Ancient Landscapes on display

seen through the window, we catch passers-by attention!

Our first Ancient Landscape installation is on display in The Emporium in Leek, in the Staffordshire Moorlands for the next week....

I especially like our yellow fish!

Ancient Adventures

the first of our Exploring with Stories events!

Ancient Adventures

Friday 8th June 2012

10.30 - 12.30 and 1.30 - 3.30

Venue: Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, Terrace Rd, Buxton, SK17 6DA

Activity: exploring Roman and prehistoric Buxton through stories and art activities, making our own model round-house or tiny painted pop-up caves, listening to stories that might have been told round a campfire or in one of our local caves and inventing our own cave-children, Roman soldier or Iron Age heroine stories

Details:

Free,

No booking needed - just turn up and join in!

Children under 8 need to bring a grown-up with them

more info and other events: exploringwithstories.blogspot.co.uk

Ancient Landscapes

Ancient Landscapes is a partner project to Exploring with Stories and we thought you might enjoy the delights of a project bringing limestone to life

we've had a busy few days as the second phase of this project begins, or maybe as the tide runs again toward the full. (PIctures from the first phase can be found on my own Creeping Toad blog - I am Gordon MacLellan, is one of the workshop artists and disorganiser of a lot of the Stone and Water projects)

Antler coral

With Ancient Landscapes, we are looking at the limestone of the Peak District where we live and the fossils that rock contains. Then mixing observation, deduction and wild imagination, we work to create the original environments that spawned our limestone as installations in crochet, knitting, clay, beads, felt and anything else that takes our artists fancy!

coral development takes concentration

....concentration, and tea!

The first installation is on display in Leek for the next two weeks as part of the Borderland Voices exhibit in the Emporium Art Exhibition (details to follow)

Meanwhile, a new group has taken up the challenge of extending the ancient landscape and a session at Buxton Museum last week, led on to a workshop at Fairfield Community Centre today. Five more sessions will follow and then we'll see just how our coral garden grows before it unfolds its glories again in the Buxton Art Trail in the summer

Inspiration

Our use of crochet in Ancient Landscapes was inspired by the global Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project (http://crochetcoralreef.org/) whose influence we acknowledge even though we couldn't afford to sign into their network as a community group.

The connection between those techniques, other artforms and our Peak District landscapes comes from Stone and Water, a Buxton-based community group dedicated to celebrating the creativity of the people and landscapes of the Peaks.

Exploring with Stories

Exploring with Stories

out, about and doing things: indoors, outdoors, everywhere or anywhere with books to read, stories to hear and  our world to investigate

With activities to intrigue us and stories and books for inspiration, Exploring with Stories offers a number of public events over 2012. Inviting people to join our teams of artists, environmentalists and storytellers, these events will take us out exploring. We may wander into woods and meet the wildlife of fields and hedgerows or head off on faerie-tale walks, goblin quests or on a hunt for the bridges where trolls might lurk. Like Robinson Crusoe, on two days we'll make the dens we'd like to live in, hide in or listen to stories in. Another strand will step back in time, waking ancient memories in Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and uncovering the life of Doveholes' Bullring

Behind everything will be stories. We'll tell stories, share stories, invent new stories, and we'll read books, lifting small paragraphs from here and there to give us a start, feed in some laughter or answer a question

Events will be free and most of them are open to anyone (a couple will have booked places) – just turn up and join in. Children under 10 should bring an adult with them (grown-ups need to mess about too!).

Programme: will be released very soon (May - June 2012), but you can look out for

         ancient memories: life in the Peaks for Stone Age children in caves, in Bronze Age settlements and Iron Age villages: we'll make model houses, draw cave-style pictures, and invent adventures with mammoths and bears and wolves

         over the fields: bumblebees and beetles, birds and hedgerows: nature detectives, we'll find out about our local wildlife, and go looking for clues and a chance to fill our own boxes of Natural Treasures

         into the woods: the excitements of trees, their wildlife, their magic, tree giants and mysteries

         away with the faeries, goblins and trolls: in, out and roundabout: where would the people out of fairytales lurk in our modern, busy, noisy world

run away to adventure: we'll make dens in the woods and tell the story of how we came to be cast away in the wilds, with ideas from Robinson Crusoe, Stig of the Dump, Brandon Chase and Swiss Family Robinson

Who is organising all this?

Stone and Water are a Buxton-based community group, finding creative ways of celebrating the people, wildlife and landscape of the High Peak and surrounding areas. Over the last 10 years, Stone and Water have organised or been part of the delights of "In Pursuit of Love and Passion", the Buxton lantern parade; "People, Plants and the Peaks", the annual Tiny! events in Buxton's Festival Fringe and the lantern workshops and procession for the Christmas Lights Switch-on