Totterdown Front Room Arts Trail 2015

This year I had the delight of being part of Totterdown Arts Trail. I was exhibiting (and selling my pottery) alongside Angela Chick Illustration and her wall of cards, Grace Guest’s beautiful tiles, and my Barfoot + Duggan cushions and kids bed-sets. Hunger Management were providing the most delicious and warming food, and Graham the cat was keeping us all company on the sofa.

Follow Totterdown Front Room Arts Trail on Facebook to be kept in the loop – plus they’re currently looking for committee members. And I’ll be looking forward to being part of it again next year.

 

Two lovely things seen today

1. A 4-ish year old boy, holding onto the lead of his sheepdog. Mum 10 steps away and urging the dog to walk- dog is wondering why the little boy is walking him, not the mum, and is stood still. Mum plays game where she walks a bit (boy wines a bit) then turns around and slaps her thighs, tells the dog to come, in high-pitched dog voice. Dog gallops on (boy hysterically laughing) and repeat. Little kids look so cute taking care of their pets, and the dog was so puzzled. Mum was laughing hard. I told her it was cutr, she commented on the dog i was walking, we smiled and parted. Heart warming!

2. The mum’s daughter is walking another 10 steps ahead! Both hands lazily above her head, pointing roughly at the pelican crossing’s flashing light, nodding her head and bringing her arms down slightly each time the light blinks. Nearly walks into a
Grown man whilst doing this, and doesn’t notice; she is in a daze. The man laughs and smiles at me laughing.

Both these sights and interactions spoke strongly to me today. I couldn’t stop grinning. Talk more and smile more to people on the street! it makes you feel good.

Aquarium: Anenomes and Sea Stars

A recent trip to Bristol Aquarium got me excited about colour again. It also interests me because these creatures are the perfect mixture of disgusting and beautiful. What do they feel like? Can you eat them?

 ?

 Sea Star

  Fish Eating Anenome

 Crazy thing. I feel like I made this and snuck it down there

Bit of research on the old google images, and I found these beauties:

 Fish Eating Urticina

 Pink Sea Star

Amanda Hazell

Amanda uses a variety of media in her work (including stitch, wire, ceramics and found objects), but all have their roots in drawing. The work tends to be simple and pared back – about the juxtapositions of different marks, tones and textures; and often uses elements of mapping and graph-making inorder to convey particular emotions and ideas.

Themes that Amanda is exploring at the moment include identity and some of the aspects that contribute to this such as memories (especially the transient and shifting nature of memories and those mediated by photos) and a sense of place, particularly around living on an island with fixed boundaries, surrounded by the forces of the tides and the weather.

Here’s her profile on North Bristol Artists website.

All: ‘Sewn Tides’ Images Copyright Amanda Hazell

Flyer for Light Box Exhibition

This was yesterday’s job, 4 hours of flyer design. Is that fast? I’m not sure, but i’m really pleased the the outcome. I nipped around cutting textures and shapes out of magazines, looking at other flyers for inspiration, scanned the best texture and the best shapes in, used a photograph of our painted pistachio shells, in a triangle formation (which links brilliantly to the content of the exhibition) 5,000 being printed right now, and will be looking at you from tables in various Bristol locations soon

St Paul’s Carnival

It’s this weekend! I’ve been looking forward to it a long time. This is the most exciting Bristol event of the year for me, since the first time I went – when Michael Jackson had just died. Me and Lucy dancing outside Dad’s Cabs with the man who was amazing at dancing and everyone’s flirting with each other and asking you to dance or dancing on you.

Poppy Time

Cor the poppies are out already! What a surprise I got driving past Eastville roundabout. The best place to find poppies in Bristol. Hundreds and hundreds of poppy plants. I did ten minutes of picking, took them home and filled half of the Sunday paper and an hour of my time lining them up to be pressed for the 3 months they need before they turn beautifully translucent. Another batch for my poppy collection, part of my ongoing poppy project. I have been doing this for 5 years now and have thousands. Soon, it’ll become something but for now I am happy with the collecting and meticulous pressing (each petal needs to be completely flat and intact.)

