Putting Down Roots

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Northern Ireland Science Festival 2023

Putting Down Roots: Making Nature at Home 

A workshop for families who would like to learn more about organic gardening and how to cultivate biodiversity in their home gardens. Making nature is an opportunity to craft a family garden that is imaginative, ecological and makes nature a part of everyday family life. Family gardens are an outdoor studio where everyone’s nature has a place to be cultivated and tended. A family garden is a living art installation and a place to grow.

Make Yourself at Home

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Makings: A Journal Researching the Creative Industries 

Make Yourself at Home: Home Studios as Pedagogical Practice 

Pamela Whitaker and Chris McHugh

Make Yourself at Home

Our belongings may be comforting and reassuring or associated to clutter as a mélange of material miscellany. The bits and pieces of our lives are brought together as a form of storytelling. These items may be a combination of functional objects, bric-a-brac, heirlooms, trinkets, souvenirs, handmade artworks and the ephemera of possessions in general—no object is excluded, and all material contributions are welcome in the production of home. This is a case study of a joint teaching venture between the subject areas of ceramics and art psychotherapy at the Belfast School of Art, that situates making at home as a centrepiece for pedagogical practice.

The Walking Studio

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ESRC Festival of Social Science

The Walking Studio: The Art of Urban Exploration was a joint outreach and experiential art and urban design workshop led by Pamela Whitaker and Saul Golden (Ulster University, Northern Ireland). The event was composed of art and urban design methodologies involving walking conversations and techniques with members of the public on a tour of Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter cultural district.

The walk offered participants an opportunity to explore art galleries and sites of urban art, aiming to imagine Belfast as a canvas for creative living. The event included critical observations and discussions about the inclusion, diversity and at-times appropriation of art in the built environment, and the impacts of art in the public realm on individual/collective wellbeing. Participants created portable artworks as part of their journey through activities curated in public spaces.