirational
identities, real and imagined
imaginative platforms – digital soap boxes, tenuous physical structures, screen printed soap boxes…!

FABRIC

OF ME / OF YOU
Overprinted on existing old T-SHIRTS – SLOGANS, like Westwood t-shirts, carrying ideas, poems and image: transformation, sublimation, transliteration

BANNER

protest – STORY – individuals – RULES: made, Broken, aka John Cage and Corita Kent – Rule Number 7 = WORK (artwork or work ethic?!) BasicSeven #7

HEADLINES

I AM…..and I AM NOT…..

PAPER – POSTER – BULLETIN

SIGNAGE

in the building, in the streets – TEMPORARY LOCATIONS – Concrete Poetry, Visualisation

Groups of residents may work with an introduction to text where we shall start with famous quotes referring to Freedom, Liberty, Equality and HOME etc. cut up, play with and add to, aka Sister Corita, from graphic influences around us.

Print-Making workshops will:

Stimulate a process of a shared enquiry – ongoing throughout the 24 weeks
Enable participants to gain practical skills – and use these to lead and enter into a dialogue together and with others
Create a counter culture of enterprise, making products not-for-sale: t-shirt, poster, and all forms of The Irregular Bulletin to be ‘free’ etc
Create dialogue between texts – inspired by sharing with the local residents PeopleLikeUs Collective in E17 who have created the most beautiful ‘open source’ poetry in the form of tweets, here at Arlington we shall use existing texts and poetry/texts created by residents.

An INDIVIDUAL and Collective FOCUS

SNAPSHOTS

Possible work with disposable cameras – to personalise the images and content, ‘snapshots’ will provide additional source material for the print workshop activities and underpin positive image and self esteem.

GROUP SHOW

For the end of project group show we have an idea to create a focus of the The Irregular Bulletin Art works in the building – like the Sister Corita Café – we can use the Arlington Café and residents’ social spaces by working together with residents.

RESOURCES

PrintBike is a fully equipped and totally mobile resource; It is powered by a Brompton Fold-up Bike, donated to us by Brompton and needs nothing else but the activation of artists’ and participants’ imagination to transform materials into great projects using strong ideas and a passion for skill sharing. Throughout the project, artists Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd will join Joseph Kopiel for each of the sets of 4 X 6 week sessions. the drawing shed are more than pleased to be able to add value to this project by raising grant funding resources to underpin the delivery of The Irregular Bulletin project.

Future Developments …. Arlington and other homeless organisations

We are proposing that later in the year The Irregular Bulletin project, with Space and Arlington, will create an opportunity to make connections with residents through other homeless organisations as part of a drawing shed project on the wider dialogue of cultural exchange around the issues of Homelessness, Mental health and Work; it will offer a space for an exchange of voices and explore participants’ own text through The Irregular Bulletin format, to share and disseminate ideas developed creatively with Arlington residents, with another group outside the Arlington building /area, but with others whom they may have things ‘in common’ and things ‘in difference’.

During March, April, May 2013, the drawing shed developed research as artists in residence with UCL Bartlett around a pilot project called #BasicSeven7, creating ‘platforms’ (performative happenings, screenings and physical stages) to explore and exchange ideas around housing and mental health and the importance of ‘taking [creative] agency’ in shifting the balance in how and what it is we value in ‘Home’. #BasicSeven7 is develop in its research stage over the next months as we fundraise beyond its developmental stage.

the drawing shed has been funded through HoeStWard, a local LBWF Councillor-led fund to develop this piece of work and is focusing the political framing of #BasicSeven7 around partnerships in Hoe St and beyond. Artists will be joining the drawing shed over the summer and autumn of 2013 in its new project garage ‘white cube’ space for a series of residencies for #BasicSeven7.

City of London Festival, 2011

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

City of London Festival, 2011

Labern+Lloyd with PrintBike were invited by The Campaign for Drawing to take part in The City of London Festival in July 2011, to make mono-prints with office workers, tourists, and literally whoever walked past. Day One was very wet indeed.

!

Cycling to our new site at Great St Helen’s on the second day.

This second day was windy!

And the other passing enterprise on wheels needed directions and a print or two…

In the afternoon, the sun came out.

Lots of people made a lot more printing on fluorescent paper.

There were some poetic moments…

And the prints glowed.

Contested Commons

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Participation, Sited

Contested Commons

Public Signage dialogue, Twitter on the Drive Two, E17 Art Trail September 2011

For the past three years, Labern+Lloyd have used the existing signage that looms large and loudly punctuates the two estates, creating screen-printed text/visual posters with participants, developing skills of local people to forge deeper connections with their neighbours. These temporary Twitter-based ‘conversations’ in the public spaces on the estates (separated by a wide road) change their tempo and shift them into ‘common’ space with Labern+Lloyd as artists negotiating the content of the posters as they are made, and working with residents – children, teenagers and adults – ‘to drag the poetic through the every day’.


Project’s origins:

Twitter on the Drive Two began as a conversation the same week that the Tottenham Riots led to 46 riots across the communities of the UK. Across the duration of the drawing shed’s larger project on The Drive and Attlee Terrace estates over the past couple of years, Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd have used the existing signage to create posters with residents, developing temporary ‘conversations’ that change the tempo of these spaces, shifting them into adhoc ‘common’ space’ – exploring the nature of these public spaces and what happens when they are contested.Artists Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd supported three resident Art Activators to become workshop leaders within their own communities using the disciplined format of Twitter – the Tweet using up to 140 characters to create poetry, prose, print and mehndi within the communities of the Drive, Attlee Terrace and the YMCA. Posters on the signage that punctuates the green spaces across the estates, and poems in Mehndi (henna) on participants arms and legs, came together to form the Twitter on the Drive Two – A Word In the Hand exhibition.The Art Activators led a series of workshops in August and September 2012, working together for the first time and to create the text for the posters exhibited as part of the E17 Art Trail, September 4th-11th 2011.This work has been funded by Arts Council England and the Walthamstow and Chingford Almshouse Charity.


Curating the exhibition

Workshopping in heavy rain

Sally holding a split poster: who are they talking to…

: Karen with one of the prints

its about being noticed…backdrop of the ‘lost’ tree prints in the wind

: Hoe Street community police joined in … from the shape you get ….

: hanging their print up on the washing line


William with his 15 minute DJ set

‘The future will show who i am destined to be’

Mehndi poem written on the performance artist ‘Bride’s arm on her visit to the Drive during the E17 Trail –

a life story in the debris of life carried on her dress

Festival Here – July 1st, 2012

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Festival Here – July 1st, 2012

the drawing shed invited residents, passers-by, friends and other organisations to participate in their mini youth festival, ‘Festival Here’, on Sunday 1st July 2012 from 12pm to 5pm on the green area at the intersection of Prospect Hill and Attlee Terrace (E17 3EG).

