Displaying items by tag: UK

Many thanks to everyone who voted for our Creating Your Future 2015 project. I’m delighted to say that we were successful in obtaining an award from the Royal Bank of Scotland Skills and Opportunities Fund. NatWest Bank, part of RBS, have volunteered their practical support as which is invaluable and we are very grateful to them and our other volunteers. This is enabling another cohort of unemployed adults to develop the creative thinking skills needed in the current workplace, to use these skills to work out what career they want to pursue and to take the necessary steps to make this a reality. Thanks to your support it’s really helping turn people’s lives around!

Later this year we will begin our Creative Cities series, which will look at Creative Cities in the Commonwealth - a nice link to the Commonwealth Games taking place in Glasgow this year. However, London is always pushing the boundaries when it comes to new and innovative initiatives and something quite special has been happening near London Bridge. Britain is strengthening its commitment to public engagement with science in a new Science Gallery in London with whom this journal hopes to build an ongoing relationship. I went to meet the new Director, Dr Daniel Glaser, to hear all about it.
Venu

Before bird catching a little offering must be made, so it is here I must acknowledge my ancestors...

My fun, colourful, hand-built sculptural representations of characters and self-imagined architectural styles are designed to make you smile. Made in terracotta and coloured with under-glazes and glazes, they represent people as I see them and homes as I would like to see them!

I have a degree in Applied Arts and a Masters in Entrepreneurship for Creative Practice and I make and sell my ceramics, along with upcycled creations made of throw-aways. I facilitate learners and experimenters through evening classes and workshops and I believe creativity is the key.

 

There I was across the bay walking not an hour ago
Now here I am
If I had stayed where my eyes rest now
Time would have moved on
the tide would still have filled the bay
Spin drift still settled into inland emptiness
Just as now.

Would I have had to run and rush like this tide beneath this bridge
To catch myself here,
To fill the places in me emptied of your presence
My life’s landscape emptied of those I once knew, without knowing as my people
Washed out to that sea and emptied of their own lives
Taken like so much cliff face fallen
On the outgoing tide of Time, that vast majority element
That holds us all within this very moment.

Standing on the bridge my inner eye rests upon places where
The people I lived amongst lived as my organs live
Amongst one another deep within my overcoat of membrane and skin
All who once were part of me and I of them
No more mine now than my own life feels is mine
Stranger in it that I am
Filled with the flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives
I no longer recognise nor truly fit within my own.

As here I stand now empty, alone
Filled with longing for the home of belonging I once knew
The tides turn, turn once more
Returning I turn, walk on.