After a relatively long hiatus through lockdown and an exceptionally busy 2023 we thought this year was going to be a little quieter, but by March all that had changed, we suddenly have new exhibiting opportunities both this year and over the coming years at venues new and old and so have dived right into preparing for those.

January - Spring Flowers
We are continuing our series of bi-montly exhibitions at the Oriental Museum in Durham. In January, Alison Lowery tried to get our spirits up by running a fused glass workshop creating spring flowers. We all needed a huge boost after the very long winter, but I have to say my own spring flowers in the garden were much later than usual and were constantly battered by the wind and rain, so a huge thank you goes to Alison for the little pick me up.

March - North African Influences
In March, Maggie ran a collage workshop influenced by North African design. This was run in conjunction with the Oriental Museums, Voices: Contemporary Art & Craft from the Middle East & North Africa. This was such a creative workshop enabling everyone to explore the amazing richness of pattern and colour seen in the arts and crafts of North Africa and the Middle East.
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We are now planning for our future exhibitions. Last year we had 3 major exhibitions. We started at Richmond Station with a second showing of the Elements exhibition previously shown at Locomotion in Shildon.We then spent time working with the collections at Jarrow Hall. These comprised of both a collection of social history material and the objects in the museum at Bede's World, celebrating the life of St Bede. This enabled us to produce an amazing amount of work from different aspects of these collections. We also had the privilege of displaying a number of ceramic works by our late member Carolyn Corfield. Finally we held our winter exhibition at the Witham in Barnard Castle.

We are now in the final stages of preparing for our forthcoming exhibition at the new Changes Gallery in Darlington. We have no theme for this exhibition so again this will be a whole range of styles, subjects and techniques.

We also recently had a planning session at the Oriental Museum in Durham for our forthcoming "Peacocks and Goddesses" exhibition. This will showcase our responses to the theme using exhibits from the museum as our inspiration alongside a retrospective exhibition of the work of Carolyn Corfield. This will run from September 2024 to March 2025 (exact dates to be confirmed).

We also have started thinking about the Traces exhibition at Washington Arts Centre in April 2025. This will be open to interpretation from a whole range of subjects as we Interface members all have different thoughts about this title.  It seems a very long way off but time is flying, it is the end of April already!

After many months of not being able to meet, our Elements exhibition was finally opened on 31st July 2021. The work presented by the artists was varied and included textiles, painting, printmaking, ceramics and glass. The subject matter was as varied as the artistic methods employed in the creation of the works. The opening was accompanied by a wonderful fourpiece band whose music was appreciated by visitors to the exhibition and to the museum alike and was a wonderful opportunity for the artists to come together to share their thoughts and work, and despite having worked in isolation appreciate the cohesiveness of the exhibition.

The concept behind the exhibition lies within the industrial tradition of the North East and how this has informed our ideas and influenced our artistic interpretation of how that industry has affected our region, not just now, but in the past, and how it continues to affect the future of the region, not only in its landscape, but in innovation, research and job opportunities.

The exhibition runs until the 1st October 2021.