Red Wing Arts is pleased to host free artmaking opportunities for community members to learn, experiment with, and experience different techniques and media. Community Saturdays are free and open to all ages to drop in and stay as your schedule allows. All materials are provided.
PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Join us for a drop-in artmaking experience that beckons us to sit, pause, connect - in the tradition of mending circles. Slow stitch connects us with past practices of craft and fiber art and our current needs – the practice of slowing down and engaging in an opportunity to reflect and contemplate intentions and become present to ourselves. No previous stitching or making experience is needed to explore, create, reflect, and play. Slow stitching takes hand-stitching and is integrated with intuitive mark-making or mindful doodling – a thread and needle serve as a line, and the fabric is the paper.
In the craft tradition of fiber arts and stitching, these powerful applications invite us to engage in a technique associated with community, care, and mending. By using simple stitches, techniques and materials, layers, thoughts, and meaning develop over time in your own unique stitching practice and style. The stitches and layers accumulate and evolve as you spend time and connect to your process. The process, the presence of it all, rather than an end product.
Honoring ourselves, giving ourselves permission to create and contemplate with slow-stitching as well as any other expressive media promotes:
Catharsis: The physical release of emotions or stress
Reflection: Becoming attuned to thoughts and feelings
Mindfulness: Becoming aware of all the senses and the present moment
Participants will be provided with printed information that describes the Slow-Stitch process, tips and hints, and basic stitches to take with them.
TEACHING ARTIST BIO: Ann E. Lawton, MS, ATR-BC, is an artist, art therapist, and art educator living and working in River Falls, Wisconsin. She has taught at UW-River Falls since 2011 and currently facilitates in-home art therapy services with neuro-divergent children in the St. Croix Valley of Western Wisconsin. Lawton’s studio practice focuses on mixed media, having had previous collage-intensive artist residencies at BreckCreates in Breckenridge, CO, and at the MERZ Gallery in Sanquhar, Scotland.
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.