Festival Here was led by the Young Women’s Estate-based Performance Project with the support of Roisin Feeney, performance director from The Albany, Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd from the drawing shed, and “…Ask Freda”. The day centred around the girls’ new performative work that used film, Twitter and den-making. The girls have been using the quad spaces and streets of Attlee Terrace to explore how teenage girls use ‘public’ spaces, how contested these spaces are (who owns them?), and how they can feel safer to use local spaces / streets – redefining and examining their rights to be more visible within their communities.

the drawing shed invited artists EMILIE TAYLOR and SINEAD LOFTUS to make interventions and socially engaged works as part of the festival, while ClayOven provided more than 70 pizzas for over one hundred local residents, passers-by and invited guests. The project was supported by Walthamstow School for Girls, Asham Homes, Waltham Forest Council and Epping Forest’s Branching Out Project. It was funded by Arts Council England and Hoe Street Community Fund.

For further information email thedrawingshed@gmail.com

PERFORMANCE PROJECT. For more information Click Here

Conflict Resolution with YIAG

(Waltham Forest Youth Independent Advisory Group)

Guest Artists: EMILIE TAYLOR and SINEAD LOFTUS

Duck House, London E11, 2011

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Participation, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

Duck House, London E11, 2011

The Work: Duck House July – September 2011

Lloyd+Labern ‘re roofed’ the Langthorne Park’s Duck House in mono-printed tiles to create a temporary work for the London Borough of Waltham Forest as a part of the Fellowship Festival.

The artists created prints based upon the concealed underbelly of the park to create one side only of the roof – each image was veiled by a suspended and ‘hand drawn off ‘ gold-filmed cellophane tile sitting over each difficult image, which could only be clearly seen by the viewer when it rained and the transparency of the cellophane revealed its story.

Images for the other three sides of the roof were created working with families from local schools and a sheltered housing scheme for the elderly. Together adults and children collected found and discarded objects of little value in local parks. Participants initially distrusted that this process of collecting rubbish could yield a rich creative resource but were full of surprise at the beauty of some of the objects and the simple pleasure of finding. This process was supported by the artists as they went on to make mono-printed tiles for the roof on fluorescent and coloured paper.

Symbols and letters unique to particular world alphabets (pulled in from a City of London Festival workshop), allude to the multicultural nature of the communities and form the front face of the work.

Context

This is the duck house as the artists first saw it, sitting in the middle of the pond in a park in Leytonstone, June 2011. Recalls of the MP’s Duck Island scandal immediately came to mind.

Langthorne Park, now holds a worn veneer of its carefully landscaped park, with small pockets of tired beauty which are overseen by the energies of Audrey the Park Keeper and the Friends of the Park.

It sits in the south of Waltham Forest, high levels of deprivation echoed recently by gang and other antisocial behaviour. On asking, users of the park do not feel safe to cross the park at certain times of the day and the respected ‘authority’ of Audrey the Park Keeper is vital to safety and continued community activity in this ‘public’ space.

Concealed here in the Desire Lines that cross the park, youths hold court the outside gym as a fresh air ‘front room’, men drink in small groups, families use the play area, eastern european mums cluster with prams, teen lovers steal a space in hidden places, older people worry constantly about the ducklings dying inexplicably every day.

There is a fragility in this place; it has considerable community use/value alongside a pervading sense of rootlessness, an underbelly; It is in this contested space that the artists chose to work with the Duck House – to re roof and re frame it, to recognise and contain all the contradictions of this place.

Objects in plastic bags found in the park, to be used for mono-printing

Workshopping at a Jenny Hammond Primary school

Watching how to make a mono-print at Buxton all through school

Parent shares new Print making skills

Prints drying on floor.

Sally on the roof with the first prints after wading through the pond

Two sides of the roof holding images made by children, their parents and older people of objects found in the parks, the brighter images grouped together in contrast to the more sombre images on the right hand face.

The gold film, now transparent, reveals the artists’ images of the difficult objects.

Duckhouse starting to fade with summer sun

The duck house, faded further by September

Duck House patched up on a bright, windy October day

PEOPLELIKEUS

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Sited

PEOPLELIKEUS, A LIVE TWITTER PERFORMANCE, 2012

The PeopleLikeUs Collective led its first Live Twitter Performance as part of the E17 Art Trail in September 2012. This public Twitter writing performance has further extended this space beyond the estates and into the ether where others were able to join the PeopleLikeUs Collective in writing to the hash-tag #bestow during the recent E17 Art Trail, September 2012. See our Blog During Spring and Summer 2012, the drawing shed @WordintheHand worked with writers Jacob Sam- La Rose and Dorothy Fryd on a Twitter live art writing project PeopleLikeUs, with residents of Attlee Terrace, The Drive and Hoe St in E17.the drawing shed’s interest in using Twitter for Live writing and Open Performance is in pushing the creative boundaries of dialogical art practice led by artists in both public and community spaces, exploring innovative ways to connect communities and to build virtual relationships; The value of difference and cultural values exposed and in creative collision, has become the material fabric of a rising and responsive Community of the Imagination.

Over the spring and summer of 2012 the PeopleLikeUs Collective met regularly to write together and use Twitter as a creative space to explore, share and riff off each other in the ether.

In collaboration with the E17 Art Trail Poetry Trail organisers, we warmly welcomed everyone with Twitter on their mobile phone to join us on Sunday 2nd September, with Jacob Sam-La Rose, in a Live performance during the E17 Art Trail. On the streets of Attlee Terrace , The Drive and the Hoe Street Ward and using the 140 characters of Twitter, we wrote on the hashtag #Bestow to embrace The E17 Art Trails Poetry Trail. Participants needed to have Twitter on their mobile phone to join us in this collaborative writing project. A full briefing at 2pm at garage number 11, Fanshaw House, The Drive, E17 3BY was given to all participants. No previous experience of using Twitter in this way was needed, though the basics of Twitter and a Twitter name were.

At the end of the performance at 4pm, tea, flapjacks and scones were served courtesy of “…Ask Freda”, a local residents’ community group, at garage number 11, Fanshaw House, The Drive, E17 3BY.

TO TWEET:

1 – Set up a Twitter Account, Click Here

2 – Download on your mobile the Twitter App (For info about Twitter for Android Click Here, for info about Twitter for iPhone Click Here)

3 – Tweet under the hashtag #bestow

4 – Alway leave a single ‘space’ before and after #bestow or it will not be picked up within the group of Tweets and your contribution will be invisible to all of us!

5 – To read the stream of #bestow tweets, click on the hashtag #bestow

Festival Here

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Participation, Performance

Festival Here

Between January and July 2012, the Young Women’s Estate-based Performance Project worked on a new piece with the drawing shed, Roisin Feeny (associate producer at The Albany) and two volunteers, Kelly and Sonita.

The new performance was presented on July 1st 2012 at ‘Festival Here‘ and used film, Twitter and physical theatre in the quad spaces and streets of Attlee Terrace, exploring how girls use ‘public’ spaces, how contested these spaces are (who owns them?) and how they can feel safer to use local spaces / streets, redefining and examining their rights to be more visible in their communities.

the drawing shed set up the Young Women’s Estate-based Performance Project in 2010.

The project is supported by partnership organisations, including Walthamstow School for Girls, Epping Forest’s Branching Out Project and it is funded by Art Council England, Hoe Street Community Fund and Walthamstow and Chingford Almshouse Charity.