Photos: Before-the collected petals. Middle-pressing them by lining up in a newspaper. After-incomplete petals and I’ve run out of time. Found-a small section of the crop.

Summer Lomo Fisheye

Finally back in the game of ‘taking pictures and then developing them’. Such a thrill. Here’s a couple, Hot mid-Spring/Summer barbecues and Empathy’s 10th Birthday @ Dojo

Cycling Club

I’ve been organising this lovely bike ride from Bristol to Bath and back. We just cycled our fourth journey. It’s so lovely, spending the day with friends (a mix of friends, and my separate pockets of friends are becoming friends with each other and friends are bringing their separate friends and integrating them too.) I want to extend it more to others – maybe on Twitter more. And now it’s Spring, the weather wil be on our side more, and more time can be spent in the lovely beer gardens in Bath and between. On the this bike ride, I took some bike portraits of the eight of us, a nice little record.

Photographs from my walk

A walk from the studio to Old Market. 15 minutes. It’s a strange thing, walking. I usually am cycling, getting places fast. Here’s what I found:

Leftover Barbie in plant pot

A lot of sandwich choices

Dead wall

And I fell over.

Broadmead Baptist Church

I recently taught some workshops with Light Box for World Mental Health Week. We chose Broadmead Baptist Church as our location, which is a lovely space – right in the centre of Broadmead, and has the cheapest room hire in the city. It’s not too ‘churchy’ and some of it is quite beautiful.

Bristol Zombie Walk 2010

The Bristol Zombie Walk was amazing this year! I think it more than doubled in size this year compared to 2009. Last year, I was a Zombie broccoli:

This year, a zombie leek:

The last Carny Ville by Invisible Circus!

“The Carny Ville extravaganza returns to set Bristol city centre ablaze one more time! The cities most dynamic and spectacular outdoor circus theatre show returns, back by popular demand ! for one last Hurrah.

Staged in the austere confines of the former Bridewell island Police / Fire hq carny Ville is like a weekend at the craziest festival you can imagine condensed into one night ”


An incredible experience if you haven’t gone already, and if you’ve been many times before, this will be the best yet. Goodbye Carny Ville! 


Tickets available at Bristol Ticket Shop search ‘carny ville’ But it’s already SOLD OUT on both Fridays! 

 

IGFest: 2.8 Hours Later Zombie chase game

Phew, I’m knackered. I volunteered for igfest (Interesting Games Festival) last weekend 17th/18th September.

I was a chaser in the city-wide game ‘2.8 hours later’ where players had to get to 6 different locations in a 4 mile radius of Bristol city centre – watching actors play out a scene in each location, giving a clue to where to get to next on their grid maps. Between each locations were chaser zombies, me and about 12 others – who jumped out from behind bins, cars, bushes, behind walls and sprinted after players.

Once caught, players become ‘infected’ – marked with a UV pen, then sent to finish the game. at the end, they were checked, any infected got put into makeup, and survivors got their photo taken and congratulated:

Players loved it, you pay £10 to play, and it’s well worth it. Some of the locations included the old police cells in Bridewell Island, the old bank vaults next to Castle Park, Jacob Wells Car park, a disused shop on Park Street and public toilets on Park Row. This game also pays for the whole of the rest of IGFest, so it’s well worth the money.

Volunteering for the game was a great way to spend the weekend – despite being completely knackered (unintentionally walking like a zombie too) I got to meet some great people, barely spent any money, I got to play all weekend. Sprinting after people who are terrified of you is pretty fun, I’ve never felt so powerful!

Me (far right in scrubs) and some of the chaser collective

Igfest website
All Photos of the undead in the bank vaults here. Photos by The Public
Spooky video of the game made by Will Ablett
Disco Liam tracked his route around the city with GPS

IG Fest 2009

Lovely video of IG Fest 2009. It’s coming up this weekend – 17th September, can’t wait!

[vimeo 7703695]

Sailing again

I have been volunteering for Bristol Sailability, who enable young disabled people to sail. It is run from Baltic Wharf, Bristol. And Sailability are looking for more volunteers.

Hello – Let’s Do Nice Things

‘Let’s Do Nice Things’ has a website, it’s here. 

