Colchester Makerspace and the Clothing Clinic would like to invite you to join in with a community project that creates a large art piece from small objects, that you will make from home throughout this time of social isolation. The art piece will be exhibited in a central location in Colchester.

The idea initiated at The Clothing Clinic whose aim is to help the community to use creative skills to re-purpose fabrics. When the lockdown happened we started to think of a way that people could interact in isolation and collectively produce a creative expression of this time. The project’s aim is to lessen social isolation by having a common purpose in which people would interact with others, plus also to record for the future the feelings that people felt throughout this period.

Colchester Makerspace and The Clothing Clinic have partnered in this project and hope to reach a wider audience.

We are keen to invite people to make a flower, a felted pebble and also a small botanically inspired piece. These would fit into a landscape of fields expressing humanity and the environment within a pointillistic style. The art piece viewed from a distance would create a rich texture of colour and mix of materials will express how all our individual actions can create a powerful collective result.

We hope that the final art piece may be as large as 5 metres by 2 metres.

Along with making these 3 dimensional shapes, we would like to invite people to send in some words or images to share your feelings and experiences throughout this time.

We aim to install these momentos into a grid-like structure and, therefore, we require that your art piece is no larger than 8cm diameter and at least 2cm deep. Your words or images on paper no larger than 15cm square.

To register into the project please email lockdown@makercampus.co.uk

The Clothing Clinic will be posting flower and pebble ideas on their Facebook page each week for those who would like to have guidance.

Artists who have a particular medium they like working in are welcome to develope their own designs.

Sharing your designs by posting on social media would create a vibrant momentum to the project and we are happy for you to invite others to join in.

Post your item to the Clothing Clinic, Maldon Rd Chapel, Maldon Rd, Colchester CO3 3GE or, when government restrictions change, you’ll be able to leave in a box in the garden.

We hope to be able to start bringing the art piece together in July and exhibit in September/October.