July – October 2022 Alne Jubilee Project
Working with a group of Y5/6 pupils at a village primary school to create a textile artwork celebrating village life and the Jubilee.
February March 2021 – Pocket Full of Sunshine Garden Fence Gallery in Byker
This project is a development of the Lockdown Garden Fence Gallery I created in 2020. I am working with Byker residents, helping them to create their own large scale animal paintings. The paintings, on plywood, will be displayed outside and bring some ‘Sunshine’ to people passing by.
Lockdown Garden Fence Gallery -2020
In the first Covid19 Lockdown, I noticed that people were taking their daily walks along my street, unable to provide workshops for the community or in hospitals, I decided to start making art for the people walking by. Each week or so, I would add an image to my garden fence, mainly painted on flattened old cardboard boxes, they stood up quite well to the weather. Then a neighbour gifted me a jigsaw and so I started using waste plywood and mdf, donated by friends and neighbours. It was lovely to see people bringing their children to see what was new in the ‘gallery’.
September 2019 – Chopwell Quick Crafters Project
Summer 2019 Whichcraft – South Charlton, Northumberland
April 2016 – My Journey
A triptych commissioned by Heaton Baptist Church. The project was about making links with people who attend groups or meetings at the church, finding out how they came to be at this place. I had the dual role of running creative workshops for groups at the church and creating an artwork that would encapsulate the stories of those taking part. In the workshops, we did ‘Spiral Dyeing’ using colour symbolically to represent life journeys. I then used these fabrics as the colour palette for the appliqued artwork.
The triptych was unveiled on April 18th 2016 and the response was fantastic.People were surprised at the scale of the work and at how their fabrics had been incorporated into the image.
Feedback from My Journey
Really quite moving to know so many people have been involved.
It has really captured the essence of our journey I am AMAZED.
Your work is surprising and made me feel a lot of beautiful emotions.
I wasn’t sure about this project before, I didn’t realise how amazing this could be when finished
March 2016- Wise Birds Wise Words
Working with patients and visitors in hospital as part of the Room For You arts in health project. I was aware that often people in this ward were passing time by knitting or crocheting. So I ask participants to use their knitting and crochet skills to help create an art installation in the ward window. All the wise owls have messenger bags containing wise words written by either staff, patients or visitors.
January 2016 – St Bede’s Philosophy of Care
Another triptych and another project for Room For You. This was for the St Bede’s Hospice at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I was asked to interpret the text of the unit’s philosophy of care in textiles and with an emphasis on colour. Three different approaches to lettering are used. One panel uses appliqued letters, the second has free machine embroidered words and for the third, computer aided stitch was used. For this final panel staff, patients and visitors were asked to choose a word from the text that had resonance with them – and to select the colour in which it would be stitched.
June 2015 The Heaton Map Project
A commission from the Heaton Festival, a community engagement festival run by all the local churches. I was asked to find a way to record engagement with the festival and to run workshops to involve local people in the development of the artwork. The map was made from metre square sections of hessian that were handpainted with the street map of the festival catchment area. At workshops, participants helped to paint in roads and parks and also block printed local houses, shops, cafes and of course the churches. On the day of the festival (sunny!) hundreds of people placed markers in the map to show where they lived, their favourite places and all the trees in the area (using a lot of green pompoms!)
2014 The Chillingham Road School Proggy Project
The school is housed in the oldest school building in the city, as part of the 120 year celebrations, I was asked to work with the children on a large scale proggy rug project to be displayed in the school entrance, completely covering an old chimney and making a tactile wall. The theme is ‘The Village School in the Heart of the City’ . Children throughout the school were asked to draw what they liked about the local area; Heaton. I then incorporated these drawings into a pictorial ‘map’ of the area, with the school at its heart. Two of the three panels are now complete and up on the wall. The children took part in an ‘after school’ Proggy club but the panels themselves have been made by parent volunteers.
Donna Cheshire Textiles 