Outside:Inside week 2

Thanks to everyone who came to Outside:Inside Festival last weekend, we’ve been busy getting things ready for this weekend (full details can be found on the festival website) and we will be down at The Oracle Riverside on Saturday with artist Vicky Vergou.

Yesterday, we were at Rivermead, celebrating the 20th birthay of the Childrens Information Centre (or Family Resource UK as they are now known)

That’s a photo at the beginning, we were mobbed by creative minds and then opportunities to take photos slipped by. The resources were pitiful at the end but the creations leaving the building were ingenious.

Next week, we are installing a new exhibition as part of the Outside:Inside Festival and Open for Art.

Verity, all rights reserved Tim Redgrove

Tim Redgrove was brought up in Reading, UK and has worked in photography for many years. From 1995 to 2003 he worked as a sports photographer at Reading Football Club producing photographic work for 2 books about the club as well as calendars and publicity work. During this time Tim also worked as sports photographer for both the Reading Chronicle and Reading Post. He then spent several years photographing the Tour de France including Lance Armstrong’s record breaking victories in 2004 and 2005 and in 2008 he photographed the victorious Great Britain track cyclists including Sir Chris Hoy and Victoria Pendleton prior to the Bejing Olympics.

His work has appeared in the The Times, The Guardian and The Independent newspapers as well as publications in the UK and Europe. His first ever photographic work was as a publicity photographer for a theatre company he used to run in London. Tim co-founded the company with Dominic Cooke (now Artisitc Director at the Royal Court) and Ruth Jones (writer and star of BBC’s Gavin and Stacey).

For the last 3 summers Tim has produced a photographic record of the fans visiting the Reading Music festival, documenting the many varied visitors to Reading’s landmark festival.
http://www.timredgrove.com/

Watch this space for more info on local talent!

A Big Thank You

Thank you everyone who came to help and who came to take part last week for the Town Centre Day – it was a very warm day and thanks especially to the hardy souls who helped lug the art materials from one end of Broad Street to the other and then at the end of the day, back again. So here’s the roll call of thanks: Porridge Lady (aka Anna Batchelor), Ingrid Jensen, Martin Stubbington, Shehnoor Ahmed (RISC), Tara Scott, Chris (New Directions), Tim Scott, Lucy Griffin (Reading Museum), Alabama Hall, Louie Hall, Ivy Schneiderman, Isla Reynolds, Maxine Doyle, Ahmed (The Oakford), Pat Lewis, Jasmine Lewis, Conrad Bullow-Weeks and Gillian Stevens.

Without you we wouldn’t have been able to make:

Animal Masks

paper boats

drawn our way down Broad Street

made cardboard castles, taught some people to knit, recycled newspapers into bags and made paper bag puppets.

So once again thank you all

At the end of the day we felt a little like The White Rabbit and The Mad Hatter

in need of a quiet sit down and a cup of tea.

Caversham Art Trail

bowl, Peter Quarmby

Last weekend I managed to squeeze in a short visit to one of the Caversham Arts Trail venues. This time of year always feels like a rush of studio trails, end of year shows, performances etc and almost every day is taken up by visiting a show. I am going to go back this weekend (the last weekend) to squeeze in as much as possible.

The Caversham Arts Trail is also taking part in the Open for Art project with works by some of the artists currently on show in Station Hill venue.

Lots of Cupcakes, Lauren Denney

More information, contact info and maps on the trail can be found here

Venue 1, Caversham Arts Trail

The jelly team will also be at Christchurch Meadows this Saturday for the 21st Children’s Festival, more info can be found here, we will be there from 11am-4pm so come along and say hi.

The Summer is here and it’s raining…

We had so much sunshine lately when we have been working in schools and today as nearly all the schools in the area have finally broken up it has been raining almost all day.

We are getting ready for the Summer Workshop Programme and also starting to slowly put things in our online shop, just in case you can’t make it to see us.

Rosie Flo's Holiday

You can view more of the Rosie Flo’s and Johnny Joe’s books here.

