Maker Networking Lunches – February 2017

A big hello and ‘Happy New Year’ to all our creative friends and associated makers! We hope you all had a wonderful break and are feeling excited, inspired and ready for a creative new year!

We thought it was about time we did a blog post on our Maker Networking Lunches. For those that don’t know; Making Space hosts Makers Networking Lunches six times a year; These bi-monthly lunches provide local creatives an opportunity to meet other makers in the area, seek advice, chat through ideas, share knowledge and just get out of the studio for an afternoon.

Please consider this an open invite to any local designers, makers, artists or those working in the creative network, to come along and join us! You can find all the upcoming dates on our website here. Lunches take place on a Tuesday afternoon from 1pm-3pm. Launched in 2014, the lunches have become an enjoyable, regular event on the Making Space calendar and are well received by all who attend.

To ensure the MNL’s remain exciting and interesting, we aim to give each session a different creative focus. By inviting respected individuals from the creative industry to lead a discussion/offer advice/talk about their practice etc, we hope that the sessions will always be evolving and remain engaging. In recent MNL’s there have been some really interesting and current issues discussed and amazing work shared.

The networking lunches are free to attend and there is no need to book a place, just turn up! All we ask is that you bring a dish to share with the group. Making Space will provide tea, coffee and other soft drinks.

The first MNL of 2017 is booked in for 7 February and we’ve invited Sian Hutchings, a sound artist and Jerwood prize winner to lead the session.

Here’s what Sian has to say about her creative practice: “I want my audience to understand the impact that our auditory surroundings have on our behaviour and work, rather than relying on the dominant sense of ‘eye culture’ as a method of navigating experience. 

Especially influenced by R. Murray Schafer, sound theorist, composer and author of the ‘Tuning of the world’ in which, he coined the term ‘soundscape’. I aim to challenge the reliance on the visual and want to ensure that the sound can in turn leads the visual.

“For Kim-Cohen, sound art is an act of reading, of making legible a set of social, institutional, and historical traces. Sonic materiality or perceptual evidence is never the proper content of sound art. “The revelation of phenomena is not enough.” It is never about the sound of the sign, but only its significance.”    (Musicophobia, or Sound Art and the Demands of Art Theory, Kane, B. 2013)

Previously my work has explored compositions based on participants direct response to place, and generating graphic notation that is a signature of the environment that the compositions have been developed in. I have recently started making visual works but with the context of those works based upon the temporal experience of sound within environments, its significance as a sign. It’s a series of paintings in which the ratio of the stretchers depend upon the decibel readings of a space at that moment. Even though the paintings are therefore based upon the acoustic levels of that space, they will always fail to be a truthful representation of sound due to the temporal nature of sound.

Sian has also been nominated by Aspex for the Platform 2016 regional award, you can read more about it here.

If you’re interested in hearing Sian talk about her fascinating work pencil the 7 February, 1-3pm in your diary and join us.

Please feel free to share this event with other makers and make sure you sign up to receive our Makers E-Newlsetter (follow the link on this page) to keep up-to-date future MNL dates and find out who’s been invited along!