Thursday 4 August 2011

Craft Council Craft Rally at West Dean Festival



The fourth Craft Rally will take place on Saturday 27 August, 11am – 6pm, during the West Dean Festival – a new four-day festival set in the stunning grounds of West Dean, Chichester.

Craft Rally is an inclusive, dynamic and inspirational opportunity for makers to exchange information and ideas around contemporary craft practice. Craft Rally at the West Dean Festival will focus on collaboration and participants will create new work through making, writing, discussion, food and games. Workshops will include The Salon of Talking Flowers and In it Together.

The makers and artists leading the Craft Rally will draw on the rich Surrealist history of West Dean and its founder Edward James and use the Surrealist principal of ‘unlocking’ ideas through games and play. Workshops will be run in an informal way and focus on experimentation, research, and risk, allowing makers the opportunity to re-think their approach to studio practice and explore the nature of collaboration.

The following workshops will run at Craft Rally and participants can work on one of all three of the projects;

• Gillian Blease is an illustrator and David Littler is an artist, curator and DJ. Inspired by West Dean’s rich links to the Surrealist movement, a love of seasonal and organic produce and the idea of making, sharing and eating together they will create a Surrealist dinner party – The Salon of Talking Flowers.

• Emily Haworth-Booth is a designer, printer and illustrator and her sister Alice Haworth-Booth is a writer. They are both activists and they will take the topic of rally to create a unified maker voice by creating a giant embroidered banner piece called In it Together that will form the heart of a procession at the rally.

• Medium is a creative studio based in Stockholm who design mainly for public spaces. They will ask makers to build tables, chairs and stools responding to written texts from designers, philosophers and architects which will act as the staging for the Salon of Talking Flowers.

Craft Rally is a strand of Crafts Council Collective, a new programme of continuing professional development for makers. The West Dean Craft Rally is being delivered by the Crafts Council and West Dean College.

Tickets cost £40 (includes entry to the West Dean Festival for the day) or £125 (includes entry to West Dean Festival for four days and camping). A maximum of 50 places are available. To book online click here.






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