Showing posts with label arts collective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arts collective. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 10

This blog is moving house!



Our blog is moving to it's new home.  We've been busy busy busy and we've just launched our new website. We're happy with it, and although there will be some inevitable tweaking, it's so nice have all of our pages and galleries and information in one place - finally!  Our letterpress studio, tucked up high in the hills of Northern NSW is purring away each day, creating hand-made objects and products of beauty and use. This really is the main focus of our work place, making beautiful things that have a place in each and every home, things of usefulness and pleasure. As well as printing custom design jobs, we produce a range of hand-printed and assembled letterpress products such as notebooks and gift cards. Our new range of notebooks are coming together this week, they are inspired by the hues of Japan and it's breathtaking textiles;  it's exciting watching every aspect of their design materialising before us. We hand-print our gift cards also, and one by one our designs are rolling of the press and into our online stores and bricks and mortar stockists.  I can't tell you how great it is to be creating everyday and doing precisely what we love.

So from this moment on, all of our blog posts will be published directly from our new website.  It's the spot to visit if you're curious about who we are, where we are and what we do.  We'll be posting about our most recent print jobs, our inspiring clients and the business of making (or trying to make) a living from a creative life.  We will bring you links to people who inspire us in our everyday creative practices, artists who blow our minds, designers who we admire, friends who are toiling away at their own beautiful creative lives and some fine sites and blogs to visit.

We would love you to visit our new online "home" where you can explore our work, find links to our stores and stockists or find info about up and coming workshops. If you do visit be sure to say hi, you can leave a comment on the blog or drop us a note via the contacts page.  We'd love to hear from you.

Sunday, July 1

The Collective Project




Earlier this year I found myself in the company of four creative souls who had formed a new arts collective in my town, Murwillumbah NSW.  It seemed I was the fifth member, and we set about creating community arts events.  As time rolled on our dreams grew bigger and bigger, we envisaged a local arts space that would give the amazing people who live and create here a platform to sell their works, to teach others about tapping into their innate creative talents, to run professional development events for artists and crafter and makers and to be a space where like-minded people could gather.

One of the bigger views was that our arts space could essentially renew or revitalise our CBD. Our hope was that such an inspiring space could breath life into a CBD that was dying.  At last count there were 30 vacant shops in our town, and more and more of these continue to close their doors each week.

We watched as Newcastle's CBD came alive again with the "This is Not Art" campaign and we watched as Lismore's CBD became the host to Pop-Up events, galleries, retail store and open studios.
With these places as inspiring case studies, we hoped that Murwillumbah would embrace this opportunity for change.

We still hope. But it will be a hard race to win.  We still have our dreams for this space, we don't know what form it will take, we don't know if we will get enough support to make it happen straight away - in fact sometimes we feel as if we are holding onto pipe-dreams.

But dreams are meant to be chased and our grand vision may materialise as a tiny boutique space in a hidden laneway or a full store front in main street - we don't know but one thing I do know is that it will take shape, somehow, somewhere and sometime.

I guess that is the beauty of dreams, sometimes they come true.



S U P P O R T    T H E      D R E A M     A N D     M A K E     A     P L E D G E . . .


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