July | 2012 | Multi-Story Water

Just when you were running out of things to do on rainy days this summer, Multi-Story Water has paddled to the rescue with TWO, FREE arts competitions for ALL ages, with a chance to win £20 of iTunes/Amazon vouchers in each one. Interested? Read on…

1. DESIGN A POSTER!
Do you like to draw and design? Are you passionate about celebrating the River Frome? Do you want to see your art work shown around Eastville this September?

If so, then we need you to design an eye-catching, river-themed poster for the Multi-Story Water Weekend 29^th-30^th September! The winning design will be used to promote this celebratory weekend of events including: dance and circus performances around the river and under the M32, storytelling, science and wildlife river walks, community film and photography exhibition, street art, face-painting and more!

Your design should be A4 portrait size and you should remember to include:

title of the weekend – Multi-Story Water Weekend!
dates – Saturday & Sunday, 29^th-30^th September
and please leave some space for us to add our logo, web address and final details about the events and locations…

The winning designs will be used to produce the official event posters, but we will share all entries on the website and also endeavour to display them during the final weekend.

(If you’d like some help with layout ideas for your poster, you can see an example of one of our earlier posters here)

2. PHOTOGRAPHY COMPETITION – EXTREME WEATHER
Calling ALL photographers of Eastville, whether you use a disposable camera, phone or SLR! The Multi-Story Water Project invites you to submit your photographs on the theme of Extreme Weather in the UK. From last winter’s big freeze to this summer’s flash floods – how did you record or experience the weird and wonderful weather patterns that have frustrated, flummoxed and fascinated us over the past few years? Or, thinking completely outside the box, what else does ‘extreme weather’ mean to you?

Your entries will be used to accompany live performance and/or to produce a slideshow that will be projected outdoors at the celebratory Multi-Story Water Weekend, 29-30^th September.

You can submit up to 3 photos per person. Please state when and where taken, plus a sentence or two about what inspired you to take it/them. (The Guardian In Pictures weekly competition is full of great examples of creative photographic responses to a theme)

PRIZES will be awarded to a winner and a runner-up in each competition, and include £20 Amazon/iTunes vouchers.

CLOSING DATES
POSTER Monday 20^th August
PHOTOS Friday 7^th September
(Please note earlier date for poster to allow us to get it produced in time to promote the September event!)

SUBMISSION Entries to either competition should be submitted by post OR email with name and contact details to:
Multi-Story Water Project
c/o Nancy Campbell
Faculty of Environment & Technology (FET)
UWE Bristol
Frenchay Campus
Coldharbour Lane
Bristol
BS16 1QY

Please label your envelope/email ‘POSTER’ or ‘PHOTO’ (or both if you are entering together!)

Remember, the competitions are open to all ages. Winning designs and photos will be selected by a judging panel that will include representatives from the local community, the Environment Agency, UWE and Bristol City Council.

The Multi-Story Water arts process officially set sail last month (it’s taken a while for this story to float downstream onto the blog!) with the first workshop at Glenfrome School on Saturday 16th June. A big thank you to everyone who came along and shared their enthusiasm for all things riparian.

Using a heady mix of scrapstore delights, scissors, glue and that other great universal adhesive (imagination not Pritt-Stick), each group created their own artistic representation of the Frome-in-the-Room. Rivers sprung over and under tables, which became topographical features, weirs and waterfalls, or concrete bridges to carry busy motorways. Water flowed into and out of tunnels, whirlpools spun mercilessly, canoeists dropped off the edge of the falls, trees sprung up – and fell down – while, in peaceful stretches amongst the lush vegetation, kingfishers perched and wildlife calmly flourished. It was clear that the river was very present in the creative imagination of the residents of Eastville.

After an indoor picnic lunch, the school gym floor became a boat-building yard and driftwood sticks (collected by me from Aberystwyth beach, the day after the flash floods there on June 9/10th), seaweed, willow from a Fromeside tree in Eastville Park, leaves, and raffia were used to create rafts, boats and crafts to be floated down the Frome.

Using a shopping trolley (one that we’d captured after it had gone feral in the Napier Road underpass) that was speedily converted into a pirate ship (thanks to the genius of Read and Kath), we transported the miniature boats down to the park. It was a soggy crew of rain-coated pirates who processed through the rain behind it, but all the boats proved river-worthy and floated off downstream, though the willows near Stapleton Bridge may have proved too difficult a bankside obstacle to navigate.

We ended the day – courtesy of Chrissy and Justin (thank you!) – with a sneak peak at the Frome as it runs between Cottrell and Heath Roads. Kath told us it was like a ‘Heathrow airport’ for kingfishers earlier in the summer. But they didn’t get their raincoats on to give us a display. But maybe, just maybe they will be making a special guest appearance later on in the project…. (guesses on the back of a postcard)

A huge thank you to all who attended and especially to Mrs O’Callaghan and Glenfrome School for providing a fantastic venue.

Please keep watching this space for the next events in the autumn, and and please feel free to keep adding suggestions or ideas for other river-related arts and performance workshops you might like to take part in or lead, as we progress towards our final celebratory weekend on 29-30 September.

In the following images, you should be able to find, creative culverts, the M32, freshwater crabs, canoes, rafts, desert islands, great crested newts, waterfalls, whirlpools and water snakes, stick-boats with leaf sails, a pirate ship shopping trolley and a boat launch…