What’s your connection to Barley Twist? What makes this lovely Notts pub suitable to host a community drawing space?
I did my dissertation on the importance of community spaces. The original plan was to get my former life drawing group to be a university society – obviously at university you’ve got instant access to their resources but if you’re not at university, you don’t have that, so these spaces are so important. They’re a form of community for so many people and basically, without pubs and clubs, our art group wouldn’t have existed. It was a social club first, and then we had the two pubs give us free function room hire.
The Barley Twist is a lovely little pub based in a very historic building near the train station. They host an extraordinary array of community events ranging from pub quizzes, vinyl record nights and books clubs. It’s a mutually beneficial thing to support a community venue. The brewery tends to be very supportive of community and charity as well, which is another thing we want to support. So, it’s a win win!
Your ‘bring and share a craft’ social is in aid of Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust, the county’s leading conservation charity – why do you want to use Not(t) Art as a platform to support this charity?
During my university degree. I studied social sciences, and my number one interest was community spaces, community engagement, and lifelong learning. But a secondary interest was conservation volunteering. Some of the stuff that’s going on with the Wildlife Trusts and catchment trusts is absolutely amazing – the rewilding and the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust runs a place called Idle Valley, which is basically a coalmine they’ve turned into a wildlife haven. To get the support for something like that is brilliant and very valuable for future generations.
Finally, what do you hope for the future of Not(t) Art Collective?
We’re launching our life-drawing from the end of May. We are currently having a rethink of what we are going to offer… This project is partially with students in mind, but we are also looking at doing two bi-weekly bring your own art and craft sessions.
But I hope we’ll attract more people who have never done art before! Perhaps they’ll try some portrait drawing or life drawing, or any arts and crafts we’ve got going on that particular session, and that they will enjoy it and they’ll hopefully keep doing it! Just like I did when I first went into that community centre fifteen years ago. And I have been doing art ever since.