Making dens with Epping Forest’s Branching Out Project

FESTIVAL HERE, THE DRIVE, JULY 1ST 2012

Twitter signage dialogue in Lille, 2012

by admin | Feb 7, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Participation, Performance, Sited

Twitter signage dialogue in Lille, 2012

In October 2012, Bobby Lloyd took a series of twitter signage dialogue screen-prints from the estates in Waltham Forest, East London to the city of Lille in northern France as part of the city’s annual Portes Ouverte des Ateliers d’Artistes and at the invitation of artist Phoebe Dingwall. Having exhibited the prints within the ‘gallery’ setting, Lloyd and Dingwall then took them to the streets, setting up further dialogues and new elements of surprise. Click here to watch a short film made by Dingwall in response to this intervention in the city where she lives and works.

This was the first in a series of outings for the Twitter signs, the second being to Portland Bird Observatory on the Isle of Portland in Dorset where they were installed in the lighthouse by Sally Labern in early November 2012.

SUNKEN GARDEN

by admin | Jan 16, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Participation, Sited

SUNKEN GARDEN

Trust for London have funded a community gardener for two years (2017-2018) to join local people living on The Drive and Attlee Terrace estates in garden design & regular planting workshops!

Held in the ‘sunken garden’ area in front of Attlee Terrace estate on Prospect Hill, gardeners of all ages are invited to develop their gardening skills, plant flowers, trees and herbs from all over the world, to create a warm & welcoming garden for all to enjoy – with local children helping to record & reduce local air pollution levels.

We are delighted that community gardener Stephen Mason has joined the drawing shed team to lead on the garden development over the course of the project. Please follow its development on our Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

IN/VISIBLE FIELDS

by admin | Jan 5, 2018 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Participation, Sited

IN/VISIBLE FIELDS
2018

In February 2018, Labern&Lloyd of the drawing shed invited residents of The Drive and Attlee Terrace housing estates (E17) to think with them about day dreaming, starting with the question, ‘do you day dream?’ The day dreaming conversations took place while walking on the estates, in people’s own homes, and on a wintry day trip to a Suffolk field (care of Top Boy Bakers’ partner E5 Bakehouse). Here the group of 14, mostly from The Sunken Garden Community Orchard gardening group and Top Boy Bakers’ baker/mentors, took part in composting, eating and walking together, all the while exploring the idea of day dreaming.

The artists have asked the questions: do you day dream differently when doing useful work, useless work or no work at all? Does language and culture impact on the way you day dream – Polish, Turkish, Tamil, English…..? The impact of early formative experiences, memory….. (Conversations were recorded by the artists alongside the taking of photographs and film footage.)

On Saturday March 17th, 5.30-8.30pm, In/Visible Fields will present a single Art Night of film projections and sound, alongside community conversations led by UCL / Wellcome Neuroscientist Micah Allen in St Mary’s Church from 7.00pm.

3 sites: the pram sheds on Attlee Terrace, The Sunken Garden on Prospect Hill and both onto and inside St Mary’s Church, Walthamstow which sits on the threshold between The Drive and Attlee Terrace housing estates and Walthamstow Village in E17.

The Day Dream Dictionary is a project by the writer Mary Paterson, developed in response to In/Visible Fields by the the drawing shed, an artists’ led organisation located on two housing estates in London, E17. The Day Dream Dictionary is part-investigation and part-intervention into the themes and experiences of In/Visible Fields. Here, the writer Mary Paterson responds to the ideas and practises raised by the project, as part of a growing piece of field research.

DOHA FOUND OBJECTS PROJECT, 2011

by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Participation, Publication / on-offline, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

DOHA FOUND OBJECTS PROJECT, 2011

SADAA / FRAMEWORK IN CONTEXT:

‘Sadaa Thakerat al Makan’ is an Artist-led Arts Project Proposal, delivered by Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd of the drawing shed following a site visit to Doha in January 2011. It begins with the Collection of the found objects taken from the demolition of existing buildings – homes, businesses and social spaces from the Musheireb, Qatar’s earliest suburb (1951) – to make way for a new sustainable architecture at the heart of Doha (2015). The most recent residents being the migrant workers who make up the majority of Qatar’s population, who have been moved out to develop the Musheireb. In response to this ‘In between Space’ that has been thrown up as the present communities move out, Labern+Lloyd began a dialogue about ‘How Newness Enters the World’ – to reflect this cultural regeneration – as future ‘culturally sensitive’ (” middle eastern”) community spaces in the city’s Musheireb are created almost in front of their eyes.

In recognition of the lack of residential status of the migrant communities, whose presence is imperative to the Qatari ruling class for the servicing and development of the richest state in the world, Labern+Lloyd wanted to work both with the uncertainness of identity that comes from the both the assumed birth right of the ruling elite and the lack of rights of the migrant population: without equal human rights, there is no recognition of the value of diversity within a nation however rich it may be, and no space for cultural identity to develop or differences to be celebrated or recognised. The proposal of an international residency programme alongside the development of a mobile artists’ studio came out of the visit; it is ideologically different in context and intent, to the externally perceived current Qatari project of collecting and curating ‘Contemporary Middle Eastern Art’ from across the region as a means of constructing and underpinning a national arab identity for Qatar.

In the context of the new Musheireb development in the city of Doha and complementing the newly launched Mathaf, The Islamic Art Museum, The Knowledge Enrichment Centre, the proposed Cultural Forum and so on, a rigorous piece of work took place in partnership with the drawing shed during the four day site visit in January, and begun a year a half ago as an idea proposed by Isaa Al Mohannadi. The summary of this proposal is for a project with a discrete identity that feeds into, interfaces with and would take its own part in underpinning the overall Musheireb Art Strategy for Doha.

The Artist-led Arts project sets out, at its heart, to foster and develop dialogue between the diverse communities of Doha in recognition of its migrant nature. It suggests that using the potency and inspiration of the found ‘objects’∗as a rich resource, the Project will support, reinterpret and create both a new ‘architecture’, metaphorically (and influence physically), and art works that are poetic, contemporary and questioning – where the porosity of territory, time, memory and identity are explored through art making and participation by the whole Doha ‘community’.

Where the rush of nostalgia and construct would flood in, artists could instead bring big questions to the most potent and the most (seemingly) trivial objects, poetic interpretations, decoding, ideological challenge, imaginative friction and new meanings, reflecting sentiment and not sentimentality. These would be ‘transmitted’, passed along if you like, into public spaces, with an intention of creating mostly temporary art works in public spaces, community spaces, and by doing this, keeping the conversation open …. this report was of course written before the Arab revolutions across the Middle East and in this sense the agenda for many has shifted dramatically, though perhaps not for Qatar as yet.

Read the project’s report: THE DRAWING SHED FOUND OBJECTS REPORT_PROPOSAL

AN ASSEMBLY OF OPINIONS

by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Participation, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

AN ASSEMBLY OF OPINIONS

the drawing shed’s PrintBike work “An Assembly of Opinions” was shown throughout August across the window of the People’s Supermarket WC1, as part of the Adhocracy Festival, August 6-7, 2011 @ Rich Mix, Bethnal Green, E1 (www.adhocracy.info/).