Johnny Joe's Time Travel

They are drawing books with a difference, all you need to do is add the heads, arms and legs!

Rosie Flo's example page

It’s slow work, updating the little shop as we are working with independent designers and makers and taking our time to make sure we find the most lovely things.

soapylove soapsicles

Like these delicious soapsicles…mmmmmm

psst, sorry you can’t actually eat them…

Noah’s Ark

The summer term is our busiest term of working outside on great projects. We have been spending the last 3 weeks working with one school on a large scale arts project involving all of the curriculum and resulting in a performance – you can read more about the project from one of the jelly team here

Noah's Ark

Noah's Ark 2

The pictures don’t even begin to convey the scale but the whole school took part, 19 sculptures created and the end finale was a dramatic performance of sound, acting and spoken word with a sculpture trail (permanent) thrown in.

This coming week is a bit of a wind down week for us, the term time activities end this week and the the week beginning 27 July all the holiday programme starts so next week we are working with a few individual clients and shifting our heads into summer workshop programme node.

Sarah, one of our team is leaving in the Autumn to continue studying in London and we will miss her (but secretly we hope she will eventaully return!)

Make sure you all have a good summer, if you’re stuck for things to do, you can always join us in jelly or we will soon be stocking online the wonderful Rosie Flo drawing books.

A quick update

So many things have happened since the last update including viewing four buildings, three for temporary homes and one for a long-term home, plus working on our big project for the end of the month but firstly we’ll update you on our long-term home, the studios.

The future studios building is the Old British School on Southampton Street, “At a meeting held at the house of Mr Letchworth to consider a plan submitted by Mr Lancaster for the education of poor children held this 27th August 1809. Resolved that such a school be established and that the same be a free school.” Reading Lancastrian School Minute Book 1809.

The Grade 2 Listed Old British School on Southampton Street was built in 1810. It is the only surviving building in the United Kingdom of its type from the period and in the Winter of 2000/2001 a competition run by the BBC decided that it is one of the most important buildings in the country.

jelly has been fortunate enough to be working with an individual who is putting time and care into returning the building to its former glory. Eventually it will be part of a larger residential development but the main studios will have their own street facing entrance with small network/ exhibition space plus space for about 10 artists in the main studio. The brickwork has been re-pointed, the roof replaced and a major clear up of the interior which had been left to home the pigeons for many years has been undertaken.

Here are some glorious interior shots:

entrance to studios/ network/ exhibition space

sneak preview of main studio area

We could bore you with photos all day, and we are currently fighting the urge to post more and more of this lovely space. This is a long drawn out job of painstaking, built by hand and last week when we visited individual bricks were being marked that needed extra care.

beautiful brickwork

The front aspect of the building shows an upper floor, that will be a flat available for rent (not from jelly) – how fantastic to live there. We used their stairs to take this image looking down into the main studio area.

View from the upper floor

The studios will be home for 15 years, we will keep you updated here on where we are at with them (and maybe even post some more photos!).

We are also in negotiations on another temporary space in Reading to be used for exhibitions – the property is currently victim of the economic climate and is in administration but thanks to the jelly’s 16 year love affair with using short term properties and the recent Government public announcement for supporting artists in empty shops we are working towards something fantastic. It will be run like Gallery 10 and will be an exhibition space for many groups and artists in the area. It is 7,00sq ft of space right in the middle of town.

sneaky peek, Floor 2, jelly2 space

The other two buildings are only for 2 weeks and will be used as part of
Changing Reading for the Day: Town Centre Day Friday 29 May 11am – 4pm; Exhibition from 4-5.30pm.

jelly, with the help of Reading artists, will be helping anyone and everyone who wants to become an Artist for the day.

To celebrate 20 years of the Children’s Festival jelly wants to create a town full of artists and artists in the making for the day – it is a hugely ambitious project, with many artists already signed up to help. jelly is providing materials, the expertise and anyone will have the opportunity to be creative. The event is free and will take place in Town Hall Square ~ we are looking to recreate the Freeze exhibition of 1988 and create our own stars of the future, culminating in a mass art exhibition and changing the face of Reading for the day.

