Imperfect workshops for the creatively curious
Community Garden is a collaborative art project that cultivates creativity, confidence and connection.
Community Garden Art Project
The Community Garden Art Project is my latest way to remind people that everyone is born creative - and reconnect them with all the benefits that come with making something together.
It’s a glorious blend of drawing and printing where I teach how to embrace chance and imperfection and focus on process.
Designed to foster good mental health, this project starts in nature, reconnects you with your innate creativity and builds connections with other people.
I’ve run it a few times now in different ways, and I feel like it’s really hitting its stride.
Each workshop starts with some no-stress, loose and gestural, feel-good drawing.
You don't need to be 'good at drawing.' Collectively everyone's imperfections are what make each collaboration beautiful.
From these drawings, we make cut paper stencils, which are printed onto a length of fabric to create a unique design.
After we've made the fabric together, we cut it into pieces. You get your own piece to take home, to use to make something. A cushion, a lampshade, a bag, a few patches on your favourite jeans? Or you could stretch and frame it to put on the wall.
Maybe you'll do some slow-stitching on it too, like the Community garden group from the NSW Embroiderers Guild. Whatever you like really.
My Community Garden Art project workshops gently ease you back into a more forgiving mindset, allow to you to experience flow and to create something uniquely yours, made with your own hands.
There are two workshops coming up this winter in NSW.
Winter workshops
Blue Mountains Residential workshop
The first one is a collaboration with Forage Workshops - a four-day residential retreat in the Blue Mountains, at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. After we’ve made and cut up our Community Garden fabric, you will get your own piece to slow-stitch with Lisa Mattock of Forage. You’ll also get to visit my studio in Blackheath.
The workshop includes a kit of all the materials you'll need, a total of four workshop days, accommodation, breakfast, lunch, morning tea, afteroon tea, and a welcome dinner. June 18 - 21 is sold out, but there’s a handful of spots left for June 12 -15.
Enmore workshop
This one is for locals of the People's Republic of the Inner West, at Tiliqua Tiliqua Gallery in Enmore. It starts with a drawing workshop on Sunday June 23, where you will make a simple drawing of a plant from your garden or neighbourhood.
I'll be in residence for five days making the fabric. Workshoppers will be able to book in a time to come and be my assistant in the printing process.
When the fabric is made you'll get to attend the cutting of the cloth, where you will receive your own piece of the Community Garden fabric.
Everyone is born creative, and every day is an opportunity to perform a new creative act.
- The Imperfect Manifesto -