Jacqui reports on a visit to the ARC centre

Hello, diary – it’s Jacqui. I went to the ARC (A-R-C) Centre today in Stockport in Reddish. It’s for people who are aged over 60 with an interest in sharing the love of art, meeting new people, and improving our well-being. While I was there – you can take your own projects you’re doing, or the artist that is there will help you to explore some new art that you haven’t done, or medium, or – whatever your level is, or whatever you want to do, the artist will help you. There’s also a volunteer that sits and helps you as well. Anyway, I brought my project along with one of my new works that I was doing from what I learnt at Dr Geraldine Gallagher’s workshops when I was in Belfast. Well, everybody was most impressed with what I was doing. They’d never seen Geraldine’s technique before and – well, I had to show everybody and show them what I’d done before on my phone and they were most interested. So anyway, I thought about it when I got home and I emailed Jackie at ARC, who is the artistic director, and I said, you know everybody was so interested, I think it’s better if they contact Dr Geraldine Gallagher in Belfast for her to come over and teach, rather than – they wanted me to teach people sometime. I didn’t want to really take Geraldine’s unique technique and kind of present it as my own. I would rather her come over and do some training and teaching, because it’s also for students in universities and they’ve come to the ARC centre. And then she can teach them as well. So Jackie was quite receptive and said she’ll email Dr Geraldine and let’s see what happens from there. Maybe Geraldine will come over and teach the people at ARC and that would be great. Anyway, it’s all about sharing, isn’t it? Take care, everybody. Bye-bye!