So we took part in the second Junction Festival - a festival of contemporary art in Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton on the first weekend of August 2012.  It made a change for us to be making our own work, rather than participatory / collaborative / community work.  Our original plan had been to more heavily embed some oral history into the process, but because of other projects going horribly awry timewise we made the decision to base the piece around one pub visit and my own memories of working at the Clarendon Hotel - a pub directly opposite the site for our installation.

After measuring the site, and thinking long and hard about what we would want to create - street art in the loosest sense, but that stayed true to our love of DIY and craft and drawing and prettiness - we created a rough plan.  We wanted to include a portrait of a regular, some of his words, and we wanted something big and bold and colourful, and hopefully unexpected.  We'd been massively inspired by Mademoiselle Maurice recently, so wanted to use origami again in our work somehow.  In the past we've waxed origami to make it more durable, but we simply didn't have the time to wax hundreds and hundreds of origami pieces, so we decided we would just keep an eye on the installation as it only had to last the weekend and if pieces melted off the wall we would make more and keep topping it up.

The three main elements to the installation were:

1. The regular - made of Black Country Bugles, and very black & white
2. The carpet - despite recent refurbishments and physical changes to the pub, the carpet remains the same - pattern created using bold origami colours
3. My hand / pint glass spilling - made of Grazia and Stylist magazines, all contemporary and feminine and colourful - from here will spill colourful origami that flows into the carpet and connecting to the words coming from the regular's mouth 

It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun.  Installing something in such a public place led to immediate feedback from passersby.  At first they were curious, and kept their distance, but as the piece progressed we had all kinds of people chatting to us or shouting out from across the street.  

A group of young people shouted at us from the other side of the road 'Good job!' and stuck their thumbs up as they walked past.  

A tiny little girl screamed 'SO PRETTY!!!!!' with her mum when she saw the origami. (I gave her and her sister a piece to take away) 

An older man who'd come from the pub came and talked at length about how it brightened up the street and was significantly more pleasing to look at than the plain old hoardings that had been up for years now. 

A visitor from 'up north' said 'if it'd been spraypaint then it would just have been graffiti - but THIS is art!'

A much older couple told us 'there'll always be people who don't like what you're doing, but we think it looks great!'.  

A man on a bike stopped to chat a few times, and really liked what we were doing.  

Two Jamaican guys were very curious about the piece, which led on to conversation about the festival as a whole.  

Some of the other regulars in the pub came over to snap a photo of the regular we'd drawn - they all recognised him!

Deinstalling was a bit heartbreaking.  I was surprised by how much I wanted it to stay up.  The origami had lasted, but was never going to have any longevity - but the wheatpastes were all pristine and looked amazing.  Nonetheless, after the festival was over we spent hours scraping away the artwork and eventually painting over it all.  (LEARNING POINT: it's virtually impossible to scrape wheatpastes off an uneven bobbly surface.  Don't waste your time, just paint over the lot!) This was also an interesting experience, as again we had passersby stopping to ask what we were doing - mostly in dismay.

'Is it the council making you take it down?! They always get rid of the things people love!'

'Why are you taking it down - it's amazing!'

'I'd leave it up if I were you - everyone loves it!'

However, in the meantime, I'm slowly siphoning off images from the week.  I wanted to capture movement and energy from the festival, and feel like this first set does a reasonably adequate job.  It was a workshop run by Wordsmiths - a participating company from Trinidad and Tobago - and they got everybody moving with sticks.

(There's a lot more to come, but this will be a slow and steady process!)

Exciting news to be told includes:

• public art developments
• our first arts & health resource nearing completion
• organisational developments
• ambitions ambitions ambitions
• a forked prong approach to the future!

..and so that this isn't just text, I'll finish this brief update with a random photo of a donkey called Pascoe who we were lucky enough to meet in Sutton Park at the Elizabeth Svendsen Trust - he was born in *1979* and is amazing!  I love organisations that do amazing things, like these guys do. :)

All has been quiet on the Frilly front - we've been keeping our heads down, applying for things like crazy to ensure we make it through the winter, and cracking on with existing projects like the papercut tests mentioned previously. (and, hopefully, we'll have more to show from that in the next couple of weeks!)

In the meantime - we've been continuing our involvement in WMPAF - West Midlands Participatory Arts Forum - which is a group of professionals from across the region meeting semi-regularly to discuss issues within the sector, share best practice, and have a bit of a natter over coffee.  During these meetings, we decided to work towards an event to partially 'launch' the network, and to look at what shape it will take, and also to raise awareness of it.  And so all of that has led towards the above event, 'Direction of Travel'.

More information can be found on the WMPAF site, and booking is essential as places are limited, but it's a free event and there's lunch and a lot of awesome people attending.. so it'll be worth it.  And Frilly will be there - so what other reason do you need to attend?! :)

Playing with vague compositional elements in advance of workshops.  Colours are wrong, but it's just a first test.

So - this may be another one of those ideas, and because of that we don't want to say too much - other than we picked a rogue prompt: "Long-Eared Furry Things".  Our idea was based around collecting 'sightings' of this mythical creature and then make them in 3D using a range of techniques.

To test the idea, we posed the question on Twitter, with about 2 hours worth of turnaround time for responses:

if you're bored this morning, could you draw a quick picture of a "long-eared furry thing" for me? i need any drawings before 11! rt please!

And here's the responses we collected!  What would your Long-Eared Furry Thing look like?

Credits:

1) Ben Waddington - @falsedog

2) Jon Clarke - @goatboyuk

3) Kirsty Hillyer (my partner in crime!) - @kfrilly

4) Ben Waddington (again!) - @falsedog

5) Lee Allen - @leeallenphotos

6) Keith Bloomfield - @hardluck_hotel

7) Paul Gallear - @paulgallear

8) "Quirky Joe" - @QuirkyJoe_

Everybody is welcome and the programme is just being finalised... and there's a LOT going on across the 5 sites - exhibitions, performances, donkey rides, competitions, amazing installations (including a knitted bull!), graffiti workshops, Zumba, and Hunt Emerson (Beano artist) is going to be exhibiting some work and chatting to visitors!  Amazing!