(M)other Wild 2nd & 3rd August 2025

8 July, 2025 | Claire

An event by (M)other Collective as part of Drawing Out Hilbre with BADA at Hilbre Archipelago
Artists: Jo Eyles, Lydia O’Hara, Lucy Jones, Lena and the Sea, Emma Thackham, Claire Weetman.

The six members of (M)other Collective, all artist-parents from across the North West, are researching how women can consider their “wild nature” and find their natural “home” whatever that may look like for each individual, without being distracted from their creative energy by domestic/commercial life. This direction of research stems from the text ‘Women who run with wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman’ (Clarissa Pinkola Estés 1992). By inhabiting Hilbre island and experiencing its ecosystems, (M)other artists have connected with animalistic characteristics and attuned to the aspects of the natural environment that nurture and inspire creativity.

Our explorations of mothering and practices of care in this remote location have informed our collective creative practice where we aim to respect the ebbs and flows of creativity within (m)otherhood – connecting to the central research themes of Drawing out Hilbre that explore Sustainability and Self Sufficiency, Time and Tides and Engagement with Nature.

On the 2nd and 3rd August 2025 you’re invited to join (M)other Collective on Hilbre Island where they will share some of the outcomes of their research on Hilbre, through exhibition of works in the buildings, installation of works around the island and opportunities to join the artists in acts of movement, rest, connection and wildness.

If you are coming to Hilbre Island please wear appropriate clothing and footwear for the weather and walking across rocks. We do not recommend that you bring pushchairs. Please bring your own drinking water and refreshments. Two compost toilets are available on the main island.

Saturday 2nd August 2025
11am: Meet at the Ice Cream Stall at West Kirby to join (M)other Collective on the 1-hour low tide walk to Hilbre Island
11am-2pm: Visit installations and exhibited work across the island and within the Buoy Master’s Buildings.
12:30pm “I Become the Island” an interactive site specific performance with Lydia O’Hara. Join a tour of the island, performance and an invitation to participate in her Hilbre Island inspired yoga. Visitors will be given a keepsake to take away from their experience.
2:00-2:30pm Last chance to leave Hilbre for the mainland if you don’t want to stay overtide.
3pm – 8pm Experience being stranded on Hilbre over-tide. Visit installations and exhibited work across the island and within the Buoy Master’s Buildings. Share your picnic alongside creative conversations about (M)other Wild
3pm Finding Solitude, an invitation to view Claire Weetman’s sculptural chairs installed around the island and to find a seat for creative reflection as the tide comes in.
5pm Beachcombing at High Tide with Lena and the Sea as a creative act of rest.
8pm-9pm Join (M)other Collective for a sunset walk back to the mainland

You can come and go to the island between 9am – 2pm on Saturday 2nd August whilst the tide is out. If you decide to stay past 2:30pm then you will need to wait on the island until 8pm when the tide has gone back out. Please follow the advised walking route from West Kirby via Little Eye and Middle Eye.

Sunday 3rd August
11am: Meet at the Ice Cream Stall at West Kirby to join (M)other Collective on the low tide walk to Hilbre Island.
11am-3pm Visit installations and exhibited work across the island and within the Buoy Master’s Buildings.
12:30pm Emma Thackham hosts a shared lunch and conversation connected to her research ‘The Islands Beneath Our Skin’
1:30pm Jo Eyles invites you to join her on a short walk to gather natural materials for a mark-making workshop.
3pm-3:45pm Last chance to leave Hilbre for the mainland before the tide comes in.

You can come and go to the island between 9:30am – 3:45pm on Sunday 3rd August whilst the tide is out. Please follow the advised walking route from West Kirby via Little Eye and Middle Eye.

About the artists

Emma Thackham
@onelifeartists

Emma is an interdisciplinary artist and art psychotherapist. Her research explores topics such as social action, performativity, embodied knowledge, cultural heritage and art therapy.

The Islands Beneath Our Skin is the working title of a new research project exploring creative practices and connections between communities in the UK and The Caribbean.

Her performative pilgrimage, bearing the Flag of Dominica, to the liminal tidal Hilbre Archipelago imagines the land as a portal between islands, and in quiet reflection she summons and honours ancestors within.

Her sculptural work is currently exploring the realm of the seven feminine archetypes, (the Mother, the Maiden, the Huntress, the Mystic, the Sage, the Queen and the Lover).

