March 2010.  Welcome to Cocoonnections! - a place where you can hear about what I'm up to here at The Creative Cocoon.

As I write this I am preparing for a trip to visit family in Australia. It will be wonderful to visit with my sister, nieces and nephews and my mother. This is a time though when I wish I could wave a magic wand and transport myself there. It is a long, long journey!

The Visible Voices Program is complete. It was an initiative I implented here in Haliburton County connecting senior volunteers with more isolated seniors in our community through artmaking. It was a tremendous success and certainly my sincere thanks go out to the Federal Funders, New Horizons for Seniors, The Arts Council~Haliburton County, Fleming College, and the Haliburton County Development Corporation. Trent University ‘s Ethics Committee approved the research portion of this adventure. And now the Nursing Department and the Geography Department together with U-Links, a community based research group and me are working on the volunteer logs and many incredible art images to answer the question ‘what happens when seniors connect through artmaking. More on this in upcoming Cocoonections! If you would like more information now, please do email me.

I hope this finds you full of the creative spirit. Until next time, be well…

Warmly, Fay.

If you're new to my site, visit the page that tells you about the kinds of things I'm doing and offering.- see my calendar of scheduled workshops, and also about the many workshops I've created for you. If you're looking for something you might have seen on an earlier visit, try the site map. My gallery exhibits my masks, fibre arts and much more

New Work

It is often a challenge to find time to do my own work. So I am always delighted when an exhibition proposal is accepted and I have a deadline to work towards! I am one of the artists in the upcoming exhibition called Beyond Frayed Edges opening March 18th, 2010 at the Agnes Jamieson Gallery in Minden. I have created a new piece, which ended up being called ‘The Council’. It is a combination of silk and soy silk paper, cobweb felt and nuno felt. It was one of those pieces where I thought I knew where I was going, then I ended up somewhere else!

View new work


Adventures

Recently I was contacted by Gilles Gagnon and Nicole Arends to be part of their wonderful Wisdom Speakers Series. You can see me and listen to me at www.thewisdomspeakers.com It was certainly an adventure and had me thinking of what wisdom means to me. Please do take a look and support this most worthwhile project by two extremely talented individuals.

I have been working on the expansion of the pilot program called Visible Voices. In the pilot I worked alone with ten participants. Visible Voices saw ten senior volunteers working one on one with more isolated seniors in our community. The research component will be complete by early summer. It has been an adventure for me combining a coordinator/trainer role with working with my own participant. We laughed, cried and created together. It was an honour and a huge pleasure! She certainly taught me as much as I hope I guided her in her process.  The challenge now is to find ways to sustain this very important work.