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Moor Threads Moor Threads is a group of enthusiastic textile artists who meet regularly under the mentorship of Bobby Britness at her home studio in south Shropshire.
The creative process is promoted through dialogue, presentations and discussions. Critical assessment of each others work allows for the exchange of ideas and creates mutual trust.
Moor Threads has held a number of successful exhibitions in Shropshire and further a field. The exhibits are the work of individual artists each having their own style and contemporary way of working.
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QUBE GroupsQube Groups is an exhibition of the work produced by the two Qube groups Paintable and Life Drawing. Paintable have been working on abstraction projects and have called their work Abstraction et Cetera. For the last seven sessions, members Paintable, have been exploring abstraction. Much of the work in this part of the exhibition comes from an investigation of a particular landscape. The group began by spending one morning last November, a cold but sunny day, on Middleton Road, out on the other side of the A5. They walked, looked, sketched, made notes, took photographs and collected bits and pieces that were visually interesting. Over the following six sessions, they explored this information in several different ways, using a range of media and approaches. You can see some of the results here.
Their work has increased in painterliness, and their ability to be critical -in an analytical, not a judgemental, way - both of their own and each others’ work, has also greatly developed. Life Drawing have called their exhibition Drawing and painting from Life the exhibitors attend regualr life drawing sessions held at Qube on Thursday evenings. 
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Recycle & Mend – to TrendThis exhibition celebrates and shows work that was made for a fabulous fashion show that took place at the Memorial Hall Oswestry on Thursday 3rd December organised by Qube Arts in partnership with the Project Group. 200 hundred people came and watched an entertaining evening for all. It was no ordinary fashion show but a showcase of ideas of how you can creatively recycle and use materials to make clothing. Radio Shropshire’s Jim Hawkins was Master of Ceremonies for the parade of local design talent, with local young people’s digital media project Hyperlink producing VJing and Alcohol rehabilitation music project Changing Tracks providing the musical entertainment. The idea of recycling clothes to make new fashions sparked the imagination of many local groups. The Project Group, Walford and North Shropshire AS Textile department, Centre North West Oswestry Youth Project, Oswestry Education Centre, pupils of Llanfyllin High School all produced new work for the show.
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QUBE ARTS Archive Pathways PATHWAY: Footway, especially one merely beaten by feet, not specially constructed line along which person or thing moves; ~finder, explorer, trailblazer, pioneer. Bridge, way over, stepping stone. Route, direction, line, course, track. Way, route, itinerary; manner, wise; method, approach, procedure, process, modus operandi. Access, right of way, communications, doorway, door, gate; way through. (Extracts from Dictionary & Thesaurus.) The pathway: The process that takes you from the experience in the landscape to the transformation of that experience into paint on canvas, etching, Collagraph, drawing, etc. The changes that inevitably occur on the way lead to the deconstruction and reconstruction of the original idea. This describes the artist’s personal pathway towards an original work. As artists we are all interested in a response to landscape. Pathways will give us the opportunity to explore that response through discussion and collaboration in a creative environment. Oswestry is in a region of rural deprivation and isolation. The proposal is to facilitate the making of new ‘pathways’ through the visual creative arts - pathways not only in the sense of discovering new places to visit, new things to do, but also of making the landscape and the cultural life of Oswestry and its environs more accessible to its inhabitants, and of understanding isolation and rurality in a positive and creative light. There is an associated Pathways book accompanying the exhibition. You can download or order the book by visiting www.lulu.com To find out more about the Pathways workshops visit the Pathways Page.