Claire Weetman
@claireweetman

Claire Weetman is crafting three chairs – self portraits of a search for solitude in wild outdoor spaces – woodlands, meadows and beaches. Places that are familiar and everyday when explored with others but luxurious and wild when explored alone.

In the text Camera Obscura, Roland Barthes compares familiar landscapes to the maternal body “There is no other place of which one can say with such certainty that one has already been there.” The wild locations where Claire has sought creative solitude from motherhood inspire the laborious processes used to camouflage the recognisable, familiar form of the chairs. Natural, elemental processes of fire, earth, air and water have slowly and meditatively altered these domestic objects so that they can exist in the wild – an attempt to turn a place where the maternal body may be able to sit into the landscape itself. Installed around Hilbre Island, this collection of re-crafted chairs aims to capture the tension between a desire for connection and a need for space for ourselves.

Claire’s work informs an activity on Saturday 2nd August when visitors to (M)other Wild are invited to experience a period of solitude in the remote location of Hilbre island.

Lydia O’Hara
@lydiaoharaartist

Lydia is a multidisciplinary artist and art therapist whose approach allows the concept for each work to dictate its most appropriate medium. To date this has included video, performance, painting, music, and more. Lydia’s practice takes an interest in embodied cognition and unconscious processes, exploring this from various perspectives including womanhood, lived experiences, collective consciousness, and motherhood. Whilst on Hilbre Island Lydia is interested in developing her work exploring “wild nature” in women, connecting with pre-evolutionary animal aspects that remain in human nature. Through observing life on the island: creatures, plants, and elements, Lydia will find ways to internalise a piece of this wild place to return to whenever she needs. This will feed into a larger piece of work looking to share this process with others, and complement her series of free hanging outdoor paintings depicting the isolating experiences of mothers and babies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I Become the Island” will be an interactive site specific performance on Hilbre Island on the Saturday of (M)other’s sharing event. Lydia O’Hara will invite visitors to join her on a tour of the island, followed by a performance, and finally to participate in her Hilbre Island yoga. Visitors will be given a keepsake to take away from their experience.

Lena and the Sea
@lenaandthesea

During the residency I sank into solitude, really felt rest, my mind had time to wander, taking time to beach comb was a simple joy. I slept on the sand. I watched seals. Taking this time for myself always makes me a better mother. When I return they get a mother that feels nurtured and so can nurture them.

At Hilbre I took my canvas sheets on an adventure, bathing with me in a rock pool, laying out covered in moss and seaweed and stones and the salt and sand of the island. I worked into them with charcoal and water. I lay them to dry on the flagstones of the Buoymasters house.

I will take the canvas sheets back to the studio and work on two Hilbre abstracts: dark green, grey, the blue of the mussels, sandstone and clay before returning them to exhibit in the Buoy Master’s house in August.

Join Lena and the Sea on Saturday 2nd August for beachcombing at high tide with Lena and the Sea as a creative act of rest.

Lucy Elizabeth Jones
@cestrianpedestrian

Drawing out Hilbre: ‘Accumulate’

Much like tumbleweed attracts and accumulates material, so do I as an artist, Accumulate experiences, techniques, influences and understanding of the world. In this globe shaped structure they merge and fuse together into an ever evolving entity.

A warp and a weft is made up of freshly harvested willow, organically interlaced through the found metal structure. Into which I start to weave a variety of found and created materials through the uneven grid. The strips of fabric are extracts from my experiences as an artist, not just of being on Hilbre, but the events leading up to and what I will eventually take away or leave behind.

I often keep any selvedges or offcuts of fabric from various projects as well as the edges of paintings. They are intriguing to me because what deems them worthy of discarding, is what makes them worthy of keeping and using in a different way. They are not bound by intention. Their arbitrariness translates as honesty, and the stories they tell are not polluted by self consciousness. I secure them to the structure by hand stitching. The imperfect nature of each stitch akin to a person’s handwriting or of an artist’s gesture or touch.

As I sat in the Buoymaster’s house on the island watching for seals out of the window, I wondered about all the women that had sewn in that room before, they might have sewn fishing nets, work clothes or even a family tree, with far greater dexterity than myself.

