SATURDAY 12th OCT 2024
Word and Renaissance One Present:
Resilience and Progressing Your Artistic Practice
With Valda Jackson MBE RWA and Melanie Abrahams FRSA Hon FRSL
A conversational and practical space to think, plan and connect
Attenborough Arts Centre, Lancaster Road, Leicester, LE1 7HA
1-3pm PWYF
Join us for a gorgeous afternoon celebrating and marking Black History Month - and kicked off by this very special and open to all workshop salon, focused on developing resiliance and artistic practice - and led by the acclaimed Valda Jackson MBE RWA and Melanie Abrahams FRSA Hon FRSL
This workshop salon is for artists and creatives who are keen to address and to evolve their resilience, as part of progressing their career and practice. Within a space of solidarity, we will ask questions of ourselves that we may not often have the time or opportunity to think about. As part of the conversation, we will focus on what tools, mindset and habits we need to incorporate within our working and everyday lives.
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ABOUT THE FACILITATORS
MELANIE ABRAHAMS FRSA Hon FRSL - has been instigating and creating spoken word and literature for over 20 years, as a curator, producer, mentor, and a speaker. She has brought artists and speakers over to Leicester and the UK including Gary Younge, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Bernardine Evaristo and John Agard. She consistently pushes for greater diversity in the arts through events, limings and spaces for wellbeing.
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VALDA JACKSON MBE RWA - is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, and a writer. Valda explores the psychology of migration, identity, and loss. She makes work about our human existence and survival – themes which extend themselves into her public art commissions.
Designer of the Royal Mint coin commemorating the 75th anniversary of Windrush generations, released in 2023, Valda was also shortlisted for the prestigious National Windrush Monument commission in 2021. Her large-scale billboard, Still Holding On (3), commissioned by the RWA, Bristol, was exhibited in the Arts Council, Collection Exhibition: Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City 2023. Valda’s untitled manuscript, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Bath Spa Prize 2021 by Janklow & Nesbit. She is a Hawthornden Literary Fellow – with short stories appearing in anthologies including The Book of Bristol, Comma Press (2023), online MMXX, Bath Spa University (2022), The Peepal Tree Book of Caribbean Short Stories (2018), Closure: Contemporary Black British Short Stories (Peepal Tree Press 2015).
Valda’s long- term collaborative public art practice, Jackson and Harris, is currently commissioned By Peabody at St Johns Hill in Clapham, London, for a series of public sculptures integrated into the architecture. Phase one, completed in 2017 won the Public Sculpture and Statues Association (PSSA) Marsh award for excellence in public sculpture.