FOR THE CENTRAL WINDOW, Labern+Lloyd mono-printed images of food aid, barricades of white sacks, body bags, oil… as ‘one offs’ in repeat patterns on British newspapers carrying stories of world political crises …

The use of the mono print acts as a contradiction to the continual occurrence of media reporting on the ‘natural disaster’ of man made world famine, creating a work that is eerily poetic, ghostly even & draws the viewer in to read critical fragments of reportage juxtaposed with recurring world famine & so exposing/inviting the connections.

On July 28th, the drawing shed artists Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd took PrintBike to The Peoples Supermarket (www.thepeoplessupermarket.org/) to workshop on the street for eight hours. Inviting members, shoppers and passersby to make a mono-print of a staple food found in the shop, while at the same time drawing focused attention to the war and famine in Somalia, the day generated an incredible two hundred prints. Yellow paper and black ink were used as a visual connection with the supermarket’s own branding and the work linked to the shop’s appeal for donations for Somalia through the DEC East Africa Crisis Appeal.

THE THREE WINDOWS: “AN ASSEMBLY OF OPINIONS”

SOME[W]HERE

by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Gallery, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

SOME[W]HERE

https://somewhereresearch.wordpress.com

Rethinking, reworking, reusing, retelling, remaking

the drawing shed worked on a project Some[w]Here on the three housing estates Patmore, Savona and Carey Gardens in Nine Elms, London referred to locally as ‘the island’, the land-locked social housing area opposite the now infamous Battersea Power Station site, with the new American Embassy being built on its flank, to be surrounded by an insulated, ‘double skinned’ layer of privately owned flats for a new richer community.

Our project Some[w]Here explored through the metaphor of the Go Cart and the Soap Box, both migration and the fluctuating gifts of memory in relation to early street play (imagination, resilience, survivability) and the first days of work (alienation) for current residents who have come to live in the area from all over the world.

It was this critical friction of an artist-directed discourse between older estate residents, men and women of 68 – 98 years, that informed the content of the work: contemporary go cart inspired objects and mobile Soap Boxes, built on the streets with architect-makers George Williams and Nozomi Nakabayashi whilst live/performance artists Jordan McKenzie and Daniella Valz Gen made provocative interventions, and we as lead artists created quieter works as individuals triggered by this multi-layered approach and the ‘unfixed’ organic methodologies of the collaborative works we make.

Both this very accessible ‘public’ work and the disruption of the streets created the rupture in dominant ideas that flowed into these quieter individual responses. In this liminal space, and in the case of Nine Elms, a physical in-between space too of an echo chamber within which we found a ‘Point of Resonance’, creating performative and film-based works as individual artists – like the project’s poetic body piercing.

ARTIFICIAL SUNSHINE

by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Gallery, Installation / Films, Participation, Performance, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

ARTIFICIAL SUNSHINE

Following our summer residency in Bury with The Public Typing Pool, we were commissioned as part of Bury Light Night, October 10th 2014, to make a new research work, Artificial Sunshine. We flooded the street and exterior of Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Greater Manchester, with a ‘Smog of Black Light’ from 8 large UV floodlights located behind metal barricades (an aesthetic and safety choice). These mirrored the spectacle of the world’s first 8 electric streetlights that marked the beginning of Blackpool Illuminations in 1879 and now in 2014, purposefully uses the spectrum of light invisible to the human eye.

Wearing black ‘festival’ wristbands printed in UV ink, a cross-generational public shifted the barrier of the spectacle by activating the work itself in an extraordinary series of intimate encounters with both the artists and UV light, as the public themselves became the work. Each person was invited to wear a black wristband or presented with sheets of paper to hold into the black light, printed in UV ink with numerous short texts and only readable standing within the work itself, illuminating information often obscured or hidden from the public gaze – historical, political, scientific, imaginative, poetic.

For its first iteration in Bury we immersed ourselves in the ‘smog’ itself, with texts gathered from widely random threads of inter-web searches fed by daily news briefings and reports. These ranged from current scientific research on the health implications of light pollution and interruptions to circadian rhythms (our new city LED street lights impacting essential melatonin production, pernicious effects of light pollution on animals) to media or state blackouts on information about war or terrorism, international and domestic to scientific work exploring the universe with references to astronomical ‘perfect black bodies’, new stars, life in space….

Through the metaphor of Black Light, we investigated emergent collective and imaginative threads of resistance – acts of civil disobedience, scientific cooperation – so as to engage with how we hold agency or take responsibility for a new ‘civil society’. From UV exposure of human debris to the making visible of big ideas, we explored both individual and collective actions, experiments and explorations – such as the democratic naming of a new galaxy after the amateur stargazer who spotted it earlier this year, 10 billion light years away from Earth.

The artists – through the metaphor of BLACK LIGHT – investigated emergent collective and imaginative threads of resistance in forms of the social, the scientific and acts of civil disobedience in exploring how we hold agency or take responsibility for a new ‘civil society’.

THE PUBLIC TYPING POOL

by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Gallery, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Research & Proposals, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

THE PUBLIC TYPING POOL

Residency: TEXT FESTIVAL BURY, MAY 3 -AUGUST 9, 2014

As part of Text Festival 2014, the drawing shed, aka artists Lloyd+Labern, set up THE PUBLIC TYPING POOL: a selection of old manual typewriters in Bury Sculpture Centre for a residency spanning the Laurence Wiener exhibition; Over the months they invited the local Bury public to take part in a number of events, interventions and opportunities to slam the keys, copy those carbons, make new music, write a love letter, settle an old score, make overtures to a community, create the only page of a novel, type out an apology, make a flat plan sculpture, write a poem, type alone, write together.

Event: Twitter: #un_civil

Exploring the [un]civil in contemporary society, Lloyd+Labern worked with a group of artists and writers to construct a score for a performative text work using Social Media Twitter for Neighbour : Stranger, a collaborative live art writing project. Opening up a space in the commons of the ether, the work was a call and response that extended the enquiry beyond the physical space of the Gallery, where the collisions of experience, ideas and form could take place, and the poetry of this work hit the discomfort of the prosaic and bounced up into a mile high space. Screened in real time in Bury Sculpture Centre, exhibition visitors and artists were invited to join us in the ether, or on the typewriters in response to the emerging conversation.

The Exhibition:

the drawing shed artists Labern+Lloyd were in residence at intervals over the months of the Laurence Weiner exhibition, creating several new works in collaboration with the Bury public and through provocations with local artists. Inspired by scientist Dr Elodie Briefer’s research on the SkyLark’s song and its split-second nuanced changes in recognising both Strangers and Neighbours, the artists made a number of new visual works using the Typewriter and its Carbon Copy investigating the [un]civil in times of austerity and migration.

The Public Typing Pool – Call Out : for Typewriters:

“Iris Murdoch wrote on a Bijou Erika…..Allen Jack Kerouac an Underwood portable, William Burroughs a Remington or whatever he could get his hands on. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used an Erika Ten Portable, Françoise Sagan a 1950’s Smith Corona Portable, George Perec an Underwood 5, and Anne Sexton a Royal Quiet Deluxe…. Ginsberg loved an Underwood 5 or was it a Remington No5?

The Public Typing Pool will work with local groups and will be open to the public to enjoy throughout May, June, July and August! Do you have an old Olivetti Lettera 32 / 22, or a Remington or a majestic old Smith Corona ….all makes, sizes and shapes are welcome!