The slithers of fabric and photos interwoven, form a rapidly solidifying sphere. A shape that is important to me particularly in this setting embodying the circularity of nature most pertinently in the ebb and flow of the tides and waves, their endless movement and change, each the opposite of another, interdependent and uncontrollable.

Jo Eyles
@the_joy_perspective

Jo is a visual artist, DJ and educator based in Liverpool. As a keen advocate for both the arts and social justice, she enjoys engaging with and empowering communities through her practice. Her mixed media approach embraces drawing and painting, photography, print, collage, textiles, and sculpture. She combines expressive use of pattern, form and colour with experiments in a diverse range of materials, endeavouring to limit the environmental impact of her work by using sustainable and recycled materials wherever possible, including recycled cardboard boxes, fabric remnants, and household waste.

Much of Jo’s recent work centres around humanity’s place within the universe and its impact upon Earth’s ecosystems. She has given her series of environmentally-conscious artworks titles with double meanings that examine the connection between humans and the natural world, and ask us to question how we can develop a more symbiotic relationship with our surroundings and the planet as a whole.

Jo currently juggles the various strands of her creative practice with being a full-time educator and busy parent. Work on Hilbre has enabled her to connect with nature and enjoy solitude, to sink into the natural rhythms of light and tide that govern the archipelago, and to work in harmony with the landscape, developing an understanding of the inherent qualities of the natural materials found there.

Her new work examines the spaces in between: spaces found between layers of rock or across the sands that connect each of the islands, spaces in time between the cycle of tides, and the spaces for reflection that allow Jo to balance her role as a working mother with that of an artist. She explores themes that relate to both motherhood and the nature found on Hilbre: fertility, growth, nurture, protection, vulnerability, erosion, strength and resilience.

Jo invites you to join her on Sunday 3rd August for a short walk to gather natural materials for a mark-making workshop.

For more information
To learn more about the Drawing out Hilbre project and the other artists who are working in residence there in summer 2025, please visit the BADA website.

The Giant’s Blankets: Storytelling at St Helens StoryFest

1 February, 202525 June, 2025 | Claire

This February half term I’m performing The Giant’s Blankets at the St Helens StoryFest. The work has previously been shared at Barnsley Libraries, The Turnpike Gallery and in schools and this time comes to Eccleston Library in St Helens on 20th February 2025.

Claire, w white woman with short brown hair is dressed in a brown jumpsuit, with blue blankets over her shoulders and leg. One blanket flies into the air as she spreads her arms wide.

The Giant’s Blankets is a 25 minute storytelling performance for families with children aged 4-8yrs, brought to life using a collection of blue blankets which transform into crashing clouds and twisting tornadoes. The giant uses her blankets to make a hammock that rescues a cyclist, a tent to protect an engineer and a sling for a baby; and the blankets make a space for a wonderful community picnic when everyone returns to thank the helpful giant who has made some new friends.

I’m really grateful for the support I’ve had with this work, from Wonder Arts who have created opportunities to share it in its development stages, from Kevin Dyer from St Helens Arts in Libraries and Theatre Porto who has supported both the writing and dramaturgy of the piece, and from the funding received in the development stages in 2023.

I invited Angela Wilkinson, a fellow member of Platform Studios to come and photograph a recent rehearsal and some of those photographs are below.

Claire peers out from under many blue blankets that cover her entire body.

Claire cradles a white blanket as though it is a small baby. She has blue blankets over her shoulders and around her neck.

The Eccleston Library performance of the work is currently sold out, but if you’re interested in The Giant’s Blankets coming to your venue, school or library, please get in touch.

Kevin Dyer and Claire Weetman in rehearsal.

Photography: Angela Wilkinson
Dramaturgy and mentoring: Kevin Dyer
Development funding: St Helens Borough of Culture 2023 open grants
Development workshops with thanks to the participation of: Buzz Hub, Thatto Heath Primary Schools, St Thomas of Canterbury Primary School.

Poster for St Helens StoryFest, 15th - 22nd February 2025 showing images from the planned performances, prices and a link to a BSL version of the information.

Emergences – Artworks with Potential

24 September, 20241 October, 2024 | Claire

by Rebecca Ainsworth, Joao Coelho, Gee Collins, Lucy Davies, Jeff Gilgannon, Cate Glasson, North West Miners Heritage Association, Claire Weetman, Angela Wilkinson.

