Making Ground and building friendships

As the lead craft organisation in Hampshire, Making Space builds new networks and partnerships with local arts organisations and contributing to developments around craft

Ceramicist Elaine Bolt and Annemarie O’Sullivan who is a contemporary basket maker, will come to Making Space and converse about their collaborative craft project, which we have decided to call Making Ground., taking place on March 18 from 1.30pm to 3pm at Making Space.

Collectively, the two makers raised a grant from Arts Council England to fund a research and development project, which took both practitioners along an extraordinary route where they uncovered a new relationship with materials, landscape and with each other.

They invited artist, Rachel Henson to create digital sequences, flick books and mutoscopes to capture progression and movement and experience of the site, which made this a three-way artistic experience for all to enjoy.

This interdisciplinary project explored site-specific making at a disused brickworks in Sussex, culminating in a sharing at the Foundry Gallery in September 2016.

More recently, we invited guest makers, such as Alice Kettle and Helen Carnac, to take part in a collaborative event, bringing in their own materials and working with clay, willow and found objects at Fabrica Brighton.

The conversation event will be facilitated by Making Space Director, Lynne Dick and will offer an informal platform for both artists to share their experience of how the project came about and talk about how this 12-month project has impacted on their practice as individuals and their views of the collaborative process.

This unique event, unearths some of the challenges and successes around creative authorship and a generosity of spirit; how to work in parallel and issues of scale, process and time.

There will be opportunities to look at samples of their work and to ask questions and we hope that practitioners will leave feeling inspired to think about their own practice and future development.

A follow up event will take place in early May, with presentation from Arts Council England.

Tickets, which are priced at just £5 each, are available to purchase via our website: makingspace.org/product/making-ground