Bury Art Museum is making a Call Out for old manual Typewriters – if you have one you could donate to create the Public Typing Pool as part of this project to launch Bury Sculpture Centre. Your story about your typewriter can become part of the artwork…!”

Man walks into The Public Typing Pool at Text Festival in Sculpture Centre Bury; he speaks to no one and sits down at one of the manual typewriters donated by a public call out, and he writes for 40 minutes:

‘I Loved Her’

He then gets up and walks out leaving the typed sheet, the copy and the carbon. Beautiful.
Neighbour : Stranger

BLACK LIGHT AT TATE MODERN

by admin | Sep 29, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Gallery, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

BLACK LIGHT AT TATE MODERN

Artists Labern&Lloyd “trace the curve of the sun’s rays as they just graze the surface” (James Maxwell, Physicist)

What does society keep in the dark, and how can it be illuminated? Labern&Lloyd of the drawing shed, working at Tate Modern as The Light Collectors, collaborated with scientists hosted by The Institute of Physics in November 2015. Together they invited the public to engage in an afternoon of Black Light, with open conversation and research. Hundreds of people throughout the day took part in an ongoing dialogue with top physicists and astro biologists about the science and politics of light.

Framed by an installation drawn from the artists’ ongoing research into the hidden at this critical point in history, ultraviolet light revealed the disjuncture between extra-ordinary scientific explorations across the full spectrum of light and the endemic slow violence caused by human domestic light poverty across the world.

Labern&Lloyd chose the human labour and skill of hand cutting the paper stencils over a period of 12 hours, matching the year round daylight hours experienced daily by people living on the line of the equator; the prints are screened in the same UV used by the British Security Industry to track our movements, identity and money.

The Public Typing Pool©, with its manual typewriters fitted with invisible UV inked typewriter ribbons, welcomed the public to contribute to an ever growing installation of contemporary concerns, made from UV ink texts and drawings revealed through the use of hand held Black Light torches.

Part of the International Year of Light in collaboration with the Institute of Physics.

WITH THANKS

the drawing shed would like to thank the following people and organisations for their invaluable contributions to this project:

Dr Matthew Clark, Chemist and Education Manager & Richard Ashworth, Colour Experience Manager: Society of Dyers and Colourists

Dr Sergio Ioppolo & Daniel Weatherhill: Astrophysicists, Department of Physical Sciences, The Open University

Ali Hudson: Evolutionary Biology and astrophysics student, Edinburgh University

Toby Shannon: the Institute of Physics’ Coordinator of International Year of Light

Joseph Kopiel, Artist: stencil cutting and screen-printing

University of East London: ADI, Print Studio

Tate Modern: Public Programmes, Community

Brian Rothwell, typewriter ribbons: Inkjet Stores, Bury, Greater Manchester

Simon Foster-Ogg: provider of things interesting and light-related

IF…ISH

by admin | Sep 26, 2017 | Curatorial, Gallery, Participation, Sited

IF…ISH

“…and I see the universe with widened eyes and I see I see I see”
Between February and December 2013, the drawing shed developed an inter-generational project bringing together a diverse group of teenage girls and older people who reside in Hoe Street ward, Waltham Forest E17, through a series of interlinked creative and cultural activities.
IF…ISH New Experiences saw the girls collectively engaging in the research, planning, and participation of new cultural experiences. A Volunteer Agreement, signed by each participant and the drawing shed, marked the girls’ active participation and sustained commitment to the project and highlighted the projects’ model of co-production. Throughout the project the girls documented their experiences using a range of creative tools, including writing, drawing, photography and film, to develop content for a PROJECT BLOG. This engaged process opened up possibilities for an imaginative transmission of experiences and formed the basis of a series of communicative exchanges with culturally diverse older people within their own community, who, in turn, began to share extraordinary moments from their own lives.

Do you ever go to cultural events, exhibitions etc with friends or family?
“I don’t go to many. I don’t think I have been to one recently, however I would like to go to more but I don’t have much connection to the outside world so I might need help in finding some.”
Do you like trying new things that you haven’t done before?
“I really don’t know I’ve just been one of those girls who aren’t afraid of trying new things. I find it good for myself because it boosts my confidence a lot more.”
“Yes I like trying new things because it takes me out of my comfort zone and allows me to believe in myself more and gives me confidence in things which I think I could never have done before. Prime example would be Hackney WickED Festival. I would never have gone there but when I went there the people were warming and I got a real buzz out of it.”
New Experiences
For the first new experience, on a day trip to Walthamstow Marshes the girls worked with local filmmaker Paul Fletcher to explore documenting their experiences using their mobile phones. The girls’ footage was compiled to create two short films which were subsequently screened at Walthamstow International Film Festival 2013. Watch the films here: Film 1 / Film 2.
As the project progressed the new experiences the girls engaged in included outings to an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery and a special event at the Victoria and Albert Museum, experiencing design, film, performance, photography and spoken word in an evening of activities that explored the hidden voice of women and how they express this through their creativity. Joining other members of the community in Walthamstow Town Square the girls watched a performance of Puccini’s opera La Rondine as it was screened live from the Royal Opera House, while at Hackney WickED Arts Festival they explored the Open Studios and participated in arts workshops, making Photograms and learning how to do Finger Knitting – a skill that was subsequently shared with members of the community and family members. During Words Over Waltham Forest festival the girls worked with local writer Nichola Charalambou to explore new writing techniques and creative responses to respond to shared words, ideas and objects, and joined an evening of poetry and music at Walthamstow Assembly Hall for An Audience with Carol Ann Duffy. For the final group outing, the girls collectively decided on experiencing Jonzi D – Lyrikal Fearta: The Letter & Broken Lineage, a choreopoetry hip hop dance theatre production at Sadler’s Wells, with a guest performance from spoken word poet GREEdS.

What do you think about younger people engaging with older people?
“I think it’s a good idea because older people can teach the younger generation more about what they should know. It may be difficult at first because young kids tend to be shy around older people. The benefits could be that younger people learn more things from the older people and vice versa.”
“Positives: Share experiences, different lifestyles. Negatives: Youths are known as scary toward older people”
“Challenging as some old people may be scared to talk to the younger generation as there is a bad name put out for the younger generation.”
Inter-generational Exchange
The project integrated the girls’ introduction to high quality contemporary arts experiences with exploring and strengthening inter-generational relationships, opening up the possibility of meaningful engagement and increased understanding between older and younger local members of the community. Their reflections on their new experiences and creative content shared on the Blog served as a tool for instigating discussion and knowledge exchange in wide range of situations, structured and spontaneous, group-based and one-on-one.
At a community event at Greenleaf Baptist Church for International Women’s Day the girls participated in group skill-sharing with older Afro-Caribbean women and communicative exchange with members of the Waltham Forest Somali Women’s Association, in addition to numerous one-on-one interactions with diverse older individuals from the community. The girls also shared their experiences with a large number of older community members at the Walthamstow School For Girls annual community Christmas tea party.
During the outing to the Hayward Gallery, an interaction between one of the girls and an older male employee at the Hayward Gallery that began as initial exchange of responses to an artwork developed into sharing childhood memories and experiences of darkness and light in Sierra Leone and Ghana. Listen to a recording here: – Audio Player
00:0000:00Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

As a result of being involved in the IF…ISH New Experiences project, four teenage girls from the group also participated in the inter-generational Live Art writing project STRANGER : NEIGHBOUR. Working with the drawing shed, the national writing charity Arvon, and writers Jacob Sam-La Rose and Nichola Charalambou, the girls joined an intergenerational group for a 3-day residency at William Morris Gallery and Winns Gallery. Working individually and in groups, the residency enabled participants to experiment with writing on paper and old fashioned typewriters, and joined members of the community and a wider public in the digital ether for a TWITTER PERFORMANCE exploring the themes of home, stranger and neighbour. The participants worked with filmmaker Paul Fletcher who was commissioned to make a SHORT FILM in response to the project, and produced personal content for an anthology of the poems and writing created during the residency.

