This week was the week of the Winter Haecca, the main event of the second section of the Ridges & Furrows Project based in North Hykeham. The night before the event I loaded up a hired van with the ceramic lights, NKarts gazebo, pop up banners and Ridges & Furrows flags. I was very excited for the event as I had been involved from the very start; compared to the Welbourn Horkey when I was brought in a month into preparations. I was very interested also to see if the event would work as well in the dark. We had to come up with a different form of evaluation as we couldn’t give out surveys due to the light. We printed some postcards that had three questions on them, and to ensure we got a good amount of feedback, we gave away free glowsticks for every completed postcard that was handed back. The postcards were a beautifully designed set of four; each set were printed with either an earth, wind, fire or water design on the front (in the Ridges & Furrows style), and on the back was a corresponding fact about each theme’s connection with North Hykeham’s history.

On the morning of the event, myself and project historian Dave Reeves went to Lincoln to appear on BBC Radio Lincolnshire to publicise the Winter Haecca. Dave talked about the name Haecca, the town’s history and the event’s attractions. I had taken my accordion in and played Jo Freya’s processional tune. Interview starts at 02.11:40, my rendition of the processional tune can be heard at 02.18:45. Here is the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04hvz0z

On my return, the team had arrived with the loaded van; like the Horkey, many members of the NKarts partnership showed up to volunteer giving the event a nice feel of communal effort and we all shared in the magic of it. As the early dusk fell, we set about putting ceramic lanterns (that had been created for a previous project) around trees near a back entrance to the village green which created a fairy-circle effect and gave more colour to the dark, cold night.

A close up of the ceramic lanterns used to light up the Haecca

The town council’s part was coming together also, a big stage had been erected which was to accommodate the nativity play and the North Hykeham song performance. The Christmas stalls were also beginning to arrive and added noises and entrancing smells to the event. Half an hour before the scheduled start, the children from schools and the community workshops started to arrive and pick up their lanterns ready to process. Dave, Crauford and myself had a quick practice of the processional tune and awaited our marching order. The sun had gone down completely by the time we set off around the site, and the lanterns really stuck out against the night sky creating a beautiful effect. We led the star-lit cavalcade past the main stage, past our aerial performance area, through the stalls and over the little beck at the back of the green. We placed the lanterns into the ground at the far side of the beck so people on the main site could see the lanterns still shining across the water.

Children posing with their lanterns

Children posing with their lanterns

Artist Ruth Piggott posing with a lantern

Winter Haecca Lantern Procession

Winter Haecca Lantern Procession

Winter Haecca Lantern Procession

Winter Haecca Lantern Procession

Winter Haecca Lantern Procession

Winter Haecca Lantern Procession

After the procession, our aerial volunteers started their performance. Our dance team had been running workshops in Boston for months and the volunteers really rose to the occasion. The blue and white lighting, twinned with ambient music and smoke bombs created a beautiful atmosphere in which the dancers looked graceful and professional on the silks. It drew a huge crowd which gave great feedback. The performance was a beautiful addition to the evening and something that was a welcome surprise to the entranced onlookers.

Winter Haecca aerial dance performance

Winter Haecca aerial dance performance

Winter Haecca aerial dance performance

After the Town Council’s nativity play and children’s Christmas songs, Crauford and I took to the stage to direct the North Hykeham Song written by artist Jo Freya. The school children and the High Notes choir performed very well and the stage, packed with people, created a beautiful noise that carried far into the town.

Members of the High Notes Choir perform the North Hykeham Song

The amazing aerial dancers gave the crowd another performance and people gradually dispersed over the next half an hour. It was a beautiful event, the bright lanterns, artworks, dance displays and the community’s singing filled the winter night with warmth and delight. The Haecca had a very different feel to the Horkey, it was all taking place on the green, compared to the many venues in Welbourn. The effort that both artsNK and the Town Council went to to make the event light and festive surpassed the Horkey as the green was lovely to look at. While being less historically informative than the Horkey, due to the light not be accommodating to setting up information boards, we hoped that due to the facts on the feedback postcards and the history woven into the art the Ridges & Furrows artists and the community created, the people of North Hykeham learnt a little more about their local heritage.

