Hepworth Wakefield: She’s Collected Circles

It’s lots of creativity and friends!

This is what a companionship of Creative Practitioners looks like! Thanks to Bryony Pritchard for the photo.

As you may know, I am one of a companionship of creative practitioners in the Learning Team at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. We invent, plan and deliver thrilling activities and workshops for schools, community groups, and families throughout the year in the gallery and also sometimes at events and in community venues and schools.

Yesterday (Dec 18th 2013) we had our Christmas get-together. We usually work on our own in the gallery so it was a real treat to have so many of us gathered together in the one place at the same time for a proper catch-up! As I listened to stories of books at publishers, installations in Buddhist centres, festive workshops (nine days in a row!), the organisation of arts festivals, Christmas drama productions, end-of-term school art displays, collections of wood for sculpting, prize-winning programmes and activities,  poetry grants won, public installations remembered, I re-realised what a stunningly creative group of artists we are, and what a delight, honour and inspiration it is to be part of this team.

The song is one I composed for some Musical Sculptures family workshops. We sang the song, then selected a circle we liked from Hepworth’s collection, then composed some music to suit that circle, then went up to the gallery to perform it – all in less than an hour. Thrilling stuff!

So this window in my Musical Advent Calendar is not really as festive as the others in that the music itself is not Christmassy at all, but it is representative of the work we all do at the gallery, and after all, yesterday’s get-together was our equivalent of the ‘Office Christmas Party’ I guess, but without the office. So Merry Christmas and thank you to my friends and team-mates Liz, Gillian, Laura, Kate, Becky, Nat, Neil, Bryony, Emma, Becky, Jennyanne, Sarah, Nichola, Karen, Michiko, Vic, Carla, Sarah, Ami, Hilary, Fran, Kieran and everyone else I’ve worked with so joyously, thus far, at the Hepworth Wakefield.

Many of the team deliver all manner of exciting, stimulating, creative workshops during school holidays and at weekends. Have a look at what’s on offer for families and visitors here:

http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/whatson/?category=18

Click the link to see when my next Musical Sculptures Workshops will be. See you there!

http://www.hepworthwakefield.org/whatson/musical-sculptures/