MY APPROACH

I love to see people gain confidence from using their imaginations, coming up with solutions and more than anything, having fun!

I’m patient, adaptable when faced with challenges and encourage everyone to have a go at learning new skills, with the focus on doing rather than the outcome.  I offer a wide range of creative mediums such as drawing, textile surface design, sewing, block printing, stone carving, wire sculpting, clay hand-building, mask making to costume design, to fit chosen themes and am able to individually tailor workshops to suit the needs of the participants and ensure that activities take place in safe and friendly environments.

WHO I HAVE WORKED WITH

I work with all ages and abilities, including participants from multi-cultural intergenerational urban communities, heritage and museums, theatre companies, festivals, schools, drama schools, youth offenders, vulnerable adults and children and hard to reach teenagers, learning disabled and socially isolated groups such as Dementia UK and remote rural communities or estates out of towns, where people reliant on public transport have restrictive contact with culture.

Working with community engagement I am experienced in developing partnerships and coming up with new concepts, writing successful funding applications, reports and project coordination, such as Strutt's North Mill Museum, Belper, where I was lead artist and project coordinator for The Craft Project, and I am proud to say the project won the Derbyshire Heritage Award for Reaching New Audiences.

ARTS, HERITAGE AND EDUCATION - Co-production with Derby Museum of Making and Derbyshire Wildlife Trust with Ambergate Wireworks - The Part They Played, commissioned Lead Artist with Beam and Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Sites (UNESCO), Artcore Arts Organisation as Lead Artist and Arts Coordinator, in Derby as Lead Artist/Arts Coordinator, Derby Museums Trust, where I am a regular freelance Family Arts Facilitator with their Learning Programme, Deda, Doncaster Museum, Peoples Express (working with youth groups and vulnerable adults), workshops with Junction Arts - Get Creative Kids summer scheme and Platform Thirty1/Black Shale. As well as costume design workshops with Buxton Opera House - Creative Learning and The Ambassador Theatre Group, Stoke on Trent.

FESTIVALS - This is Derby Festival, for Walk the Plank and Derby County Community Trust and Derby Theatre - Lead Designer and costume workshops coordinator (2019), Furthest from the Sea, Derbyshire World Heritage Discovery Days, featured lead artist in Festival of Villages - Doncaster DKweekeND Arts Festival, Derby Museum of Making Assemble Festival, Manchester International Arts Festival. Tapton Lock Arts and Heritage Festivals with Junction Arts, Artcore. Multi-cultural festivals include Mela Festival, Nottingham River Festival and Leicester, Derby Feste and Normanton Carnival, Derby. Belper Green Festival, Food Festival, and Belper Arts Festival. Derby International Women’s Day Celebrations (Planning and Trustee), Wirksworth Arts Festival (Procession Planning). International Book Festivals in Derby and Stoke on Trent, Mental Health Day and Refugee Week with Derby Museums Trust.

LEARNING DISABLED - LEVEL Centre, (Learning Disabled Arts Organisation) at LEVEL, Deda and Quad, Derby, exploring sensory and physical movement to music and sculptural making with Lead Artist with Can Do, Leonard Cheshire Disability and an intergenerational project with Transition 2, Abbey Ward Derby as Lead Artist/Coordinator for Creative Communities, with Artcore.

LOCAL AUTHORITY AND HEALTH - Primary and secondary schools, Birmingham NHS Trust, Women’s and Children’s Hospitals, as part of Keneish Dance Wellbeing programme in Birmingham. Derbyshire Youth Offending Service, (activities included life skills and art/crafts with ISSP groups and restorative one-to-one), Derbyshire Dales - Community Artist for socially isolated rural communities (Gateway Through The Arts, Leader+). Derby. Red Cross, Dementia UK and Alzheimer’s Support and Memory Lane in Belper, Derbyshire as part of the Through the Windows/Craft Project at Belper North Mill Museum. Working with young teenage parents with Connect 2 and Sure Start, delivering art projects and Derbyshire Youth Services in collaboration with local community wood, carried out with behaviour support pupils.

HOW TO BOOK A WORKSHOP

If you wish to contact me via email: heidi.luker@yahoo.com and I'll be happy to discuss your needs in more detail.

I have an Enhanced DBS Certificates for working with children and young people and adults. I also have Public Liability Insurance and a driving license. I’ve received recent training in Safeguarding (Level 1), managing challenging behaviour in young people and mental health and drug awareness.

UPCOMING PUBLIC AND ONLINE EVENTS INCLUDE

EXAMPLES OF previous COMMUNITY arts PROJECTS AND WORKSHOPS

Five sessions were carried out as co-production with Derby Museum of Making along with featuring in their Assemble Festival, and First Friday Evening Event and Derby Feste with Furthest From The Sea, five in partnership with the White Peak Distillery, based in the old wireworks in Shining Cliff Wood and five in St Anne’s Church in Ambergate, where two serious floods in the past four years caused the closure of its main community hall. The impact of the flooding is why we worked in partnership with Derbyshire Wildlife Trust who supported our school sessions and outside wire sculpting sessions as they informed participants of the importance of anti-flood measures using planting.

