The Inside Out Art Group is an informal collective of diverse artists who work and exhibit in the North Wales/North Shropshire Borderlands region.
Some of us are professionals with years of experience – some of us are students just learning our craft. There are about sixty of us, and we work with every media imaginable. We’re sculptors and painters, we print, draw and photograph, we work with glass, paper, acrylic, oil, found materials and light. Many of us are also members of other local art groups, such as Borderlands Visual Arts, The Project Space, Marcher Glass, Marches Independent Photography, etc.
We exhibit together in pairs, in small groups; we meet for crit-sessions and social occasions. We go to local exhibitions and art-events together. We blog, share photos and videos online, chat on Facebook, get together for sketching/walking afternoons, meet up in pubs to talk art. We’re active but loose; committed but lightly organised!
If any of this sounds interesting, you’re more than welcome to come along to our regular “Notebook Meetings”, held at 2pm on the first Wednesday of every month at the Willow Gallery. Come along and meet up with like-minded artists – or leave a comment and your contact information here on this blog and we’ll get back to you. All our events are posted here, or on our Facebook page, or through our Twitter account – @insideout_art. The Inside Out Art Group is coordinated by Diana Baur and John Swogger, two local artists.
A short history of the Inside Out Art Group
The Inside Out art group was founded in 2007 as a loose collective of artists living and working in the North Shropshire Borderlands region. The group brought together local professional and practising artists as well as students, graduates and alumni from Glyndwr University art department (formerly NEWI) in Wrexham. The group put together two highly successful, large-scale outdoor exhibitions in the village of Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog in the summers of 2008 and 2009. The exhibitions featured sculpture, painting, installations, land-art, and sound and vision pieces sited in the gardens, driveways, hederows, trees and hillsides around the village. The exhibitions were covered by the BBC and attracted hundreds of visitors.
Following those large-scale exhibitions, the group established Studio a1 – a multi-purpose exhibition, teaching and meeting space in the Cambrian Studios building in Oswestry, North Shropshire. During 2010 the studio space acted as an artist’s hub for a growing network of local professional and student artists. As of the end of July 2010 that space has been handed over to a small group of independent artists who, encouraged by the success of Studio A1, want to try their hand at running their own gallery.
Inside Out has now moved up the road to The Willow Gallery’s Dunbabin Room, and have already started a regular programme of exhibitions there. Since June 2010 we’ve had three group shows in the gallery, and are planning more for the coming twelve months.
All of this is about using the group’s growing membership and experience to try and significantly raise the profile of the visual arts in Oswestry and the North Shropshire Borderlands region.
Join the Inside Out Art Group!
Any of this sound interesting?
Joining the Inside Out Art Group costs £30 a year. All members are invited to take part in any and all exhibitions, events and projects, including:
- our ongoing programme of exhibitions in the Dunbabin Room at The Willow Gallery
- our ongoing current work exhibition in the dining room of The Hand Hotel, Llanarmon D.C.
The Inside Out Art Projects Community Interest Company
In 2010, the Coordinators of the Inside Out Art Group, Diana Baur and John Swogger, set up a community interest company to help fund and organise art projects in Oswestry. The Inside Out Art Projects Company is a not-for-profit social enterprise whose aim is:
- to create sustainable and affordable exhibition, working and meeting spaces for artists in the Oswestry and North Shropshire/North Wales borderlands region.
The Company has helped to fund and establish the shared working space in Studio A1 at the Cambrian Building, as well as promote the Cambrian Studios Building as a space suitable for artists’ studios. It continues to work with local property owners and the tenant artists in the building to help create further studio spaces within the building, and to transform the building into a regional art and design centre.
The Company is also now working in partnership with Shropshire Council and local entrepreneurs on a further large-scale which will create a flagship green-energy Creative Enterprise Centre for Oswestry.
We believe that Oswestry has the potential to become a regional hub for the arts and the creative industries, and that making studio and working space available in Oswestry to artists will benefit the town economically, socially and culturally. Inside Out Art Projects is always looking for additional funding as well as opportunities to further our aims of bringing artists into Oswestry.
If you are an arts funder who can help, or a local property owner interested in the possibilities of leasing space to artists, we’d be very interested in hearing from you. Please contact us via a comment to this blog.
I’d be grateful if you could forward this message to Joan Santana, as I haven’t managed to contact her by other means. I’m helping to organise a playgroup reunion in Birmingham on 5th November. If she’s interested, she can contact me via email: helen.r.lloyd@gmail.com.
P.S. Your website is very good!
Helen Lloyd.
Wow what a cool site, I enjoyed reading your about page. I thought this was cute: ” We’re active but loose; committed but lightly organised! Sounds like a great gathering, as an artist myself, I would love to be a part of something like this.
Thanks! Actually, one of the things we’re interested in doing is establishing links with artists elsewhere. We’ve got a kind of slow-burn “artist-twinning” project we’ve called “pARTners”. We’ve had some long-running but very informal exchanges with artists in Italy, Norway and Ireland. If you’re interested, maybe we could look into something like this?
This sounds very interesting, I would like to hear more about the details, my email is mariackent.mck@gmail.com Wow! you make the artist in me feel excited, thanks
I’m a local artist/printmaker (between Shrewsbury & Oswestry) and am interested in joining the Inside OUtside Art Group. Can you let me know who to contact. I’ve been in the area for about 4 years and working in splendid isolation is wearing thin.
Hello. We wondered whether your members might be interested in the courses we run at the Grange just outside Ellesmere (website address given below). We have two courses coming up imminently – one at the end of September (paper marbling) and one at the beginning of November (bookbinding) that we thought might be of interest. (If members are interested in learning these skills, even if they don’t want to attend the course, we’d still be interested in making contact). We’d also like to talk to Inside Out about our Open Day in June (did anyone come this year?). We have a lovely venue here and there may be scope for exhibiting .
Look forward to hearing from you.
Rose