The exhibition of works created on the day will take place using the railings around Town Hall Square and the John Soane monument. Alongside this there will be window exhibitions of works by the artists helping us. The works will be housed in 27/28 Market Place (opposite the Post Office) and 173 Friar Street (in Town Hall Square) from Friday 22 May until Friday 5 June inc. All this has been made possible by the generous help and support of Reading artists, Reading people and businesses, including Sainsbury’s, Haslams, Fryer Holt.

Come along and join us on the day and help us Change the face of Reading.

Last day in the workshop

Today was the last day in the workshop before the Easter break – apologies in advance if you try to phone us anytime after today and before Monday. We are fortunate to have a town centre space, given to us by Reading Borough Council in partnership but it also means we have the hours of civil servants.

everything starts with drawing and paper

This is a novelty for us after years of being key holders with doors onto streets and responsibilities for the building and security. We used to just be closed three days of the year, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and Easter Sunday. Now we get to embrace a longer break which probably seems lovely from the outside but sometimes we forget too and want to go to work……….. yep, we love work.

Soon we will be adding a page here which will let you know a little bit more about the jelly team, underneath we are all quite shy about our own work although we find it easy to talk about other artists, other makers, young artists coming to workshops and encouraging them. Did you even know that most of the team are practising and exhibiting artists themselves? You may be amazed by what we all do.

Here is another quick snap from the beginning of the session today – making baby animals – somehow I always forget that end shot when they are done, I must try harder to remember.

the beginnings of a fantastical creature

Miniature Art Gardens

art gardens in the making

Yesterday Sarah and I ran the Miniature Art Gardens workshop together with 10 participants and two lovely mums who were there too. Above are pictures of the pieces halfway through the two hours session and they just became more and more ambitious.

One of the gardens left the workshop with me as I was taking one of the participants home, it was a challenge carrying the large piece through town but it made people smile.

We are doing more garden/ spring based workshops this week, garden sculptures today from 10.30-12.30 and papier mache baby animals tomorrow – full details here

extra nice things from the morning

This morning after a meeting with one of the jelly Board I went back to work and saw all the little people hard at work – they really are little people, from 18 months upwards and they were making papier mache bunnies.

When jelly started, the little people weren’t one of our target audience but now those first little people are now assistants at jelly, some have art school ambitions and now the next generation are here and working away making their bunnies.

Only next week left for the toddlers before the Easter break but all workshop details can be found here.

they made me flowers

Toddlers will start again on Monday 20th April.

knitting vegetables

The Knitted Vegetable Workshop by Felix at jelly was a resounding success. Taking the idea of knitted vegetables to new levels, participants got to play with Felix’s gardening & cookery books and raid her vegetable-shades yarnpile for inspiration and materials. 1 pomegranate, 1 giant toadstool, 1 yellow pepper, 1 potato and 1 cucumber were cast on at the workshop and updates on their progress will be posted intermittently on Felix’s blog at The Domestic Soundscape

The idea behind the workshop was to pass on the maths, knowledge and personal experience of vegetable knitting gathered by Felix in the course of her knitting career. She is very enthusiastic about recreating ordinary objects in yarn and hopes that the principles of vegetable knitting will catch on and result in a bumper crop of knitted vegetables in 2008/9! Everyone at the workshop agreed that there isn’t enough sharing of basic knitting maths and went away with at least the numbers required to make a spherical or ovoid shape on double pointed needles and some tips on where to look for ideas.

Pumpkin knitted by Barbara, cake to be eaten by everybody else

Barbara’s knitted pumpkin (pictured here) which was mostly knit during the Jelly Knit Nights, imbued the evening with a festive feeling, and the ample cups of tea and gingery cake kept everyone’s spirits up in the face of complicated knitting maths!

Further veggie links
– toadstool reports here
– Felix’s knitted potato