Event space 1, Haydock Street, St Helens, WA10 1DH
Thursday 26th September 2024 18:30-22:00 VIP launch event
Saturday 28th September 11:30-17:30 as part of the SUN STREET SOCIAL PARTY
Other times by appointment.

What does a connected community of ideas look like? What are St Helens artists creating that could grow into thoughtful, beautiful work? “Emergences” showcases the work of nine artists who live and work in the town, highlighting their potential.

Brought together in the space of a fortnight, these artists represent the area’s existing infrastructure and networks. Rebecca Ainsworth, Gee Collins and Claire Weetman, all from Platform Studios, have previously worked with Kindred LCR on plans for a secure future for artists studios amid the Town Centre redevelopment. Angela Wilkinson, also a Platform Studios member, Jeff Gilgannon and Joao Coelho have received support through St Helens Arts in Libraries’ Artists Together programme. Lucy Davies is a recent graduate from the BA (hons) Graphic Design University Centre St Helens; Cate Glasson is a resident glassblower at the creative hub that is The World of Glass; and North West Miners Heritage Association are one of the many active community organisations who connect the arts to the people and stories of St Helens.

Each of the works in the show connect to the title, Emergences. The idea that creative work, like a germinating seed, begins in one form that contains the research, the processes and energy to grow into something bigger. Explore how the artists’ works connect to each other and how the town, its people and resources can create a nurturing environment for creative ideas like this to flourish.

About the venue:
Kindred LCR in partnership with St Helens Borough Council have taken over the old Catapult building on Haydock Street (rounding the corner into Bickerstaffe Street) to create ‘Street and a Half’ (SnA). Event space 1 is a unit that shows the current space and its potential to be part of a new home to help socially-trading organisations (STOs) and makers grow.

Credits:
Venue and funding support: Kindred LCR
Projection mapping and equipment: Focal Studios
Glass blowing facilities and production expertise: Marcin Czepiga and The World of Glass
Exhibition producer: Claire Weetman
Poster and marketing design: Gee Collins

For more information or to book an appointment to see the show, contact Claire.

About the artists:

Rebecca Ainsworth presents a large graphite rubbing taken from the floor of The World of Glass hot glass studio. The image is a trace of the creative process of the glass blowers and transforms a stage in Rebecca’s process of creating paintings into a large-scale drawing that marks the layers, echoes and human imprints on places.

Rebecca Ainsworth: *The home of the green molten glass*, Graphite rubbing on paper

Joao Coelho creates detailed dioramas that capture the rustic, weathered beauty of hidden nooks and the eerie charm of an abandoned alley. Every detail, from the cracked walls to the rusty shutters, tells a story of forgotten urban history in miniature form. Exhibited in this space that is between past and present uses, with its own marks of deterioration and potential Joao wants to connect with others as he develops his creative passion.

Joao Coelho: *Echoes of the Inferno*, Mixed Media

Gee Collins is an artist and artworker. They create art with other people, support creative activity, ask lots of questions and listen to people’s answers. With a bit of luck this means creating spaces for justice, challenging and expanding learned ideas of what the world is allowed to look like.

Gee Collins: *And yours*, Engraved mirror and glass

Lucy Davies produced a series of two-colour risograph and lino prints of shop buildings in and around the town centre of St Helens as part of her recent degree show. Some of these shops such as Burchall’s Bakery are well loved and still in use, others wait, frozen in time until they are demolished. Lucy’s printmaking helps us to remember the people and stories behind these locations and to appreciate the interesting features and architecture that surrounds us.

Lucy Davies: *Flip in St Helens*, Flip Book and *Burchalls, Top Nails, Charity Shop, Jordan’s Employment Agency*, Risograph prints.

Jeff Gilgannon and Angela Wilkinson are collaborating on a project called “Our Town”, creating amazing images which present the regeneration in a way which engages the local community and attempts to cultivate a positive view of the town, both now and in the future. They aim to showcase the town’s changing places and architecture and its changing population in unique perspectives which creates enthusiasm for the transformation and strengthens community bonds.

Cate Glasson is a glassblower at The World of Glass who was moved by the history of The Wood Pit Disaster in 1878 to create an installation of glass bells that can sound out for every man and boy that perished giving a light filled ringing voice to those whose lives ended prematurely in the dark and horror below ground that day. Each bell is engraved with a person’s name from the NMRS list of lives lost, connecting family names to people who live in the Borough today.

