Category: Community
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The Generosity of Makers
A reflection on being a generous artist and being part of generous communities A second essay copied over from Substack, where I am taking part in a summer essay-writing challenge hosted by Beth Kempton. This week’s prompt was Generosity. This is not the writing I planned over the course of this week. This is not…
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Stitching Emotions: call for contributions
Stitching Emotions is a new contributory project to make a piece for a large fabric book to be exhibited in my exhibition ‘Mary Linwood: Art, Stitch & Life’ in Sept 2025. We don’t know Mary Linwood’s feelings about her embroidery practice but she must have loved stitching. Women’s experiences in history are rarely recorded and…
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Worn Stories for Refugee Week
To mark Refugee Week, I’m sharing a project from last summer where Mandeep Dhadialla and I worked with a wonderful group to create a large hand-bound book of textile-inspired artworks. I’ve just had new images taken of the book and it has now been returned to the British Red Cross in Leicester who we worked…
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When public engagement is not very engaging
This morning I gave up two hours to go to a nature recovery strategy residents consultation workshop. I left feeling deeply frustrated by the lack of clarity on the strategy and what input we could have and by the poor way it was run. It’s reminded me just how valuable public engagement skills are and…
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Creating Together
In the latest episode of my podcast Making Meaning, I talked about co-creation, which I define as making artworks with others. I’ve put together a page of some of the highlights of my co-creation work too. It really is an important part of my practice, and that’s not changing this year – I have several…
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Making Meaning Podcast Episode 39 Artist Support Recipes
In this last conversation of series three, I’ve brought together five members of a group called Artist Support Recipes. A couple of years ago I brought together a group of artists to explore thoughts and ideas about artist support and development. We had some funding to meet for a year and put together some resources…
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People Who Get What You Do
One of the biggest challenges I hear about in my mentoring work and other conversations with artists is about understanding your own creative practice through talking to others who get it. We all need to be able to share our ideas, confusions, challenges and talk through how to make sense of all the stuff floating…
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Sharing Worn Stories
This weekend is re/action festival in Leicester city centre, where you can see our recent community project artwork, Worn Stories. Over the last few months, me and Mandeep Dhadialla have been working with a group of lovely people who are from sanctuary-seeking backgrounds and are supported by the Red Cross in Leicester. The completed art…
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Blossom and Thorn Research
Over the last month I’ve invited people local to the National Forest Way to look at hedges and share their findings for my Blossom & Thorn project. This is part of the research for an artwork I am making for Timber Festival in July which tells stories about the hedges alongside the National Forest Way.…
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Worn Stories
Yesterday was the first of six sessions for a community project I’m running with Mandeep Dhadialla. We have been commissioned by ArtReach to create a project with refugees from around the world and now living in Leicester exploring stories of textiles & recycling. It was such an inspiring and enjoyable session with really fantastic conversations…
Ruth Singer 