The Kitchen
The room everyone ends up in
- Role
- Production and Programming
- Location
- Newtown
- With
- Oriel Davies Gallery
- Date
- October 2017 – January 2018
We programmed and production managed the second edition of Open Space for Oriel Davies Gallery
Dark Olive programmed and production managed The Kitchen, the second edition of Oriel Davies Gallery's two year pilot project Open Space, following The Drawing Room the year before.
Open Space was a two year pilot, and The Kitchen was year two. Both editions were ours to conceive: Dark Olive answered the gallery's original open call with the idea of building a room rather than an exhibition, made The Drawing Room in the first year, and came back the following autumn to build the other room a house actually lives in. A drawing room is where a house sits down. A kitchen is where everyone ends up.
Year two was a different job to resource. The first time we had begged and borrowed our way towards a look, largely out of family barns and charity shops. This time we knew exactly what the room had to be before we started, and went and got it: a complete second hand kitchen came from a kitchen company, and businesses around Newtown came forward with materials and support once they understood what was being built. There was a great deal to be grateful for.
The Kitchen Make | Play | Share 7 October 2017 - 27 January 2018 | Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown
The Kitchen was Oriel Davies' pop-up project and event space: a creative, social room where art, performance, craft and film were made, shared and inspired. Open to visitors from October 2017 to January 2018, it presented a vibrant programme of workshops, activities, events and talks alongside fantastic opportunities for collaboration, and encouraged community intervention.
The Kitchen was a room to relax and hang out in as well as a space for creativity. Designed as a flexible environment for a wide range of activity, it adapted and changed continuously over the four months as visitors, artists and community groups created and shared their work.
Once the room was built, the programme filled it. Saturday mornings through the winter belonged to Messy Kitchen, workshops for children and families that handed the worktable over to whatever the week's making happened to be.
Around them ran the sort of thing a kitchen ought to hold. Celf Able brought The Bird Company. The Arwystli Artists took residency days. The Friends of Oriel Davies held their Christmas quiz, Rusty Winterbottom ran no cooking cookery, and Anushiye Yarnell got the gallery dancing.
Five residencies ran alongside it all - Amy Sterly, Fiona Collins, Chris Mapp with Bettws Lifehouse, Mai Thomas with the Ladywell and Trehafren Children's Centres, and Simon Fenoulhet with Criw Celf - each of them working in the room rather than away in a studio, where anyone passing could watch, ask, and end up joining in.
Building on the achievements of The Drawing Room in year one, The Kitchen was the second edition of Open Space, a two-year pilot project that ran from March 2016 to March 2018. In both years, Open Space presented a broad platform of cultural activity from October to January, which ran alongside, and in addition to, the Gallery's existing exhibition and learning programmes.
Open Space was an Oriel Davies project supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The Arts Council of Wales.