UNTITLED
I get out of bed and open my curtains
I look out the window,
I see the morning sun say good morning to me as
it casts its fresh yellow beams on my pale
colourless walls.
The playful breeze kisses my cheek as I look up to
see the birds flying high in the blue heavens.
I look through a different window,
I see a sheet of darkness,
Large flakes flutter to the ground like ashes after
flames, each with a different story to tell.
I stood there, viewing life through my frosted
window pane.

A HYBRID HOME
The birth of a new species, I think.
A hybrid culture.
A hybrid race.
How does one make peace with their predicament?
When ones mother was born
In a land where education is not free
Treatment is not free, water is not free
But it is her sanctuary, her escape, her home.
She remembers the vibrancy of spices, colours, clothes
Of long pastel sunsets set upon red barren land, waiting for dusk to appear
To break her fast with the ones she loves.
The birth of a new species, I think.
A hybrid culture.
A hybrid race.
How does one make peace with their predicament?
When one is born into a welfare state
In a land where education is free
Treatment is free, water is free
Yet it is their uncanny ability to create dreams
And allow those with tenacity to chase them down
With a flurry of excitement, a pinch of hope, a slice o courage
That fosters love in my heart for my land
This is my home too.
I find myself tasked with the heavy burden
Of having to reconcile the two halves
That make up the whole of my universe.
The birth of a new species, I think.
A hybrid culture.
A hybrid race.
How does one make peace with their predicament?
I do not know. Do you?

Funded by Well London and Arts Council England, the project was supported in Hoe Street by Walthamstow School for Girls and Paul Fletcher, E17 Films.

PRINTBIKE

by admin | Sep 26, 2017 | Curatorial, Drawing, print & text, Installation / Films, Mobile, Participation

PRINTBIKE

PrintBike – the mobile print workshop powered by its Brompton fold-up bicycle (and sponsored by Brompton!) has been working both on the estates in Waltham Forest and across London since Autumn 2010. Currently it resides at Arlington, the large homeless hostel in Camden where the drawing shed is in residency with its Irregular Bulletin project.
In 2012, PrintBike worked hard at a local primary school in E17 as part of a series of Saturday printmaking workshops with families, during the Silver Jubilee street part on the estates and as well as took part in the E17 Art Trail in September. 2011, Labern+Lloyd were invited to take PrintBike into a number of diverse settings, from a park in a deprived part of Waltham Forest to the heart of the City of London to the Peoples Supermarket in Lambs Conduit Street near Holborn (and to Adhocracy at the Rich Mix in Bethnal Green, August 6-7). These three pieces of work were visually linked by the astonishingly direct and equitable medium of mono-printing that engaged a vast array of people and led to the re-tiling of a duck house, the dressing of shop windows and fleeting words on a city square bench.

The PrintBike project’s conceptual intention in E17 has been to get individuals to physically move from one estate to the other so as to set up adult discourses using PrintBike. To this end, Studio Polpo designed a simple mobile printing-making trailer for the drawing shed, built in Waltham Forest and powered by an orange Brompton fold-up bicycle.
‘We have used screen/mono-printing as the main tools with which to trigger ongoing visual ‘conversations’ in contrast to the omni-present negative signage that loudly punctuates the estate. In agreement with the estate manger’s CEO – indeed, with whom we have discussed the project intentions in some detail – and with residents, we have slowly ‘taken over’ the over-blown signage to create different levels of discussion through which to explore and not exclude uncomfortable, potentially ‘critical’ voices within this temporary exchange. We anticipated that these voices might at times be discordant, and inevitably diverse, ranging from the descriptive to the poetic to the banal to the political, therefore moving back and forth between the external and the internal’.
‘We have involved a volunteer resident in two lots of training and we are building in more of this so that the residents themselves can start to co-lead creative workshops with participants linked to the signage project. Thus our developing competence as printmakers is beginning to be transmitted down to residents, a number of whom are now developing skills and realisable means of expressing their ideas, concerns and creativity’.
‘We are using print to encourage debate amongst residents across both estates, as well as for residents to explore experiences and language, and contribute to developing a sense of place and ownership in what has historically been a somewhat fragmented community with a documented low level of ‘well being’.

#STRANGERNEIGHBOUR

by admin | Sep 26, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Gallery, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Residencies & Commisions, the drawing shed

#STRANGERNEIGHBOUR

On Saturday 9th November 2013, 1.30 – 3pm, the drawing shed‘s Lloyd+Labern,#WOW festival micropoet @herbieherb and Jacob Sam-La Rose led a Twitter Performance, open to Arvon residency participants, community and ‘public’ in joining in; with the core group following a devised ‘SCORE’, we moved between exploring themes of home, stranger and neighbour, through discomfort of the unknown, and comfort of the known, and the merge of these two assumed places, ideas collided and tweets came together using the hashtag #StrangerNeighbour
It was an extraordinary event, where people came together at Winns Gallery Lloyd Park E17 to sit around the typing pool, whilst other typed and many tweeted amongst the noise of machine but no human voice, and in the silence that seemed to permeate the space despite, and the ether becoming a community space of the imagination.

STRANGER : NEIGHBOUR 2013-14

by admin | Sep 26, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Gallery, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Residencies & Commisions

