It was great to be a part of the first Craft Club at Turner Contemporary. This took place on the opening day of the exhibition Turner and the Elements. I got involved after attending training at Turner Contemporary for Craft Club
volunteers in October.

One crocheter teaches a beginner

Six volunteers and staff at the gallery ran the first Craft Club. We had been exchanging emails and planning the Craft Club for a while and we were all really looking forward to it. We met together a couple of weeks before the first session to confirm plans.

Our volunteer teaches a begiiner crochet

We set up stations for knitting, crochet, weaving and finger knitting. The Clore Learning Studio is a great setting for crafts, it is so spacious and light. Over 80 people took part in crafts. Some were experienced and some were beginners. I had six peg looms in constant use by adults and children from two-and-a-half years upwards. Two looms were left out for people to add to when they visit the gallery. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people have woven on them!

We are all looking forward to the next session on 25 February from 1 – 4pm, it’s free and rveryone is welcome!

Father and son have a go on the pegloom wave, using wool inspired by the colours of Turner's pallette

Participants learn how to finger knit

Claire helps participants create their own pegloom weave

To see more pictures from our first Craft Club session, take a look at our Flickr page.

Craft Club is a project inspired by Crafts Council England.

Landscape is central to the work of both Hamish Fulton and JMW Turner: Turner was constantly walking and sketching, recording the changes he observed in the landscape. Hamish Fulton’s work always results from a direct physical experience of and engagement with landscape, both urban and rural. Both artists have taken inspiration from the landscape in Kent, and Turner made over 100 paintings of Margate and the Kent coast, a number of which will be in this exhibition.

One of the ideas at the centre of Turner and the Elements, which has been curated by Ines Richter-Musso and Ortrud Westheider, is that of Turner as an artist who was acutely aware of the traditions of landscape painting, but who renewed and reinvigorated this tradition, in part through the way he absorbed new discoveries in the natural sciences into his art. This is an idea we began to explore in our opening exhibition Revealed.

Here, it is exemplified through Turner’s depictions of the elements, not as divine natural forces, which was the tradition in painting until the 18th century, but for their own sake: he was fascinated by the interactions between the elements, creating unusual, frequently dramatic combinations of air, earth, fire and water. The exhibition is divided into 5 sections, one for each of the 4 elements with the fifth section, titled ‘fusion’, looking at how, in his later oils in particular, Turner often combined all the elemental forces together.

JMW Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) © Tate, London 2011

We’re incredibly excited to bring this exhibition to Margate, in the very location where Turner created some of the works on display. It has previously been shown in Hamburg (at Bucerius Kunstforum) and Krakow (at the National Museum), but we are lucky to have a number of extra works in the exhibition in Margate that were not included in the previous venues. The majority of the loans are coming from Tate and it’s a are opportunity to be able to show such a fantastic group of Turner’s later watercolours from the Tate Collection, many of which are rarely exhibited due to their fragility.

JMW Turner, Crimson Sunset (1835), © Tate, London 2011

For me it is these works in particular, especially his beautiful, almost abstract watercolours known as ‘colour beginnings’, that we really see Turner experimenting with the medium to produce beautiful studies on colour and the changing effects of light.

Turner and the Elements opens on 28 January until 13 May 2012.

We had films about fluff, stick men and growing teacups. There are the beginnings of some wonderful objects to add to our ever expanding library/archive, Frank.

The next couple of sessions are going to be dedicated to exploring the book and creating objects from books.

Take a look at our early experiments next week…

(See the time lapse footage from day 1 on de-install of Nothing in the World But Youth below)

Hamish Fulton’s exhibition in the West and Balcony galleries (opening on 17 January until 7 May) will be his first solo show in the UK since an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2002. Hamish, who has lived in Canterbury for many years, exhibits his work all over the world. His practice is based on his experiences of walking in the landscape and he has been making art resulting from the experience of individual and group walks since the early 1970s. Turner Contemporary’s relationship with him started around four years ago, when we commissioned him to make a series of group walks in Kent and France.

