By Jill Stocks
There’s lots of activity going on at the minute in Horsforth as organisers and residents join together to create and craft for this year’s Walk of Art weekend.
The Horsforth Walk of Art, being held on the weekend of July 4th and 5th this year, is very much a community led event, and across the town people are making and doing to make this year’s event the best ever.
The first of three community craft sessions took place at Horsforth Museum and Kezia Roberts told us more.
“Every year for the Walk of Art we always make sure there is some sort of community activity that anybody can get involved in. Especially if they’ve never, for example, taken their hands to knitting before then we can help them and show them how to knit so it’s another kind of extension of what we do for the Walk of Art which is helping people access the arts in different ways.
“So today we are making little knitted or crocheted characters because we hide them on the routes for the Walk of Art.
“So we’ve got three routes this year, and along the routes we hide knitted characters so we’ve got little rabbits, and they hark back to our theme as well. Our theme for this year is ‘back to my routes’ so we’ve got root vegetables but then we’ve also got ‘see a rabbit rabbit’ which was the very first activity that we did for the Walk of Art in 2015. And we’re also making bunting as well.”
The event at Horsforth Museum was the first of three such events. Further events will be held at Beyond The Red Door on Sunday, 31 May and Sunday, 14 June, doing similar activities, bringing the community together to contribute to this year’s Walk of Art through craft.
“It’s an opportunity to just all get together as part of the community and make some lovely things for the Walk of Art, so we feel like it’s ours, it’s our event is the Walk of Art, it’s not the organisers, it’s just ours in Horsforth.”
The Walk of Art is based on three routes; green, blue and red. Members of Sisters of Horsforth WI have also joined in making bunting for the three routes along the walk as part of their craft group activities.
Leeds Women’s Aid shop on New Road Side are helping to make the bunting project sustainable by supplying materials that would otherwise be recycled as rags. Horsforth Shed have also supplied wooden shapes which have been distributed to schools and groups for people to use for creative activities.
Returning after a year’s break the Horsforth Walk of Art is a community led creative festival with all sorts of activities going on across the town between 11am and 4pm on both days.
There are more traditional activities such as knitting, embroidery, still life, clay modelling, musical storytelling and choirs. Or try your hand at something different that you may not have tried before such as kanji writing, chalk of art, time travelers activity, skate of art, or cardboard robots. And many many more.
Applications were invited from artists and from homes and businesses who would like to host the artists earlier in the year. Organisers recently met to match artists to venues but the details remain a secret for now.
Horsforth Arts Society will be exhibiting items on the Green and in their rooms a short distance away. There will be a collaboration with Leeds Trinity University. And Horsforth Brewery will be hosting the Walk of Art mini shorts celebration, showing short films, adverts and animations.
Artists will be visiting schools this month and next working with pupils to produce artwork for the High Street galleries which form part of the Walk of Art.
And judges are currently working their way through some of the fantastic submissions from 0-25 year olds across Horsforth for the Walk of Art flag competition.
The Walk of Art recently received £250 funding from the Horsforth Lottery which is a huge help to supporting artists involved in this year’s events.
Kezia explained how the Walk of Art is funded.
“We’re really fortunate that the Walk of Art is funded not from external sources every year. We ensure that the Walk of Art is run by the people of Horsforth for the people of Horsforth and as such all our sponsorship and our grants are sourced within our community as well which is amazing.
“So this year we are very excited that we were given some money by the Horsforth Lottery.
“We’re really really grateful and appreciative of anybody who thinks of Horsforth Walk of Art when they know they’ve got a little bit of money that they can gift and that kind of money can go towards things like materials for artists so then artists can give their time freely but they’re not out of pocket because we’re in a very strange time at the moment.
“Then they can go into schools, they can work with our children in the schools or they can do work as part of the Walk of Art itself and activities as part of the Walk of Art.”
You can find out more about what’s going on and how you can be part of the Walk of Art this year in Horsforth by following their facebook or Instagram page.
If you have a submission for the mini shorts exhibition you can submit it via wetransfer or by email.
- If you would like to donate towards the Walk of Art there is a crowdfunder with any monies raised being used to buy insurance, artists materials and create signage for venues.
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