Cate Glasson with Marcin Czepiga: *Wood Pit Bells*, Hand blown and engraved glass

North West Miners Heritage Association and their resident artist Jim Housley create replica Pit Banners that celebrate the heritage and communities of former mining areas in St Helens. These banners are used in place of the, now delicate, originals that reside in archive collections to celebrate and remember the spirit and culture of St Helens past mining communities. NWMHA aspires to become a centre of excellence in the production of these banners.

North West Miners Heritage Association: *Clock Face Colliery Banner*, Textile.

Claire Weetman presents ‘Constellations of Kindness’ a geodesic dome, pin-pricked with illustrations from the adapted story of Hoshi and the Lucky Stars, about the power of a community working together. Works incorporating storytelling performances are a new avenue for Claire in her varied work as an artist, educator and producer of community-engaged projects.

Claire Weetman: *Constellations of Kindness*, Pin pricked card and audio.

The Giant’s Blankets – Barnsley Library

A person stands on a hillside, with their outstretched arms covered in patterned blue blankets that blow in the wind.

28 June, 202428 June, 2024 | Claire

I’ve been working on something a bit different lately. During the creation of The Many Uses of a Blanket project in 2021/2022 lots of beautiful exchanges happened between a wide range of people and the blankets – they were gifted to a cold baby at a charity football match, they comforted a member of the public who fell outside one of the exhibitions, we’ve had picnics on them and brought colour and comfort to lots of public arts events. As a result of this I decided that there was a story to tell. So with a lot of support I’ve written it, and worked out how to bring that story to life by using the blankets.

In The Giant’s Blankets, a lonely giant shelters from the storm under a mountain of blankets. Travelling two giant steps at a time, she secretly gifts her blankets of kindness and care to people and animals in the town, but nobody notices the giant. The audience travels with the giant through the storm to a place where she eventually feels part of a community. At the moment, I am the performer, bringing this story to life using the Giant’s Blankets which transform into crashing clouds and twisting tornadoes; the giant uses her blankets to make a hammock that rescues a cyclist, a tent to protect an engineer and a sling for a baby; and the blankets make a space for a wonderful community picnic when everyone returns to thank the helpful giant who has made some new friends.

On a beautifully sunny weekend in June, Barnsley Libraries invited me to come and share the story of the Giant’s Blankets to their family audiences as part of their programme of Refugee Week events. The two performances were followed by a stay and play activity where we built dens, created fuzzy felt blankets and enjoyed the colouring sheets.

Magical – it was a lovely performance, really creative and imaginative.

Really enjoyable. My daughter who is 3 was fully enjoying the story and loved the den building

The Giant’s Blankets has been developed so far with generous support from Wonder Arts in the form of rehearsal space, advice and arranging scratch performances; Kevin Dyer as mentor and dramaturg; R&D funding from St Helens Council Borough of Culture grants; Thatto Heath Primary School and Buzz Hub who took part in workshops to develop and test the story and St Thomas of Canterbury and St John Vianney Primary schools who have both hosted scratch performances of the work.

I’m hoping to develop the project further, if you’re interested in hosting a performance and activity, or can support the development of the work, please get in touch.

Finding Solitude – an exhibition of drawings

31 January, 202431 January, 2024 | Claire

Venue:
The Coffee Stop Café, St Mary’s Market, St Helens, WA10 1AR
1st February – 30th March 2024
9am-5pm Monday – Saturday

You can also view the works in an online space if you are unable to make an in person visit to St Helens.
View the exhibition in an online space here

Claire Weetman presents a collection of drawings of chairs that invite you to sit down, but that time to rest alone is just out of reach.

This collection of pencil drawings, created by Claire in 2023 and 2024, began by thinking about how time alone either physically or mentally is difficult to achieve as a parent. Chairs are perched precariously on branches or balanced on top of a tottering tower of bins that need emptying. The chairs are inviting, you’d quite enjoy that seat for yourself, but ultimately, all of these chairs and their offer of rest are unusable.

Each chair is based on a real chair. Three of them were seen abandoned outside while walking to school with her children. Other drawings feature real chairs that have been moved to a more surreal setting to elaborate on the feeling of never being able to find time alone.