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Pathways Workshop Outcomes On display is the work produced by the Pathways workshop participants during the studio sessions. There were two 2 day workshops. Judy Gough and Janie McLeod took a group out for half a day, giving the participants 2 hours to collect information and responses from the pathway they found. This was followed by preparatory exercises aimed at developing new visual ideas. The work led to creating a coherent set of canvasses which are displayed together as a block. Gill Crozier and Judith Harrison took a group out for a full day exploring various facets of forest and woodland, then open views across a valley and the Shropshire Plain. We came to the studio a week later and first concentrated on visualising a colour from the pathway that impacted on us the most. We then tried to mix the colour. Then paint it, laying another colour next to it if needed, to achieve the colour effect we were after. The process went on to exploring the drawings and photographs brought back and developing two canvasses. The work produced illustrates the amount of inspiration that can be derived from following a physical pathway. The creative pathway it can lead to has been proved to be rich and exciting. The work here is just a snapshot of what was achieved by groups of various ability and confidence.
From 19th October you will have the opportunity to see how Pathways has inspired the ARTedge artists Gill Crozier, Judith Harrison, Judy Gough and Janie McLeod. |
Ellesmere Sculpture Initiative 17th August - 3rd October This is the first year of the Ellesmere Sculpture Scholarships, which were founded to promote the creation and appreciation of sculpture suitable to be shown outdoors, and to provide a seasonal focus for the Ellesmere Sculpture Trail. The Ellesmere Sculpture Scholarships are awarded for a piece of sculpture suitable for temporary display on the Ellesmere Sculpture Trail throughout August and September. While these objects are on display in Ellesmere, the purpose of this show is to provide a more general showcase for their makers’ practices. The first three recipients work in a very divergent way. Trevor Clark began his sculptural career as a stone carver, specialising in letter cutting before becoming interested in sculpting in the round in a range of materials. Will Clifford’s practice embodies a mapping approach to a location’s historical and physical dimensions, providing spectators with new avenues of insight. Ruth Martindale’s work is the most process-based of the three, exploiting local materials and craft technologies to create temporary installations.
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| Peter Blake - Alphabet A Hayward Touring exhibition, Alphabet, by Peter Blake comes to Qube as part of an extensive UK tour. Alphabet is a set of bold and colourful silkscreen prints, one for each letter of the alphabet, produced by the artist in 1991. Peter Blake emerged in the 1960s as one of the leading British Pop Artists; he is most famous, perhaps, for his cover design of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album in 1967. Alphabet characterises his method of working, incorporating ‘found’ imagery from postcards, magazines and popular ephemera. From the familiar Z for Zebra, to the esoteric P for Pachyderm and iconic K for King (Elvis Presley), these screen prints reflect his humour, nostalgia and eclecticism. Born in 1932 in Dartford, Kent, Blake studied at the Royal College (1953-56) where he was a contemporary and friend of David Hockney. There he began to explore themes such as circus performers, film stars and the emblematic motifs of children’s games, badges and comics. During this time he also experimented with abstract planes of colour, juxtaposed with images of musicians, actors and models, including rock ‘n’ roll icons such as Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers. In 1969 Peter Blake moved to the West Country and six years later co-founded the Brotherhood of Ruralists. Since then he has produced more traditional paintings and watercolours alongside his Pop collages and constructions. He was elected Member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1981 and was awarded a CBE in 1983. In the same year, a major retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery, London was one of the most successful exhibitions ever held there for a living artist. He is now an active Royal Academician, and was the chief curator of the RA’s 2001 Summer Exhibition. He lives and works in London.
The Peter Blake exhibition in boxes.
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Peter Blake prints being put up....
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Millicent Kaye Memorial Millicent Kaye Memorial children's art competition organised be the Oswestry Rotary Club. The exhibition theme was the jungle.
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Wendy Riddick - A Natural Selection
An Exhibition of Textiles, Drawing and Painting inspired from the Natural World by Wendy Riddick of Shrewsbury. Sometimes a moment a thought or concept can inspire a body of work. When using natural silk it can be the very fibre which can inform the direction the composition takes. I try to be sympathetic to the mood, contours and makeup of the natural construction. This can result in a series of accidents and chance mutations. Once the piece has begun it takes on its own identity as my personal reflection and spiritual response to the subject and materials evolves. One piece often leads me to another or concludes a thought process. This is A Natural Selection.
