Host: Jerome Whittingham

Artist Amy Davis is on a quest to help people embrace wonkiness and imperfection in their creative pursuits.

She’s recently been using some mini potters wheels, and making tiny wonky pots. She explains how these ‘toy’ potters wheels are helping her and others to learn to play with clay again, building creative confidence.

"It’s about celebrating imperfection and all that it’s about. Your creativity doesn’t haver to be perfect, because the moment things become too perfect or people overthink their creative process, that’s when people tend to step away. And I think a lot of the time it’s education, when we were younger, that makes us think that creativity is a scary thing. When in actual fact, if more people were able to embrace the joys of creativity for what it is, rather than perfectionism, I feel that’s when people will get more out of the process," says Amy Davis.

Amy’s now looking to extend her Wonky Pot Initiative, and is looking to partner with venues and organisations in North Staffordshire to help her bring the fun of wonky creativity to more people.

Interested?

Get in touch with Amy on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/alouartist/

https://www.instagram.com/thewpi/

Support the show

Get in touch anytime!

Website: https://thepictureposter.co.uk/

Follow Jerome on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeromewnews

Host: Jerome Whittingham

Anarchy Is Her Birthright, a group exhibition curated by April Star Davis, brings together women and non-binary artists to explore 'resistance, care, survival and feminist refusal, shaped by lived experience and place'.

Presented at ACAVA Spode Works in Stoke, 'Anarchy Is Her Birthright' follows April's residency at ACAVA, awarded as a prize after her success in the Three Counties Open Art exhibition at Burslem School of Art in 2024.

Instagram: @april_star_davis_

Anarchy Is Her Birthright

PREVIEW: 5.30pm, Friday 20th February, ACAVA Spode Works, Stoke, Elenora Street, ST4 1QQ. The exhibition then continues to 1st March.

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Website: https://thepictureposter.co.uk/

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Designer and creative thinker Megan Fitzoliver is co-ordinating a celebration of North Staffordshire's creative and caring individuals, groups, and industries.

The Festival of Hands will take place across Stoke-on-Trent and beyond, 1st to 14th June.

She's looking for expressions of interest from anyone that wants to get involved.

We sat in Spode Rose Garden in Stoke, enjoying a coffee from the Bluebird cafe, chatting about the festival and its themes.

Get in touch with Megan at:

megan@festivalofhands.org.uk

A website will be going live soon too.

Support the show

Get in touch anytime!

Website: https://thepictureposter.co.uk/

Follow Jerome on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeromewnews

We meet Yuliia Holovatiuk-Ungureanu, one of two Ukrainian artists currently exhibiting 'On The Edge' at the University of Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent.

Yuliia talks us through the themes of the exhibition, co-produced with fellow Ukrainian artist and friend Olha Barvynka.

The exhibition explores 'transformation in response to a world shaped by crisis.'

One part of the mixed media exhibition, Yuliia's ceramic bricks, have attracted unwelcome and upsetting attention from a small number of visitors to the Henrion Gallery space - a thoroughfare used by students and visitors to the university. Yuliia updates us about what has been happening.

UPDATE: since recording yesterday morning, the artists’ exhibition in the Henrion Gallery at University of Staffordshire has suffered more vandalism, including the breaking of several of Yuliia’s ceramic bricks. We’ve welcomed both Ukrainian artists into our city to give them safety and a home. They’ve responded in gratitude by giving us incredibly poignant art, adding greatly to our local arts scene. It’s shocking to think that a small number of visitors to the gallery would act in such a vile way to our friends. I hope the police and university exercise their fullest powers in bringing the perpetrators to account.

The exhibition has now had its run extended to 6th March.

Support the show

Get in touch anytime!

Website: https://thepictureposter.co.uk/

Follow Jerome on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeromewnews