Creative Ways

Dorset Art Weeks 2020 may have been postponed but we can still share stories about artists’ work and even offer some virtual tours and online screenings

Only a few weeks ago 800 artists, designers and makers from across the county were preparing to welcome visitors from far and wide to their studios and galleries for the 14th biennial Dorset Art Weeks (DAW). To help celebrate this wonderful array of venues great and small, urban and rural was a beautifully produced Dorset Art Weeks Guide - a comprehensive directory to all the open studios and filled with artists’ stories. Alongside this was to be the launch of the new Film Dorset, with a stand-alone programme of screenings. Coronavirus has put this popular event on hold for now, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t share some beautiful images and fascinating stories from DAW with you here. After all these artists are fundamental to the creative and cultural economies of Dorset.

Dorset Art Weeks has been refocused and reinvigorated in several ways for 2020. We wanted to put the studio at the heart of the event. We wished artists to not tidy up, but leave the tools, materials, experiments and stimuli to their work in full view to better inform and prompt dialogue with visitors.

Not all artists - particularly those in groups and collectives – can participate in this way. These artists have been brought together in a ‘pop-up’ festival, celebrating art made in kitchens, sheds, village halls, borrowed shops and other temporary settings.

The arts charity, Dorset Visual Arts, who produce the event, will run Art Weeks next year so that none of this wonderful creativity will be wasted. We’ll be back ready to WOW you then. In the meantime, there are some events which will still happen but in a more virtual way...

Jem Main, Creative Director, Dorset Visual Arts

FILM DORSET