This Winter, join The Ruskin for our series of creative workshops led by artists and makers, in the historic surroundings of Lancaster Castle.

The Ruskin x Natalie Linney: Printing with Rust

Saturday 13 November 2021, 10:00 to 1:00 | Tickets: pre-booking essential, £10 (includes all materials), age 16+

Explore the possibilities of rust and botanicals as printing agents in this centuries-old natural process. Led by artist and educator Natalie Linney, create an eco-printed silk scarf to take home, using salvaged metal and iron-soaked leaves and berries.

Natalie is an artist working with textiles, form, pigment and print. Her striking textile pieces are created using traditional methods, drawing on materials found in the contemporary urban environment.

The Ruskin x Kathryn Wood: Make a Felted Bowl

Tuesday 16 November 2021, 10:00 to 12:30 | Tickets: pre-booking essential, £10 (includes all materials), age 16+

Create a beautiful and useful wet-felted bowl to take home, with artist Kat Wood and Shepherd Joanne Wood.

The bowls will be made using wool from Joanne’s own flock, and from nearby farms in the High Peak, Derbyshire. A sharp fall in the value of wool over the last two years has resulted in farmers burning it because the price no longer covers the cost of shearing. Wool now generates as little as 20-30p per kilo, which has led to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of UK wool being wasted.

Kat Wood is a multidisciplinary artist whose work addresses the relationship between the back-to-the-land movement, working northern hill farms and 18th century printing techniques. Her projects include You Can Lead a Horse To Water, that focuses on a new understanding of the rural as a place of cultural production.

The Ruskin x Bijan Amini-Alavijeh: Cast a Corbel

Tuesday 30 November 2021, 10:00 to 12:30 | Tickets: pre-booking essential, £10.00 (includes all materials), age 16+

In architecture, a corbel is a structural section that juts out from a wall to carry a weight.

In this workshop, you will learn how to design and construct your own corbel. Led by artist Bijan Amini-Alavijeh, we will look closely at decorative elements of Lancaster Castle, and the ways in which Ruskin himself captured architectural detail. You will create a transcript of your chosen element, and carve your design into clay. Your design will then be cast in plaster, revealing a unique decorative corbel.

Bijan Amini-Alavijeh’s work derives motifs and patterns from Medieval and Persian architecture, and interprets these as both literal and abstracted forms. His works explore systems of mathematics, structure and repetition, and act as a documentation of the decorative; observing its lack of inclusion in today’s infrastructure, and archiving these elements for future reference.

All workshops are suitable for beginners.

Images L-R: courtesy the artists Natalie Linney, Kat Wood, Bijan Amini-Alavijeh