Claire started making this series of drawings during an artist residency in 2023 with Wild Rumpus and (M)other Collective, where she and a group of artist-mothers stayed in the woods for 4 days. While sitting on an old wooden dining chair in the middle of a field she read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. In that book he compares familiar landscapes with the maternal body. “There is no other place of which one can say with such certainty that one has already been there.” Within these drawings, Claire has aimed to capture the familiarity of a chair and to set it in a location that we feel we might have visited. But within each drawing there is some barrier, either physical or emotional, that prevents us from sitting down in peace.

Finding Solitude - never disconnected. A pencil drawing of a wooden chair in a field of long grass. A telegraph pole is visible in the distance.

Finding Solitude - precarious balance. A wooden chair with an arched back support is balanced high up in the branches of a tree.

The original drawings are available to purchase at a cost of £150 each, and prints will be available at a cost of £15 each. Please use the contact form on Claire’s website if you wish to make a purchase.

We Reside* Here

29 November, 202316 January, 2024 | Claire

As the lead artist for Artists Together – the artist development strand of work for St Helens Libraries and Arts NPO – I’ve been working on a programme of work during 2023 called Reside*

During 2023 St Helens has been the Liverpool City Region Borough of Culture, so for this creative year the programme was built around this thought:

“What if every artist who is RESIDEnt in St Helens was recognised as an artist-in-RESIDEnce for the year?”

We started the year with a pop up exhibition at The World of Glass that mapped the locations of artists around the borough and shared what they were planning on working on during the year. Following opportunities for artists to get help with funding, planning and commissions, opportunities to make work together, 1-2-1 feedback from curators and producers and chances to share ideas with each other, we have arrived at the end of the year and the production of We Reside* Here.

We Reside* Here is both a publication and exhibition that maps and showcases the work of over 60 artists in St Helens. The document features a map, illustrated by Cady Davies and with graphic design by Karen Hitchcock, that places each artist in the area of St Helens that they are based, showing our audience that artists aren’t rare beings, only to be found in the big cities of Liverpool and Manchester. These artists are our neighbours, the people you meet on the school run, the folks standing at the bus stop, and they are only a small proportion of the people who bring light, colour, stories and the joy of creativity into St Helens.

As well as mapping some of the artistic population, the We Reside* Here document provides guidance to artists. There are examples of how a number of artists are making their work, designed to provide inspiration and support to other artists seeking to develop. A list of organisations who support people’s creativity features, along with a breakdown of what the process of Reside* was during 2023, so that other artists can pick this up and make new work in the future.

The exhibition that accompanies We Reside* Here is installed at St Mary’s Market in the large event space from 25th November – 20th December. This features an installation of the map, with its cardboard-cut-out style illustrations and showcases the work of many of the 60+ artists, whilst signposting audiences to other works that exist in locations around the town.

Reside_onscreeninfopack Download

ResideMap-only Download

Artists Together and We Reside* Here is supported by

The Art of Motherhood: An Exhibition of Resilience and Strength

3 October, 20233 October, 2023 | Claire

Saturday 7th October 2023, 11am-7pm, Sunday 8th October 2023, 12-4pm.
Stretford Public Hall, Chester Road Stretford M32 0LG

Three of my Finding Solitude drawings that were created during a residency with (M)other Collective at Wild Rumpus’ Whirlygig Woods in July 2023 and my Landing Lights window blind feature in this exhibition in October 2023. The exhibition showcases art, photographs, music, recorded histories and performance that capture the experiences of mothers during World War II and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The opening event on 6th October features a special performance by the cast of Motherhood Unscripted of scenes and songs from the show, as well as a drinks reception with nibbles.

This exhibition is part of Mothers in Crisis: Then & Now, a two-year-long creative heritage project delivered by enJOY arts with mothers from across Trafford. Delivered with support from Stretford Public Hall and the People’s History Museum.

Constellations of Kindness – Thatto Heath Primary school

2 October, 202328 September, 2023 | Claire

I tested out a few new things for my Constellations of Kindness work this month. I’ve developed how the project can connect with themes within school, using a selection of prepared images to tie in with the school’s Around the World themed week. Two Y5 classes worked with me to create two globe structures that you can fit your head inside and are now installed in the school library.

Black circles of card hang in front of a window. Words are written on each card with tiny pin holes that form the letters. Fragments of words meaning peace, love, and kindness in english, polish, arabic, french and japanese can be seen.

