We were delighted to receive a grant from the Roger Stott Community Grant Scheme, Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust to run 4 workshops for children and young people aged 11 to 20 years living in Gargrave and Malhamdale. The workshops were delivered by professional creatives, printmaker Brian Hindmarch, artist Carolyn Hird-Rogers and ceramist Allison Wiffen. The workshops ran in the autumn of 2021.
Printmaking Workshop with Brian Hindmarch
The theme of the workshop was appropriately ‘My Place’, so cherished mementoes and nature finds were brought along to provide inspiration. All the participants took home inspiration, a sense of achievement and their own brilliant works of art.
Book-Making Workshop with Carolyn Hird-Rogers
The theme of the workshop was ‘My favourite place’. The children used ordnance survey maps of the local area to find their favourite place and then used sections of the map to create unique handmade books. The young artists cut out a cover for the journal from the map featuring their special place or route. Skipton Castle, my walk from home to school, a favourite stroll along the canal were some of the ideas chosen. Using a large needle and embroidery thread the children then stitched a star or a line where they had visited or walked. As you can see these formed the covers of the memory book.
Ceramics with Allison Wiffen
The theme for these workshops was creatures: real or imaginary. Delightful creatures emerged from pinch pots. Penguins, snails, hens and tortoises and other creatures were modelled from the clay. As ceramics need to go through at least three ‘firings’ before a final product is achieved, Allison ran two workshops three weeks apart. The first workshop involved making the creature from clay using a pinch pot technique and the second to decorate the creature after it had its first bisque firing and then everything had to be dipped in glaze and fired again. This gave the children the opportunity to see all the processes from start to finish.
The Artists…
Carolyn Hird-Rogers BA(Hons)PGCE
Carolyn has been an artist and designer-maker since completing her degree in ceramics from Cardiff Art College. Following many years as a ceramic designer specialising in porcelain jewellery and domestic ware, Carolyn returned to college to study graphic design and a post graduate certificate of education.
A fascination for the linear qualities of the landscape has been a primary inspiration for all of Carolyn’s work, both porcelain and print. Current projects involve working with mixed media collage, using textured papers created with foils recycled from the print industry overlaid with inks and gesso, sgraffito and drawn lines, and also creating landscapes of the Yorkshire Dales to frame, send as cards and as covers for handstitched books.
Allison Wiffen
Brought up in the North East, Allison first fell in love with clay at the age of 14, having found more traditional art forms such as painting and drawing intimidating. The expressive nature of clay and the sheer range of possibilities it offered delighted her. Having gone on to study languages at Leeds University she lived abroad and then had a career in Advertising in London before giving it all up to put together a portfolio of work and apply to go to art college.
She did a BA Hons in Visual Arts specialising in ceramics at Camberwell College of Art where she took first class honours. She then set up a studio in south east London in 2003 making mainly ceramic jewellery incorporating her own photographic images. She produced bespoke ranges for many museum shops throughout the land from The British Museum to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, The House of Lords, and Leeds Museum.
Six years ago she left London to come back up north and moved to Gargrave. She now makes an eclectic mix of graphic and colourful work including: jewellery, pots and wall pieces. She works on the wheel and she also hand builds. She still loves playing with clay, a material with so many possibilities that a single lifetime just isn’t long enough to explore them all.
Visit my website to see more http://www.awceramics.co.uk
Brian Hindmarch
Artist, printmaker, designer and teacher, Brian has a studio in Ilkley and was a lecturer in Graphic Design at Bradford College, School of Art, for over 20 years, from 1992-2013. He applies a wide range of graphic design techniques and processes, including photography, etching, letterpress, lithography, screen-print and relief print, and he has a particular interest in interpreting natural history, environment and landscape in his work, which includes original mixed media artwork and limited-edition prints. He has travelled widely for inspiration, including the Hebrides, Ireland, Devon, and across Yorkshire.
“I am drawn to places that give exhilaration, contemplation and reflection. Places to think, reflect and affirm beauty within the natural world. Through my career as a lecturer in Art and Design, I have become something of a ‘journeyman’ stemming from my apprenticeship, and employment as a commercial artist and teaching in London, Wales, Nottingham, Birmingham, Ireland and now Yorkshire.
I am drawn to edge lands, the coast, waysides, watery places and being ‘on the spot’. The mystery of the commonplace, between the real and fantasy. This relates to understanding of the seasons, of dawn and dusk, but also the aesthetic pleasure of solitude, silence, darkness and the sublime. Transient effect, fleeting changes, the mood, the light and the ceaseless flow of a river or stream. I can combine both drawing and transferring images to plates in-situ. The rate and speed of drawing to react to that moment or satisfy my curiosity has sometimes left my work to be untidy, vague, ambiguous and incomplete. This irregular disorder, however, relates to my form and pattern of thoughts. I am concerned with elements of time, weather, actions of wind, wave and movement, geological structure, growth and form. My use of symbols and visual metaphors relate to emotional and expressive responses. The process of etching and printing enables me to record and explore in a well-defined application with techniques that are appropriate to my visual language.”
Gargrave Art Exhibition 