Sky Dair

Thursday 18 April 2024
5:30-7:30pm
Humber Street Gallery
£5, booking required

This workshop will focus on how self-publishing can help artists understand their practice and develop the language of work. During the session participants will produce an A3 fold-out zine which investigates your current processes and discusses areas of growth.

(Materials will be provided, but we also welcome you to bring in your own images, notes, and other paper-based materials that you would like to include in the activity).

Sky Dair is a writer, filmmaker and musician from London, completing an MA from Central Saint Martins in 2020 and currently a member of the School of The Damned. Her practice focuses on the presence of catharsis within the acts of making and thinking. She is interested in the intersection between visual, audio and language as a vessel to explore emotion. She is a self-publisher and creates a wide range of her own artist books and zines which are sold within independent bookshops and book fairs in the U.K.

Paola Estrella

Thursday 16 May 2024
5:30-7:30pm
Humber Street Gallery
£5, booking required

Founding member of Diasporas Now, Paola Estrella will discuss the art of collective and cross-disciplinary collaboration. During the workshop participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own practices to identify multiple ways in which working with others could benefit the creative process.

Paola Estrella is a multimedia artist born in Mexico City and based in London. Auto-fiction and self-discovery are central her practice, through which she conveys notions of intimacy, desire, and becoming. Through her work, she explores how new technologies impact the public and the private spheres and reflects on how the imaginary influences social conventions, gender, identity, and our notion of reality. Estrella’s work includes mixed media painting, video, installation, and performance. She has a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in Contemporary Art and studied art direction and mixed media at Central Saint Martins.

David Cleary

Wednesday 12 June 2024
5:30-7:30pm
Humber Street Gallery
£5, booking required

David Cleary is an independent curator based in North Wales whose practice seeks to nurture artistic collaborations between artists and communities. David’s session will draw upon his experience facilitating a range of public programmes in rural and coastal localities to lead an informal group conversation exploring artist-led and social practice.

He is currently Access and Inclusion Officer with Disability Arts Cymru on the Amdani! Conwy project. He was one of the curatorial fellows on the Jerwood Curatorial Accelerator 2022/3, and previously worked as Curator of Learning and Engagement at Mostyn (2021-3), Llandudno, and Learning & Exhibitions Coordinator at Humber Street Gallery (2017-21).

Ashley Holmes

Thursday 4 July 2024
5:30-7:30pm
Humber Street Gallery
£5, booking required

Ashley Holmes is an artist, DJ and broadcaster working with sound, drawing and collaborative projects. His practice is centered around social, historical and relational knowledges and the multi-layered meanings of stories, words and sounds within Black music, writing and performance.This session will explore methods of creative practice in relation to Ashley’s work.

Ashley has hosted Tough Matter, a monthly show on NTS Radio since 2017. He is also a resident on Mondo Radio and at No Bounds Festival. He facilitates Open Deck, a series of gatherings started in 2018, giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University.

Past workshops

Emma B Fox

Thursday 4 April 2024
5:30-7:30pm
Humber Street Gallery
£5, booking required

Artist Emma B Fox will deliver a food-based session exploring the art of hosting and community building. She will draw upon her experiences working in Leeds as a ‘Mom’ with Party Mom Society, and documenting, producing, and performing in alternative/inclusive nightlife spaces that center around non-conforming Queer experiences.

Currently Emergent Artist-in-Residence at The Baltic, studio holder at Convention House, co-host of Social Art Network Leeds, and member of DISrupt, Emma Bentley Fox is a socially-engaged arts practitioner, with a multi-disciplinary approach to art-making. Her practice centers around community building and collaborative working to generate moments of joy, healing, intimacy and kinship.