The leaflets for the Winter Haecca event arrived today, they followed the same design pattern as the Horkey posters and leaflets with similar colours to keep a sense of continuity. (See below) Distributing them was now a priority with the event on the 14th looming down on us. I therefore booked a time at the big ASDA in North Hykeham to do some leaflet distribution in the lobby. As the Haecca would be a very varied event, incorporating interpretive dance, community artworks, social history and the Town Council’s input of Christmas stalls, songs and plays, I had trouble deciding which opening line to use to get people’s attention. I therefore settled on a rather crude option of deciding which people may like certain things. For families with young children I started with ‘Would you be interested in coming to a Christmas Fair?’, with older residents I chose social history as an opening line, etc. The best response I had was from an old boy from North Hykeham who, when asked ‘are you interested in local history?’, replied ‘I am local history mate’.

Haecca Leaflet- Front

Haecca Leaflet- Back

Later on in the week we received word from artist Jo Freya that she had finished most of the verses for the North Hykeham song she was writing for the event and teaching to children in local schools. It starts with an opening chant with the town’s oldest streets, then breaks into the main body of the song, influenced by the 50s rock and roll style.

North Hykeham Song composed by Jo Freya.

In addition to the lantern making workshops and Jo’s music workshops in local schools, we were also providing two days of history workshops at South Hykeham Community Primary School. I went for both days with project historian Dave Reeves. We used some similar topics as in the workshops Dave did in Welbourn Primary school, such as the old occupations of the area, their parents’ occupations and their own ‘marks’ incorporating the jobs they wanted to have. In addition, as we had the maps I had sourced from the town council, we described how the occupations in North Hykeham had changed over the years. At the end of each workshop we showed the children the maps and invited them to find the old windmills, the foundry, the old gravel pits and, yes, their own homes. Dave and I had a great time teaching the children and involving them in such ways as to get them excited about their local history.

Below are some of the occupational ‘marks’ the children created.

Children working on occupational ‘marks’.

After the Welbourn Horkey, this week afforded everyone a bit of a rest from the hectic organisation of the event. My monday involved a leisurely drive to the storage facility to drop off lots of the equipment used for the event such as stakes, signs, workshop materials and the Ridges & Furrows banners. I collected the feedback forms from the artsNK offices at the National Centre for Craft & Design and had a flick through: there was lots of great feedback and the main point of good feedback was the freshly pressed, local apple juice! Also a few expressed their fondness for the music which was nice to hear.

After that, I took a few deserved days off. However the project in North Hykeham was already underway with a lantern making workshop taking place in the Terry O’Toole Theatre, which was our base of operations for this section of the project. I helped set up the tables and equipment with the two artists for this section of the project Ruth Pigott and Nadya Monfrioli. The workshop was the first of two, this first one designed for people of all ages to create stencils of local heritage inspired designs, cut out of card, which would then form silhouettes on the lanterns. It was very well attended and people seemed to have a great time. The quality of the designs, was a good sign that the North Hykeham section of of the project would yield just as beautiful and creative artworks as in Welbourn. The North Hykeham event was going to be in the evening so the personalised Hykeham lanterns would shine against the cold winter sky! Here are a selection of the stencils made in the workshop:

My stencil of an acorn- they are present on the North Hykeham coat of arms

A beautiful oak leaf interpretation of a windmill created by a resident. Both icons appear in North Hykeham’s history and their coat of arms

A selection of more designs

More designs ranging from urban to rural images

My second week as an intern for the Ridges & Furrows project started off with painting posters promoting the community art workshops run by our resident artists. It marked a nice turn of pace from the frantic first week as I was able to do it in my living room. It was also a big role reversal in our house as I was doing arts and crafts and my girlfriend, who had previously done a textile degree, was reading history! I then had to go out and collect some A-boards from one of our contacts in the village and put them up in the entrances and exits to the village.

The first workshop was led by jeweller Miranda Sharpe; she taught all the attendees how to do enamelling. It was aimed at an adult audience and involved use of a small portable kiln. It was great to see the themes from the historical research used in such imaginative ways to make patterns on the metal. Here are some examples of what was made:

Miranda Sharpe’s protable kiln, used for firing the enamel powders onto the piece of metal.

A resident of Welbourn applying the enamel powders.

Placing the enamels in the kiln to be fired.

The background has already been fired and now someone has applied more powders to be the main object of the piece.

A selection of enamels which are cooling after being in the kiln. The wheat sheaf is mine!

