Everything is in bloom

Hello everyone! Spring greetings from the Works-in-Progress Artists Collective, thanks for your interest.  We write this during a  wonderful run of good weather in this part of the world, and it is very hard to sit by a computer so we will keep it short for you as well.  

We have begun, plants and humans alike, to emerge blinking into the sun.  The outdoors has become more welcoming, and we have begun to gather and stretch our dormant social muscles.  We enjoyed having a presence in the community via the Neighbour-to-Neighbour Spring Clothing Swap/ Ringing in Spring event held in Midtown Toronto in April, and since then we have met as a collective for a work party and plan another one for early July.   Work parties are NOT an oxymoron; various work+social experiments run throughout this newsletter as we plan our summer.  Marnie Saskin is heading up an art destruction/rebirth potluck party in Hamilton at the end of this week, and we have been invited as a collective to take part in a Work themed show at the Art Gallery of Burlingham in August/September, along with another round of Back-to-School swaps and some more potential workshops and events with new playmates are in the works for the fall. Read on and we will tell you what we know, and join us THIS SATURDAY or July 4th if you can. 

Work parties are not new to us - as a collective, we prefer to meet while sharing skills or working on a project - but May 29th was our first work party prepping material for upcoming events!  Flag bunting and T-shirt bags for swaps and other community events were the day’s projects. WiP member Shams el-Din Rogers hosted 4 of us in her backyard in east end Toronto and provided some of the tools she had invested in to make masks en masse in the early months of the pandemic, including an Accuquilt Die Cutter with pennant die, which allowed us to cut multiple flags at once and make some very fancy bunting!

The benefits of a work party? It is a very good way to get to know each other, share skills and make things, and really suits our vibe. We learn approaches from each other, access new tools and techniques, wax philosophical on best use of waste, eat snacks. 

The results? We did NOT get through the entire stash of fabric, but we did find homes for a lot of it. And we did not make bags. We made a few lines of bunting and were able to take it for a test outing a few weeks later. (more on this below)

We are doing it again on July 4th, please reach out via email if you would like to take part: works.in.progressto@gmail.com.  Space is limited but we would welcome a few more hands.

We’ve been invited to participate (by way of metres and metres of bunting! yay!) in the upcoming three-part exhibition series The Future of Work, formed as sites of continual research on the labour markets, essential work, equity, and mobility. On from August 26 - December 31, 2022 the exhibition will feature artists and cultural producers who work within solidarity economies, focus on mutual aid, actively work against competitive forms of growth, and who formulate anti-capitalist methods and strategies around worker ownership, peer-to-peer, gift economies, cooperatives, community-governance, financial justice, and climate justice reform.

Parallel Economies, curated by Suzanne Carte, will be the part shown at the AGB and will explore emerging and established parallel economies, radical new forms of production and alternatives to the ways in which industrial sectors exploit resources and workers, including Justseeds, Christina Battle, GUDSKUL, Derya Akay, Gendai Gallery, Jen Delos Reyes, Gabrielle O’Hirondelle Hill, and community members such as the craft guilds of the region, gardeners, historians, and students of the School of Labour Studies at McMaster.

The AGB is also hosting an opening event on Saturday August 27th in the afternoon and Works-in-Progress has been invited to host a swap or free-material market in the space. There will also be a family-parade hosted by Clay and Paper Theatre downtown, open studios, Justseeds silkscreen demos and banner-making, food, and drink.

We will be coordinating more collaborative bunting making - July 4th work party, anyone?

One of the fun things about running into other makers is that moment of recognition - that glimmer/spark/fireworks of craft and art that goes off when you start chatting about your loves.

Through our work with this collective and long before, it has become a way of life to seek new uses for waste, and to avoid buying new when we can repurpose something old. There is enough already.  It doesn't have to be hard, it can just mean reimagining how to make do with what you have.  Here are a couple of examples: 

For our bunting, Shams found a bag of twill that had been cut up into short lengths for mask ties, but was not useful for that purpose anymore.  So instead of using bias tape or twine, she sewed these short bits of waste fabric together into string. 

Leah found a new use for bits of T-shirt yarn from another project: wrapping around uncomfortable flip flop straps as padding- fashionable and comfortable!