I made this at the Art Club at Shop, Christmas Steps, which was part of ‘Let’s do Nice Things’ takeover last week. I made things what I was told to make.

Summer Wedding

Hello me

I helped out with a wedding recently, a semi wedding stylist if you will. Main jobs were making cake stands and designing the look of the cake table, (the bride asked every one in her book club to bake a cake each, instead of the regular wedding cake) creating the place settings and designing the table plan.

 

Table Plan

I hand-cut everyone’s initial and stuck them onto the plan with velcro – this made it easy to make last-minute changes to the seating plan if guests couldn’t make it. They chose trestle tables – with couples sat both opposite and next to each other. I was hoping that the plan would spell out something, but it didn’t – not enough vowels. I would like to make something out of the letters, as a post-wedding present.

Cake table

The whole day was a dream. Bristol Florists Bella and Fifi worked hard on the flowers, they were gorgeous too – some wild flowers, all seasonal and locally grown.

Looking for a photographer in Bristol? All the above photographs were taken by Bruce, here’s his portfolio. He also photographs the Invisible Circus lots, so if you’ve ever been to one of those nights, you should have a look and see if you can spot yourself in the galleries.

Three Nice Things in Bristol

One: Bentleg – Lets Do Nice Things 

Pop up galleries, life drawing, film showing (Miranda July’s ‘Me andYou and Everyone we Know’ on Mon 26th July at Shop the Shop)

Two: Shop 

A lovely community interest company, vintage clothing and stuff and lots of community arts events. They say: “Shop envisages a world where businesses value people and sociability over profits – and creativity is acknowledged as and encouraged to be an essential part of life. SHOP exists to provide a retailing experience which focuses on conscious consumption and prioritises fair prices and original fashion. This consumption provides the financial means to use the shop space as an arts venue for the benefit of the whole community.”


Three: The Happy City Initiative


They say: “Whoever you are, whatever your background, Happy City is here to help you make the most of your street, your community, your neighbourhood, your city. Maybe you’ve got a bright idea and need help making it happen? Perhaps you’ve got a little time to spare or some knowledge or experience to share? You might have an established organisation, looking for inspiration, ideas and people keen to help out…

Happy City exists to spread happiness. To bring people together, making connections between communities so people like you can make the change you want to happen. We don’t promise funding or formality. But you can be sure there’ll be no fat cats, forms to fill out or hoops to jump through. Just normal people like you, working together and using what we’ve already got to make our city better, brighter and happier than ever before.”

Now Say Hello Back – MAKING LONDON MORE SOCIABLE ONE HELLO AT A TIME

In lots of places, lots of people are doing some extraordinary things. This morning, after a good long Skype with my sister in New Zealand, I knew I wanted to do some blogging, find some new stuff, get on twitter, snoop around the internet a bit. So here’s a great thing I found:

 

Now Say Hello is a one-man mission to make London more sociable via a bicycle. Bruno Clarke cycles a lot and has created a point-scoring system for human interaction whilst on his journeys:

Me saying hello – 1 point
Getting a response – 5 points (unless it’s aggressive or rude)
Getting a conversation – 10 points
Getting a joke – 20 points


He’s noting down his efforts and scores on the blog, like this:

Saturday 10th July

60 points – ok so it’s a slightly made up number, but I think it’s fairly representative of the day.  I cycled 117 kilometres to Brighton with many a country hello and nod along the way.  Was a lovely ride.  It’s no Tour de France, but I was still pretty please for a lone effort on a hot day.

Thursday 8th July

5 points – after my fellow cyclists, a lady in red, was barked at by an enfuriated oncoming rider, we shared a little “well good morning to him too” as I cycled past.  A jolly end to an aggressive start.  Some people just get on the wrong side of their saddle don’t they.

I’m inspired by this and want to start my own mission – both whilst cycling around Bristol and walking around, and I’ll even count when I’m in my car – most people have their windows wound down in the sun.

Join in yourself. Lets collate results.

Follow on Now Say Hello on Twitter – @nowsayhello
Follow on me on Twitter – @lucybarfoot