STRANGER : NEIGHBOUR 2013-14

STRANGER : NEIGHBOUR– Artists Labern+Lloyd in Residence at Winns Gallery, a ‘scored’ live art writing Twitter Performance, a Typing Pool, two writers, a three day writing workshop at William Morris Gallery and an inter-generational and culturally-diverse group of 16 Waltham Forest residents! #WOW
In November 2013, visual Artists Bobby Lloyd and Sally Labern from the drawing shed, inspired by their ArtAngel Open100 project, Sky.l.Ark, set up an exhibition and project space in Winns Gallery E17 entitled: “Stranger: Neighbour & The Lost Print”. With an enthusiastically received public Typing Pool of fabulous old fashioned typewriters and showing a series of trade mark screened ‘Lost Prints’ on archive tissue alongside a build up of carbon copies, Labern+Lloyd made new work in the space around the theme of Stranger : Neighbour. This references the split second changes in the skylark’s song, unheard by human ear which delineates recognition of stranger and neighbour, of threat and territory, of warning and welcome.
Throughout October 2013, the artists and writers Jacob Sam-La Rose and Nichola Charalambou led public inter-generational writing workshops in LockUpNumber11, the drawing shed’s new project space on The Drive estate, London E17 (courtesy of Ascham Homes) and in The Mill community centre and Walthamstow School for Girls E17. With national literature partner ARVON, the artists and writers also led a three day intensive writing residency in early November where participants worked individually and in groups, using pen and the ubiquitous exercise book and moleskin!
On Saturday 9th November 2013, 1.30 – 3.00pm, the drawing shed‘s Lloyd+Labern, #WOW festival micropoet @herbieherb and Jacob Sam-La Rose, led a TWITTER PERFORMANCE using the hashtag #StrangerNeighbour. This was open to the writing residency participants, with the local community and ‘public’ joining in. With the core group following a devised ‘SCORE’, we moved between exploring themes of home, stranger and neighbour – through the discomfort of the unknown, the comfort of the known and the merging of these two assumed places. Ideas, memories and observations were shared and then collided, tweets at odds, even dissonant, then echoing one another and ending in a respectful, slowed down rhythm. It was an extraordinary event, where people came together at Winns Gallery Lloyd Park E17 to sit around the typing pool, whilst others typed and many tweeted amongst the noise of machine but no human voice. In the silence that seemed to permeate the space despite all the ‘sound’, the ether emerged into a community space of the imagination.
As an integral part of the project, the drawing shed also commissioned filmmaker Paul Fletcher from e17films and Walthamstow International Film Festival (WIFF) to make A SHORT FILM in response to ‘Stranger : Neighbour’ – which has led to a poetic response, using QWERTY from the typewriter keys and references to Hollis Frampton’s ‘Zom’s Lemma’ (1970).
Finally at Winns Gallery, the drawing shed introduced an ’emergency shelter’ as an intervention into the gallery space, a physical/ideological object they are using in all their project work, both on and off the housing estates, and in settings across London and beyond the UK.

IDEASFROMELSE[W]HERE

by admin | Sep 26, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Curatorial, Gallery, Installation / Films, Participation, Performance, Publication / on-offline, Residencies & Commisions, Sited

THE IRREGULAR BULLETIN

IdeasFromElse[W]here is an arts laboratory project led by the drawing shed lead artists Sally Labern and Bobby Lloyd and co-curated by artist Jordan McKenzie. From the project base in Winns Gallery, E17 (and throughout Lloyd Park), from June 16 – July 13 2014, artists and the public came together to collectively engage in the sharing and exploration of art-making, performance and creative ideas.

Informed by the likes of Allan Kaprow, multi-disciplinary artists and makers from across Waltham Forest, the UK and as far away as New York, joined us in opening up, challenging and extending the processes of devising, making and presenting art, with this ‘festival of ideas’ incorporating live art performance, film, live writing, dance, text, print, sculpture, sound, and new media. Provocations, invitations and responses from artists and public participation continually informed and adapted the project from the Winns project space as well as from the drawing shed‘s project space LockUpNumber11 on The Drive estate E17 and the ARTS LAB PROJECT BLOG – www.ideasfromelsewhere.wordpress.com – which continues to develop as a document for experimentation, dialogue, and evaluation of this arts lab and the process of ‘thinking through making’.

The IdeasFromElse[W]here project space at Winns Gallery was open to the public 11am – 5pm, Wednesday to Sunday, from June 18 to July 11 2014. On Mondays and Tuesdays during the project, resident artists used the project space to play, experiment and develop their own work. At these times the artists also had exclusive access to the William Morris Galleryarchive, library and research resources.

Over 50 artists and practitioners were involved in the arts lab, including

Katy Baird Nadia Berri Sarah Buckle Laura Dee Milnes Ben Faga Film Direction Simon Foster-Ogg Joseph Kopiel Sally Labern Bobby Lloyd Leah Lovett Jordan McKenzie Justine Pearsall RARA Annette Robinson Phil Sanger Single Action Group Site Space Steakhouse Live Daniella Valz Gen Carrieanne Vivianette Ed Woodham

In the run up to and duration of IdeasFromElse[W]here we invited Cara Courage to ask questions of and write critically on the process in the role of ‘Thinker in Residence’. This role ran in parallel with Cara’s research into the drawing shed‘s projects for her PhD studentship at University of Brighton Doctoral College, looking at grassroots urban arts interventions and the affect they have on people and place in an investigation of the phenomenon and theory of relocalism.

In addition to PrintBike, by popular demand the drawing shed brought back The Public Typing Pool, striking up letters and conversations in exchange with users of The Public Typing Pool concurrently installed alongside Laurence Weiner in the new Sculpture Centre in Bury, greater Manchester, as part of Text Festival.

Alongside the daily art-making and performance that developed organically and spontaneously throughout the month, programmed events included Film Direction’s screening of ‘A-Z of London: 26 Raw Films’, People Pavilions with the public joining RARA to build human pyramids in Lloyd Park, and performances from Single Action Group, Steakhouse Live, and Site Space

Over the course of the arts lab, artists contributed to zine boxes which were auctioned at ‘JUNK, A FUN[D]RAISER’ at Winns Gallery on Thursday 10th July. A fundraiser to support the drawing shed‘s future projects, the evening also included film and live art performance, bringing artists and the public together to celebrate the arts lab in its final few days.

CLAYOVEN COOKBOOK

by admin | Sep 19, 2017 | Participation, Publication / on-offline

CLAYOVEN COOKBOOK

ClayOven was born in 2010 as an idea in response to the residents of the YMCA – which itself sits to the South of the two estates – most residents are still unable to cook their own meals and many talk freely of this as separating them off from being able to be connect to that deeper cultural part of themselves which is signified by the making and sharing of food. Residents at the Y now volunteer in their excellent cafe helping to cook food for each other.

Launched at a community organised event, residents decided that they needed ClayOven to be mobile so it can remain safe and unattractive to bored teenagers, this extraordinary ‘gift’ to the community was made by many local families and has now been well and truly understood as valuable, creative and a powerful connector; it is used at every public community event where food is on the agenda!

It was also at the heart of the various ‘cook and eat’ sessions. The project invited families to share the cooking of a simple culturally-specific meal together in each other’s homes as another facet of this dialogue – we called this ‘Eat-Ins’ and they ran alongside ‘Eat-Outs’ where the community cooked and ate together in the open air. This continued to inform the cookbook that documented the building of the ClayOven and the ritual of food within the everyday, within evolving personal / community identities.

This whole project was inspired by Sister Corita whose community cafe ran alongside the print workshop that provided radical posters during the anti vietnam protests of the 1960’s.

The cookbook is an ongoing and developing resource, any ideas – please do share!

Everyone can add a recipe! Write yours to thedrawingshed@gmail.com sharing an image too.

Click on the image below to see the ClayOven cookbook:

CLAYOVEN

by admin | Sep 19, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Mobile, Participation

CLAYOVEN

The idea of ClayOven came to us when we were making the drawing shed in the cafe garden of the Forest YMCA with the help of our carpenter and residents – the ‘Y’ sits to the South of the two Hoe St estate communities – many of the Y’s residents aren’t able to cook their own meals due to the lack of kitchens and they expressed really strong feelings about how this denied them connection to a deeper cultural part of themselves, one that is signified by the making and sharing of food.

