Art on Your Doorstep – A Special Event Day at The Courthouse

We had lots of interest leading up to the day, with a nice little article in The Northern Echo the week before the event. These lovely ladies; regular faces at Rural Arts, seemed very happy to have their picture in the newspaper! :

Photo Courtesy of Northern Echo

The day itself was packed full of creative workshops, talks and performances for our Over 60’s that attended the event.

It was lovely to see so many new faces at the Courthouse on the day, as well as some of our regular participants in the project; from both the artist one-to-one sessions and the monthly Rural Arts Over 75’s Art Cafe.

We began the day with MAIA delivering their “Bamboo Tamboo” workshop. MAIA have performed for our Art on Your Doorstep project previously and have proven very popular with our older audiences! (You can read a bit more about their previous performances here.)

It was great to see the band deliver a workshop as part of the day as well as perform later on in the afternoon. The Bamboo Tamboo workshop proved to be just as popular as their performances have been, with the participants particularly enjoying the opportunity to all work together to produce African or Jamaican rhythms:

MAIA then followed on their workshop with a musical performance. The particular highlight of the day was when one of our participants rocked around the courtroom to MAIA playing their cover of “Rock around the Clock”. Her enthusiasm got a lot of us up and dancing altogether bringing smiles all round!

We also had the lovely Jenni Wren perform for us later on in the day with a riveting display of both Scottish and Spanish dancing.

As well as all the great performances we had on as part of the day, we also had a wide array of creativity dispersed throughout the building.

This included us having exhibited some of our participant’s art in the courthouse gallery, as part of the event. Including this lovely collaborative painting made by the Monthly Over 75’s Art Cafe:

Alongside this, our Art Cafe and workshops regular, Geoffrey Evans, kindly donated his sketchbook for the day, containing a document of all the workshops he has attended since coming to Rural Arts! Our favourite piece of his was the self portrait etching print that he created as part of our drawing and printing community workshop in July.

During the day our participants also got to try out their hand at a variety of creative workshops. These included a sensory I-Pad workshop with Claire Foy, as well as mono-printing with nature and ceramics. (Both taught in our workshop.)

We ended up with an array of ceramic birds and animals, including hedgehogs, chickens, 

Everyone seemed to especially enjoy the chance to try something creative that they may not have had the chance to do before. One person described it as having been 

“fun, interesting, different and therapeutic”



Our favourite work produced in the day, had to be these stunning results from the mono printing workshop, created by rolling coloured inks onto an ink plate along with natural leaves

Overall the day was a wonderful and positive event. We hope that we’ll be seeing lots of the people that attended the event very soon again! By the end of the day our cheeks were hurting from smiling so much!

“It was all very good and very friendly. I found a new friend!”

“Brilliant! I enjoyed every second!“

Find out more about our Art on Your Doorstep project here if you or anyone you know may be interested in getting involved. We host regular performances in venues in Thirsk and the surrounding areas, as well as host monthly Art Cafes both here at Rural Arts and in surrounding areas. We also work alongside Thirsk Community Care to insure our workshops are accessible for all, and therefore are able to arrange transport to our monthly Art Cafe if it is needed. As well as this we are sometimes able to offer one-to-one artist sessions. Please contact 01845526536 for more information or email either poppy@ruralarts.org or sorcha@ruralarts.org