Our Community
EATING ART
In 2023, Barnsley Civic was granted funding and support from the Know Your Neighbourhood Fund and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to run a series of workshops exploring the art and design of objects associated with communal food sharing.
The project brought together diverse and disparate community groups, including Feels Like Home, Chilypep, Trans Barnsley, Creative Recovery and Barnsley College, who worked with local artists, ceramicist Moz Khokhar and illustrator/surface pattern designer Ellie Mae Fisher, to create designs for mugs, tea towels and tablecloths.
Inspired by the project, students on Barnsley College’s Extended Diploma, Foundation, Access and Fine Art Practice Degree courses also created designs for placemats and tea towels, as well as food themed artworks, including ceramic fruits and paintings.
In total we engaged with over 150 individuals over the duration of the project, over 18 sessions. We held a celebration exhibition, which featured the collective efforts and creativity of all five groups. Students volunteered by firing the ceramics produced in sessions, and supported the installation of the exhibition.
At the end of the project, participants, artists and volunteers were invited to view the exhibition and to share a meal together.
The video below was produced by John Slemensek-Thorne of Studio Bokehgo, to celebrate the project and the creativity of the groups that took part.
Project artist profile – Moz Knokhar
Moz Khokhar is a ceramicist living and working in Barnsley.
He is also known to many young people and artists in Barnsley as a teacher at Barnsley College, currently teaching the Fine Art Practice Degree
and ceramics modules for most art and design students.
In the past two decades Moz has explored the geological qualities of his surroundings – His work draws from the fusion of South Asia and South Yorkshire within his multicultural upbringing.
The resulting work is dictated by the natural elements of earth, fire, and water when fired in reduction where presence or absence of oxygen determines the patternation of glaze on surface.
The dramatic (and sometimes unexpected) variations allow him to produce a diverse range of work that embodies this natural process.
As a ceramicist, Moz’s approach to making is to trust the process, providing a platform to create a hugely varied body of work unconstrained by predictability.
His practice ranges from functional to sculptural ceramics and embraces an extensive range of materials and techniques, including throwing, extruding and slab building combined with the use of natural minerals as colourants.
Over the past fifteen years, Moz has exhibited at Booth House Gallery, Cooper Art Gallery, Sheffield Ceramics Festival, York Art Gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art, Sheffield Ceramics Festival, is part of the permanent collection at Cannon Hall Museum and makes regular appearances at Art in Clay: International Ceramics Fair.
Project artist profile – Ellie Mae Fisher
Ellie Mae Fisher is a surface pattern design illustrator living and working in Barnsley, and for the past three years she has also been a secondary school art teacher in Doncaster.
For former Barnsley College Art & Design student, Ellie Mae graduated Leeds Art University with a textile degree in 2020. The young designer made her mark with designs that celebrated her northern English heritage and the history of her hometown of Barnsley.
Ellie’s regular produced designs for the Rotherham stately home Wentworth Woodhouse and the German home lifestyle store The British Shop.
Ellie has also exhibited her work at Barnsley Civic and most recently at The Cooper Gallery, Barnsley, as part of The Cooper Prize 2023.
