Last year I decided that I wanted to be involved in more collaborative art activities. Why? Well, I have had several years to explore and develop my own art practice and have concluded that creating art should not be solitary experience; it should be shared with others. I believe that art has developed through the need for community and the outcome is not more important than the benefit from sharing the process from others. I also think that art has an important purpose in keeping our minds healthy and that this is often overlooked in the way that our time tends to be used, so I think it is really important that people are encouraged to undertake any kind of creative pursuit.

One of my goals in this area was to gain some practice in running classes. Ask and the universe will provide they say, and indeed it did. By chance, at the start of last year, I heard about a new Creative Club starting locally that was offering after-school art classes for adolescents and their parents to attend together. It sounded like exactly the sort of initiative I wanted to be invovled in and the lovely folks at Proteus Creation Space kindly agreed that I could come along and help out. After a few weeks of observing how things were done, I had the opportunity to run a class to show the students the techniques I used to make mixed media artworks like these. It was really interesting to see how the students used my materials and techniques - see a few examples of their work below.

My second experience in community art was getting involved with scenery painting for a local Christmas pantomime. My son had joined in as a junior actor the previous year so I was able to see how the show came together over the few months of rehearsals. I was really impressed by how the group, all volunteers, had all worked together and helped each other to pull off the production. When they asked for more people to help and my son was keen to be in the shown again, I volunteered to help paint the scenery. So my Friday nights from September onwards were spent painting panels in a church hall with a group of people all involved in the panto in different ways. I had no experience of set design so it was really interesting to find out about everything that needs to be considered, and it was a good social activity to do as well. In the end, my husband was roped into be part of the stage crew and my daughter decided she wanted to be in the next panto production so it looks like this project will be a part of our lives for the next few years at least!

Both of these projects were really fun to be part of, and required little or no skills and experience. What is going on in your community that you can get involved in?