The team of coordinators of the Artcycling project met in Copenhagen on 8-9^th June to talk about the activities already done in each of the partners’ countries and also to discuss and agree on the tasks to be done in the coming months.

We had a great opportunity to know about the excellent work done so far by the four organizations, mainlyabout the meetings with craftspeople and the local art labs.

The next months are going to be very exciting, as we are starting with the Artcycling creation. National and international showrooms, training to develop skills for earn a living with art, blogs telling the experience in all the countries, ePortfolios, etc. We will keep you updated about everything! [Read more…]

Pacificstream had several meetings in different places, one of them being at Tracy, one of  our artists’ lovely home which is made out of driftwood and other up cycled and eco building materials..She even has a driftwood kitchen!!!

Our ideas so far combine a number of concepts, which include the use of sustainably sourced greenwood for crafting furniture legs, to using old tyres and textiles and upholster them into funky furniture. We are also organising some print workshops which will hopefully allow us to explore the use of recycled paints and various different ‘found surfaces’ to work on…..

So one of the things that Jane, our art director has been doing is building some green woodworking equipment to make the furniture legs. She built a shave horse which is a piece of equipment that allows you to shave down freshly cut wood and more recently she made a pole lathe which is used to turn the wood…she is still learning the woodturning techniques though!!! She also worked with local rangers to collect the wood from a sustainable heathland, just outside Liverpool in Wirral. The tyre stool is still in a prototype stage at the moment, but we are looking to upholster it in brightly coloured funky designs.

As an example, one of our artists has been making some collage work with stamps, as you can see in the photo, which we may bring into the print work.

Its all a work in progress, but once we have a workspace, we are really hoping to gather some interesting materials to work with. We will also be thinking about making smaller items like notebooks from recycled textiles, and possibly some jewellery from computer wires.

                    

Artcyclers of Retextil Foundation started to collect old things in December. The task was to collect things that are old but could be reused and are available locally. We made up a game for this, to make it more interesting: we asked participants to collect things and place them into a shoebox. The aim was that these boxes were swapped between people to allow others to use them creatively.

After two weeks of collecting, everyone came in with a box full of waste material, things that can be reused. We exchanged the boxes among members so that everyone got a new box with unknown materials. In the following weeks, everybody started thinking about using them creatively.When everybody was done, we held a presentation. Artcyclers presented what they have made, and explained what it meant for them to create, what did they thought about this first challenge. They talked about what was hard, and what was uplifting about the creative process.

There were some who thought that the unknown materials created an obstacle, while for some people, bringing about their creativity was the hard part. Some people have made more smaller things, others only one bigger one.

These works have been exciting experiments, great objects were made. We look upon this game as an initiation, as everyone is beyond the making of their first upcycled obect. We look forward to the following two years of the project and its further stages.

Our first invited craftsman guest was Angéla Kocsis from Mosonszolnok. Angéla has prepared a self-developed textile recycling technique to show for us. She brought us carpets and small bowls made with a sewing machine. A zigzag pattern is apparent on the surface of these objects and it constitutes an integral part in their structure as well. [Read more…]

The kick-off workshop

We launched the creative labs in Denmark with a kick-off workshop on November 9th, to get the Artcyclers community going in Copenhagen. The workshop was based on an open call, spreading the word in our network and calling out to some of the small schools like TUBA and KUBA of which Copenhagen and Denmark is quite rich.

[Read more…]