We also took an opportunity to develop mass participation with the pin-pricking technique with 11(!) KS2 classes, which required a busy night for the Cricut machine that cuts out all the shapes. The whole of the juniors of this 3-form entry school heard the story of Hoshi and the legend of the lucky stars, before returning to class with instructions on how to make their own mini constellation of kindness. A selection of words about kindness and community were translated into the languages of the countries being studied, plus the languages spoken in school and each child was able to create their pin-pricked contribution to the community installation. The result is a window installation of approximately 300 circular constellations, all connected and suspended from each other.

A black background has drawings made of dots of light. Drawings include a happy cartoon-like frog, the Japanese flag, a silhouette of a figure holding hands and the word Japan.

One of the classes I worked with were studying Japan, and whilst hanging these, they felt like fortunes, blessings or hopes for the future that might be found in a Shinto shrine. I think there could be something in this process for when I hopefully expand the project into one with the wider community.

Thanks to Thatto Heath primary for the space to try this out.

George Groves Sound Heritage project

29 September, 202328 September, 2023 | Claire

During summer 2023 I’ve worked with Dave Bixter and Rebecca Ainsworth to deliver a project with Buzzhub St Helens. This is a collaboration where art, history, and innovation converge, in the creation of a mesmerising film that celebrates the legacy of the pioneering Hollywood sound engineer, George Groves who was born in St. Helens.

A table has artworks and sculptures laid out on a black cloth.

The creative workshops have offered Buzz Hub’s film club participants the chance to delve into experimental music-making, sound recording and editing, musical and visual collages, etching into wax disks, and the captivating world of film-making. The result? An enthralling 6-minute film that weaves together ambient and abstract sounds and visuals, all born from the very heart of these workshops. Alex, a member of Buzz Hub’s film club said, ‘I really enjoyed working with Dave, making music and putting together different sounds, it was just amazing!’

Artwork is laid out on a table, viewed from above. The artworks are circular discs with gold engravings, vinyl records and record sleeves with collaged images over them.

The project pays homage to George Groves in a way that not only honours his contributions but also ignites a spark of inspiration and creativity in the hearts of our community,” The film was unveiled during a Heritage Open Day event at St Helens Town Hall in September 2023 and can also be viewed below. Soon, some of the artefacts created during the workshops will also be on public display at Lucem House Community Cinema alongside their existing mural that marks Groves’ achievements.

This project was made possible by National Lottery Heritage Fund as part of ‘Creative Underground’, a two-year heritage project coordinated by St Helens Libraries & Archive Service.

Chester Contemporary Schools Programme

The base of a glass cabinet has small books made from paper that are printed with colourful architectural shapes and feature words including "quote, stage, performance, feel good"

28 September, 202328 September, 2023 | Claire

Chester Contemporary is a new visual arts event curated by artist Ryan Gander. For the Contemporary, international and Chester-based artists, emerging talent, and the city’s people have been invited to make and show work for Chester’s unique places and spaces, inspired by the theme ‘Centred on the Periphery’.

I’ve been working on the schools programme as part of this new festival with Mickle Trafford Village Primary School creating ‘The City Unfolds’

Chester’s city centre is characterised by its secret passageways, hidden staircases, buildings on multiple levels and interesting places to be discovered. Year 5 pupils from Mickle Trafford Village School have shared some of their favourite places and studied the architecture of the city with artist Claire Weetman to create artist-book sculptures combining paper folding techniques, printing and poetry.

A black wood framed glass cabinet is painted deep purple inside. Suspended inside are snaking shapes made from coloured paper.

Two sculptures made from coloured paper - one is arch shaped, the other like a wheel laying flat on a shelf. Reflections of the city can be seen in the glass of the cabinet that they are in.

Inspired by both Claire’s artist-book practice and Unfurled, a University of Chester exhibition at the Grosvenor Museum (which ran until 2 July), the class have explored how to use the text, images and storytelling that can be found in books. They’ve combined these book-making elements to create their own sculptural artwork that reminds us of places in the city, including Chester Cathedral, the Rows, the Walls, dance and musical performances, the sound of food being served at the new market, and their top tips for the best pancakes in Chester! Their work can be seen in the display case outside Waterstones on Eastgate Row.

Thanks to the staff and pupils of Mickle Trafford Village School, Mickle Trafford, Cheshire.

Find out more about Chester Contemporary here