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Jason Hicklin:
Where the sea meets the shore A glimps at the artistic life of master etcher Jason Hicklin. Two bodies of work inspired by visits to Donegal and the Isle of Islay. Etchings: Islay
Etchings: Donegal
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All work is shown with by kind permission of The Beardsmore Gallery, London NW5 |
ActiveMedia:
Illustrated Books An initiative of Thomas Adams School’s Media Arts Programme and delivered in partnership with Qube Arts, this project has established new opportunities for young people to develop a series of illustrated books that reflect their interests, concerns and creativity. The exhibition presents the artwork for the books: Five groups of young people have worked with the support of lead artists, Spencer Whalen and Martin Smith, and with creative writer Kerry Davies, to produced the five distinctive books. The groups have determined the themes, generated the ideas, created original writing and artworks, and finally, helped to design the layout and construction of the books.
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Tanya Raabe Who’S WhO is a collection of contemporary portraits by Artist Tanya Raabe. The portraits challenge the notion of portraiture using disability aesthetics and visual language. The Oil paintings are of established and emerging local disabled artists, who have and continue to pioneer disability arts and culture. Each artist has been chosen because of their influence in shaping disability art as an arts movement in its own right. Portraits included: pioneers: performer, writer and singer Julie McNamara, actor, performer and writer Mat Fraser and painter and disability arts writer Colin Hambrook. Portraits of Emerging artists; local artists in the collection, David King, from Bishops castle, Joy Tudor from Shrewsbury and Zoe Partington-Sollinger From cloebury Mortimer. Tanya Raabe explains her work in more detail: ‘I have created a portrait of each artist as an oil painting exploring my personal relationship with them, the art work illustrates the position of each artist in a challenging society of perfection, beauty, and normality.’
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12th January- 24th January 2009 Qube Groups An inspiring show of work produced by the art groups that are run by Qube in the last 6 months. Paintable is an arts and health painting group who meet at Qube on a Monday morning. They have been developing their painting and drawing skills rapidly over the last few months and recently ventured into abstraction. The results have been truly remarkable embracing a range of materials new to the group. They have been challenged with the introduction of painting still lifes with acrylic and more recently oil pastels. Tutored by Judy Gough the results are spectacular. Life Drawing began at Qube in July every Thursday night and has proved very popular with local artists and students alike. Models are organised but everyone brings their own equipment and the sessions are run by the group democratically. The drawings illustrate the range of sittings the models are asked to perform. Sitting times range from 1 minute to 50 minutes with some of the drawings created from a moving pose. The idea of developing skills in wildlife photography stemmed from comments made during Qube’s basic photography courses and long standing relationship with professional wildlife photographer Mark Sisson. During 2008 the group went on two wildlife photography trips. Most of the photographs come from the first trip to a bird of prey centre when the weather was fine and most of the birds behaved themselves – not to say the photography wasn’t challenging but everyone came away with some great photographs as you can see.
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17th Nov- 24th December 2008 Christmas Crafts Qube's annual Christmas Crafts exhibition featuring 14 local artists and makers opened on Friday 14th November and will run until December 24th. The artists on show are Kevin Gibson, Jan Singleton, Alistair Tucker, Peter Edwards, Lois Hopwood, Hazel Bijok, Louisa Humphries, Ellen Powell, Sally Coxhead, Jean Jenkins, Filly Feltit, Jim Sadler, Jane Croft and Pam Morris.
Come and visit Qube and sample some local cultural delights, from the brooding landscapes from Alistair Tucker to the crafted and carved ceramics of Jean Jenkins or the Quirky clocks made by Kevin Gibbons to the gorgeous glass panels produced by Jan Singleton, just take your pick. If your taste is more functional there is quality hand knitwear, jewellery and oak woodcraft to sample. Everything is for sale and has been created by local artists. |
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3rd-8th Nov 2008 Reflections
Pictures taken during the opening night on November 3rd.
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 Rach by Peter Edwards |
Until 8th November at the Qube Gallery is a wonderful exhibition of self partraits created by children at Morda School under the expert guidance of the renown locally based artist Peter Edwards.