In fact, the mobile ClayOven came into being for the Big Lunch, June 2010. Launched at this community organised event on the two estates where residents decided that they needed it to bemobile so it can remain safe and unattractive to bored teenagers, this extraordinary ‘gift’ to the community was made by many local families and has now been well and truly understood as valuable, creative and a powerful connector. We still hope to build another small oven in the residents garden of the YMCA.

It has also been at the heart of the ‘cook and eat’ sessions where ‘…AskFreda’ and the drawing shed have invited families to share the cooking of a simple culturally-specific meal together in the open air, and will continue over the winter of 2011 / 12 in each other’s homes as another facet of the dialogues we set up across the estates. This community cooking which is led by local families, informs the community cookbook that documents the building of the ClayOven and the ritual of food within the everyday, within evolving personal / community identities.

A Print image for the home will also be created by the family cooks as the project develops, again led and inspired by residents as Art Activators for their own communities. This is the story then of the making of the ClayOven!

Since making ClayOven the drawing shed and ‘…AskFreda’ community group have had several community feasts all based around local cooking and in the open air. When ClayOven comes out it creates opportunities for local growers to donate vegetables, local cooks to share recipes and their cultural skills with others and an unthreatening casual space for friendships to be forged.

Stories of ClayOvens across the world also get shared and it becomes a space that fires the imagination; on July 1st 2012 ClayOven was used to make over 72 pizzas for a youth arts event, ‘Festival Here’, led by young people taking part in the Performance Project.

It has also been at the heart of the ‘cook and eat’ sessions where ‘…AskFreda’ and the drawing shed have invited families to share the cooking of a simple culturally-specific meal together in the open air, and will continue over the winter of 2011 / 12 in each other’s homes as another facet of the dialogues we set up across the estates. This community cooking which is led by local families, informs the community cookbook that documents the building of the ClayOven and the ritual of food within the everyday, within evolving personal / community identities.

A Print image for the home will also be created by the family cooks as the project develops, again led and inspired by residents as Art Activators for their own communities. This is the story then of the making of the ClayOven!

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…and now we are ready for The Big Lunch round the corner….!

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Stoking the fire…

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More neighbours join in to chop wood and watch.

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THE FIRST FIRING. ClayOven is drying out in readiness for the first cooking session.

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The first flame!

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Bobby laying the kindling for the first ClayOven firing!

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experienced ClayOven users join in, bringing gifts! …trying his handmade bread ‘paddle’ for size.

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…the internal sand mound has been scraped out now to make the ‘hollow’ of the oven …

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Hours later….

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Thick and tough work to meld onto the first layer..

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The mixture! Bobby lost her wedding ring in the mix and we had a community hunt on to retrieve it from the clay- took us hours, but we finally found it !

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Two weeks after the first layer, we set about adding the second outside layer to insulate the oven- this time using clay and sawdust

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the door created…. using a selection of Sally’s kitchen knives!

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A few days later we cut out the oven door….

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At last, back in the studio at the end of a great day!

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…some of The ClayOven builders!

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ClayOven stage one finally complete!

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The chimney being created using a cardboard tube and the final handfuls of clay are added

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back down again…

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and higher….

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viewing the scene from the flats above…..

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washing hands.

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shaking the clay mixture.

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taking in the sun.

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ClayOven really taking shape now.

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New ClayOven makers joining in as the atmosphere builds

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new people joining in….

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pounding more…..

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……more pounding….

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pounding the clay and sub-soil

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adding more sand to the mix

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more clay and straw

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working as a group to pack the sand dome with the clay mix

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back to main structure

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pink feet pounding

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more mixing of clay

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keeping the dome wet with newspaper

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the dome is ready!

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building with sand ….

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making the sand dome

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starting to create the clayoven structure

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adding subsoil and straw into the mix

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spreading the clay slip onto stone slabs and bricks that become the bottom of the oven

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mixing the clay donated by Waltham Forest College …

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starting to mix clay with water to make a ‘slip’ was child’s play…

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base secured ready for building, paving slabs in place

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TOP BOY BAKERS

by admin | Sep 19, 2017 | Communities of Imagination, Mobile, Participation, Sited

TOP BOY BAKERS

BAKING PROJECT LAUNCHING JANUARY 2017!

Started by boys living on the estates, our fabulous baking & mentoring project, now for boys aged 12-16, will be supported by adult men who will train as mentors & encourage boys from the estates to develop their baking skills, learn to sell what they produce and share their culinary creations with families, friends, neighbours & the wider community.

The project was launched in January 2017 with baking workshops led by expert East London bakers at Today Bread bakery and café on Hoe Street. Men and Boys – this project is for you!

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO SEE WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING TO DATE:

https://topboybakers.herokuapp.com

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MENTOR TRAINER WANTED

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Top Boy Bakers is an exciting and innovative baking and mentoring project for adult men and vulnerable boys aged 12-16, living in and around The Drive and Attlee Terrace estates in Walthamstow. The men and boys will participate in a programme of bread and pizza making workshops led by Alex Bettler – a talented local baker and founder of Today Bread in Walthamstow Central. The men will also be trained as mentors and provide on-going support to the boys to ensure they make the most of their new baking skills.

We would like to hear from men aged 25+ who have some baking skills or an enthusiasm to learn, and who are interested in becoming positive role models to the boys. We are also seeking a professional male trainer to deliver a series of mentoring training sessions.

Please see the brief for the Mentoring Trainer below. If you or someone you know is interested in delivering the training or becoming a mentor, please get in touch with Clare Moloney, Community Development Coordinator, thedrawingshed.community@gmail.com

top-boy-bakers_brief-for-mentoring-trainer

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR!!!

by admin | May 25, 2016 | Participation

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR!!!

PLEASE CLICK CommunityDevelopmentCoordinator.Job details.thedrawingshed.May25.2016 FOR FULL DETAILS!

Live on the Drive 2016

Now with NEW Blog! Documenting the exciting Live Art created by the LoT-D girls and more!

Social Art Practice, East London 2009 – 2012

Some[w]Here Now – Pump House Gallery 2015

Leena Chauhan

LiveElse[W]here

Live Else [W]Here LUNCH

Cultural Wellbeing 2013

Some[w]Here Research – 9 ELMS – Wandsworth

#BasicSeven7

City of London Festival, 2011

Contested Commons

Festival Here – July 1st, 2012

Duck House, London E11, 2011

PEOPLELIKEUS, A LIVE TWITTER PERFORMANCE, 2012

Festival Here

Twitter signage dialogue in Lille, 2012

SUNKEN GARDEN

IN/VISIBLE FIELDS 2018

DOHA FOUND OBJECTS PROJECT, 2011

AN ASSEMBLY OF OPINIONS

SOME[W]HERE

ARTIFICIAL SUNSHINE

THE PUBLIC TYPING POOL

BLACK LIGHT AT TATE MODERN

IF…ISH

PRINTBIKE

#STRANGERNEIGHBOUR

STRANGER : NEIGHBOUR 2013-14

THE IRREGULAR BULLETIN

CLAYOVEN COOKBOOK

CLAYOVEN

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Live on the Drive
2016

Social Art Practice, East London
2009 – 2012

Some[w]Here Now – Pump House Gallery
2015

IN/VISIBLE FIELDS
2018