Delivering drop-in public workshops, we showed participants how to sculpt simple wire sculptures looking at items made using wire found in the Assemblage Collection in the Derby Museum of Making or that used wire made in the wireworks such as telephones or planes. We also explored the use of shadows, an interactive element of out installation, by encouraging people to make shadows with their wire sculptures. Pupils in Ambergate School were able to view our installation artwork with torches when we set up a mini-exhibition as a Show and Tell.

Using wire, Crich Primary School, pupils created group artworks of river scenes depicting ducks, bullrushes and dragon flies, which were installed in their outside play areas for all to see, while Ambergate Primary School carried their ducks as part of the Aye Up Me Duck theme of the Ambergate Carnival.

As a means of enabling the community to contribute to the project, everyone who attended events could sculpt a wire leaf that would be added to a group artwork consisting of a large wire branch of wire leaves. It represents the idea of ‘Branching Out’ into the Ambergate community and also reflects the ancient Shining Cliff Wood surrounding the wireworks. This will be installed in the Whistlestop Cafe in the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust’s education centre based in the old railway station in Matlock Bath.

“Fascinating exhibition and amazing artwork. I especially enjoyed coming along to one of the workshops and having a go myself and meeting new people from the community. Thank you Linda Philo.”

“Really enjoyed it – sociable but not too intense and relaxing. Up for future crafts of any kind.”

“Never tried this before, had a really enjoyable evening – relaxing, calm and fun. Thank you”

“Really enjoyable and fun class. Tracy”

“Lovely to try out a new craft. Thank you very much”

“Totally amazed myself in what I made. Thank you so much. Tracy Walker”

I chose the theme of a space ship is because in space, you don't necessarily need to be able to stand or walk, because there is no gravity. The Space Probe would enable a disabled astronaut to leave the main spaceship, like a water or jet-ski and carry out independent exploration/research missions, possibly on new planets or solar systems.

Based on my observations of the students and their sensory explorations with materials, The Space Probe was designed to be an extension of the astronaut's body and will be controlled by a combination of hand held control sticks and/or/direct thought stimulation from the astronaut's brain to the Space Probes computer system, along with the back up from control centre back on Earth. It can also change the sections of it's shell like shape to enable directional movement, rather like an invertebrate (animal without an internal skeleton) such as crustacean's or an insect. The astronaut's cockpit is surrounded by an inflatable cushion that will fit around the astronaut's torso supporting them in an upright position during space travel.

Secret Gardens was part of the Innocence and Expression Project: at Artcore multi-cultural arts organisation and funded by BBC Children in Need. It provided sculptural workshops as a collaborative group project for children 8-18 in an urban area that was lacking in accessible creative activities. One of the aims of the project was to give local children a space to be creative out of a classroom environment. 

In each session, I introduced them to a new sculptural skill that included: Clay, recycling found objects, paper sculpting and indirect mosaics. The objective was to produce a group work culminating in three exhibitions entitled ‘Secret Gardens’. They were displayed publicly in Furthest From the Sea's window at Derby's indoor market, Artcore Gallery Space and Deda during Derby Feste.

The children were invited to imagine and create an imaginary figure or plant/object that they would like to find in a secret garden. Some chose to sculpt images of how they would like to be, some super heroes and others re-created their family and friends and many reflected the different clothing, coloursand cultures of their communities.

One of the girls was partially sighted and wanted her figure to have enormous eyes so that she could see in the dark and could glide instead of walking and bumping into things. When I asked her why she had used dark purple colours on the body, she said it was so that her character would fade into the shadows and be inconspicuous.

. There were children who were home schooled or excluded from school. Working as a group, meant that they had to learn to cooperate and share space, ideas and respect different ways of learning. This was especially evident in working towards the group exhibition using mosaics; some found the concept of merging the end row of their mosaic tiles with another persons patterns very challenging.

The Normanton Tiger - Visual Concept Designer and Community Engagement Artist with Sustrans and Artcore, Derby.

This small intersection at a mini roundabout in Normanton, Derby has one of the highest numbers of traffic and pedestrian incidents in the UK.

As a visual artist I worked with Sustrans and community arts organisation, Artcore who led a series of interventions and consultation workshops with the local multi-cultural community to find the best way of increasing road safety awareness. It was decided that temporary stencilled images on the road and pavements would be designed and it was during one of the road side engagement workshops as an artist that I came up with the idea of an Indian Tiger.

The Tiger was a recognisable symbol of the cultural background of the area and if there was one thing that would make people slow down for crossing pedestrians it was a giant orange striped tiger!

A large crew of us worked all night to spray on the stencils (created by Artcore) in sub-zero temperatures. The next morning there were numerous reports on the radio about The Normanton Tiger and people in Normanton still talk about the crossing!