The second workshop was a family workshop led by artist Lyndall Phelps which aimed to create a stage-like set of the old Co-operative shop which used to run in the village. The Welbourn branch was the first rural branch of the Co-operative family and opened in the 1840s. The workshop saw a great attendance with families staying for the whole day to create whole hampers of artwork.

Learning drawing!

My seed packet replication-Pedler’s Parsnips

Potato prints

More of the children’s artworks

A great collage of a sack of flour

A great hamper created by one family

During this week I met all the local volunteers involved in the steering group meeting for Welbourn; the meeting brought together the project leads from artsNK, the historian, artists and numerous locals from the village. With representatives from the parish council, primary and secondary schools and farming community volunteering to help at every stage of the project it really felt like a project in the best interests of the community. All this work was building up to a community-led, one day festival in which the artwork created by the village would be exhibited. This was later called the ‘Welbourn Horkey’, the name taken from the end of harvest feast the farmer would provide for his workers who helped. While seeming an generous, communal gesture, this feast was held instead of payment; a practice which soon died out with the more capitalist arrangement of landlord paying peasant, which arose in the sixteenth century. I revelled in learning this information and was getting on very well with the Ridges & Furrows historian Dave Reeves. It has been a joy for me to carry on learning and researching history after the end of my degree to keep my brain working in the same way and keep certain skills honed.

Hello, my name is Danny Pedler and welcome to a blog about my first job out of university; an internship in the artsNK project, Ridges & Furrows! The project works to introduce artwork to communities in three target locations in Lincolnshire. In each location, the project researches their local, social history then, through working with both the community and professional artists, create artworks inspired from the historical research. This blog will reveal what it is like working for artsNK through my personal journey with the Ridges & Furrows project. I hope to better illustrate what it is like working in an arts administration organisation, and what the Ridges & Furrows project is trying to achieve. Enjoy!

In June, I graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London with a 2:1 in History of Ideas; it was a relatively pretentious degree that was incredibly fun to study, but that I thought wouldn’t yield much in the way of a career. While looking for work across all disciplines, I applied for the role of ‘Freelance Historian’ for the Ridges & Furrows project. Despite being turned down from this job due to lack of experience, I was offered an internship, as the artsNK staff were often lacking someone on the ground to carry out a wide range of tasks. I remember getting the call in the middle of Morrisons and doing a mini fist pump. I moved from Essex to Lincoln and began an exciting, unrestricted job full of diverse assignments.

I had a very good first week to introduce me to the work that artsNK does. I first had an induction with the team who are based at the National Centre for Craft & Design in Sleaford. It was pretty confusing getting my head around the bureaucratic machinery of the organisation, and was told by my rather stressed inductor about the laborious task of correctly budgeting the Heritage Lottery funding for the project. After this introduction I was set to work helping in some art workshops that had already been organised in the first target village of the project which was Welbourn, just south of Lincoln. It is a beautiful community with a great agricultural heritage which became clearer as we delved deeper into the history of the village. This first section of the project employed two artists, with whom I worked with straight away, called Lyndall Phelps and Miranda Sharpe.

Their work can be seen here:

http://www.lyndallphelps.com,    http://www.mirandasharpe.co.uk

This stage of the project worked closely with the village primary school teaching workshops for their art week which included paint activities by Lyndall and metalwork with Miranda, all based on the research into the village’s history that had already taken place. I also helped the project’s historian Dave Reeves with workshops teaching local dialect to the children including words like ‘jannick’ and ‘featish’ which mean good, neat, etc. The children loved the workshops and it was really fulfilling to see new skills being adopted through a focus on their local history.

A collage leaf created by a pupil of Welbourn Primary School in Lyndall Phelps’ workshop.

A lot of painted leaves made by pupils of Welbourn Primary School in Lyndall Phelps’ workshop.

Ridges & Furrows historian Dave Reeves teaching the children of Welbourn Primary School about ‘making your mark’ which were the signatures of people who could not write.

A poem made up of traditional Lincolnshire dialect which was created by Dave Reeves and the children of Welbourn Primary School

All in all it was a great first week to introduce me first to the machinery of arts administration but also to the invaluable work it does. I thoroughly enjoyed working with children in the schools reintroducing them to their history and teaching them new artistic skills.