Hamish Fulton Walk 3: Boulogne sur mer. Photo Kim Conway

For Fulton, walking can be many things: it is a meditative experience; a physical challenge (he is particularly interested in mountaineering as a form of walking based on an extreme relationship with nature). It is also, at times, a form of protest and this exhibition will include a pair of text works he has made resulting from expeditions on the Nepal/Tibet border commenting on China’s occupation of Tibet. At the heart of his practice, and of this exhibition, is the belief in walking as an artform in its own right.

Hamish Fulton, Chinese Economy, Tibetan Justice © Hamish Fulton

The exhibition starts with works representing walks Fulton has made in Kent and South East England, including a new film documenting a group walk with 198 people walking slowly and in silence around Margate boating pool in 2010. This is the first film the artist has made. Fulton has stated that, ‘a walked line, unlike a drawn line, can never be erased’. In this film the walkers appear to trace a continuous line on the beach.

Other text works are being installed to respond directly to the architecture of the West Gallery, in particular the angled roof line:

West Gallery layout view

All the works in the exhibition are being transported from within the South East, in part a reflection of his commitment to environmental sustainability. In his walks, he tries to make as minimal impact on the landscape as possible, influenced by the US Wilderness ethic of ‘leave no trace’.

From 10 – 17 January, visitors to the gallery can watch time lapse footage of the exhibition changeover on the first floor, so do come and see for yourself!

You can also see the film, which is updated every day, here.

Watch the time-lapse film here, we’ll be adding new footage to every day.

There is a month till the next session so participants have selected a few objects from Frank to take away to ponder on creatively over the break. Our first forays into film making have been a great success and we are going to be back shooting film with a vengeance in the New Year.

Moving on from last week’s themes of volcanos and balloons to candles, shadow play, whoopee cushions and spinning records. Although the lure of fire and cabbages refuses to be extinguished!

Sam came and quietly introduced the group to the editing process which was enlightening and opened up endless possibilities.

It is nearly time for the Christmas break but not before next week’s Blank Canvas festive party complete with mince pies, parlour games and non-monetary secret Santa.

Last month I spent two weeks at Turner Contemporary in Margate on a Curatorial Exchange Programme organised by the British Council. During this time I met lots of people, made new professional contacts, did some studio visits with artists in Margate and London, and some research into arts management in the UK.  A one hundred kilometer distance between Margate and London is very small for Russians, so a few one day trips to the UK’s capital city became, briefly, a part of my life. But every time I was happy to come back to Margate!

What is Margate?
Meetings with local artists are, for me, the best way to learn the particularities of a place. Thanks to my colleagues from Turner Contemporary I made many studio visits. They helped me to see the real beauty of the place I was living in: coastal nature, varied in its sameness by Leise Wilson; ‘salt traces’ of citizens by Helder Clara, an archeology of time and place by Steve McPherson. I mosaiced my own image of Margate from these pieces and conversations with these, and other artists.

Artist Helder Clara's studio on the Harbour Arm

But what is art made in Margate?
It is often site-specific art dedicated to native places, situations, mental outlook. It is local art and equally art of very good quality. It is also an irreplaceable element of Margate life. If you’ve seen Moscow it doesn’t mean that you have seen Russia. If you’ve been to London you haven’t been to England as well. Here in Margate I had an opportunity to see real English life and English art as a part of a strong and healthy civil society. Margate showed me not only arts for arts, but also arts for artists, arts for the town, arts for the local community. It showed me a system of institutions (LIMBO, Crate, and other galleries); a system of art-events (The Pushing Print Festival for example), and a system of supportive and creative relationships that I don’t see in Russia today.

P.S. I came home full of ideas on how to change our local situation!

Using our new Lomokino Camera we explored for the first time the possibilities of moving image. Taking inspiration from the contents of our ever growing elements collection housed in Frank, members of the group joined forces to create some Fluxus Inspired films. Offerings included; a film about dirt and cabbages; a sandy volcano; ice cubes and umbrellas and a balloon trilogy.