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Tag: Art Education

DIY Residencies Online presentation + workshop

Dates and Times

Friday 27 March 1-2:30pm BOOK

Thursday 23 April, 6-7:30pm BOOK

Friday 15 May 2026, 1-2:30pm  BOOK

Cancellation policy:
Refunds are available up to 24 hours before the event begins. After that, while we’re unable to issue a refund, we’ll gladly offer you a place in a future similar session.

hARTslane Presents:
DIY Residencies

Online presentation + workshop

Take control of your creative journey and design the residency experience you deserve.

DIY Residencies is an interactive online session combining a concise presentation with a reflective workshop, created for artists who want to reclaim agency over their time, focus, and working conditions. Instead of waiting for competitive or inaccessible opportunities, this session offers inspiration and practical tools to help you design and plan your own self-organised residency.

This presentation + workshop is relevant to all creative disciplines, including visual artists, writers, performance artists and musicians.

What to expect

  • A clear introduction to DIY / artist-initiated residencies

  • Real examples and case studies drawn from professional practice

  • Practical tips and tools to organise your own residency

  • Guided reflection time to start planning your own idea

  • Peer feedback in small breakout groups

  • Access to slides, worksheets, and other resources.

Format & details

  • Format: Online presentation + reflective workshop

  • Duration: 90 minutes

  • Participants: Maximum 15

  • Fee: £15 per participant

  • Platform: Zoom  

Participants will leave with practical resources and a clearer sense of how to create protected time, dedicated focus, and space for experimentation within their own circumstances.

Session leader

Cristiana Bottigella is an art producer with over 25 years’ experience supporting artists to develop their practice, access resources, and create meaningful cultural impact. Her work focuses on socially engaged art, artist-led infrastructures, and sustainability.

She is the founder and director of hARTslane Gallery (South East London) and a director at the London School of Muralism. From 2000–2009, she ran the residency programme at the Pistoletto Foundation in Italy. In 2024, she authored the DIY Residencies guide for the Arquest website and currently co-runs Making a Buck Without Selling Out, a six-week course on artist practice development.

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Art Education, Opportunities, Workshop

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Promotional poster with a bold, DIY aesthetic for a course titled Making a Buck Without Selling Out, presented by hARTslane. The background is a rough-textured, rusty red with torn paper-style beige panels layered on top. At the top, the black text reads: hARTslane Presents:. Below, in large capital letters, the title is displayed: MAKING A BUCK WITHOUT SELLING OUT. The typeface is heavy and hand-cut in appearance, giving the design a raw, grassroots feel. There are no images or dates—this version focuses solely on the title and presenter.

Making a Buck Without Selling Out – Open for registration!

Promotional poster with a bold, DIY aesthetic for a course titled Making a Buck Without Selling Out, presented by hARTslane. The background is a rough-textured, rusty red with torn paper-style beige panels layered on top. At the top, the black text reads: hARTslane Presents:. Below, in large capital letters, the title is displayed: MAKING A BUCK WITHOUT SELLING OUT. The typeface is heavy and hand-cut in appearance, giving the design a raw, grassroots feel. There are no images or dates—this version focuses solely on the title and presenter.

Macking A Buck Without Selling Out is open for registration!

Next course: April 2026

Making a Buck Without Selling Out is hARTslane’s new course on artists’ professional practice, with hARTslane co-director Cristiana Bottigella and guest tutor Sophia Kosmaoglou, founder of ART&CRITIQUE and co-founder of the Radical Pedagogy Research Group.

We created this course because we recognise that there’s a gap in art education—one that rarely prepares artists for the realities of building a practice in today’s culture industry.  

The art world’s economy is full of contradictions. Artists are expected to be visionaries, provocateurs, and entrepreneurs all at once. We’re told to challenge the system—while also expected to succeed within it. Artists must survive and keep making work within a capitalist economy. That means negotiating visibility, marketing, and income—without selling out.

This course confronts that tension. It asks:

  • What does it mean to prioritise artistic integrity over marketability?
  • How do you stay connected and visible without getting drawn into competition and isolation?
  • What does autonomy look like when you also need to pay the rent? 

This programme isn’t a checklist or a formula. It’s a space to ask difficult questions about what keeps your work going, what threatens to undermine it, and how to protect your autonomy while expanding your networks and building community. You’ll also reflect on what success means for you, and what it takes—emotionally, materially, ethically—to keep your practice sustainable over time.

You’ll get 6 online sessions, weekly activities with tangible outcomes, peer review, written feedback, and collective learning, a workbook to map your progression, resources, tools, and one-to-one tutorials to review your action plan.

Find out more and register on the course page

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Art Education, Opportunities

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Bags of Love

BAGS OF LOVE

Making a difference while making good news!

Supported by

Children from Lewisham have explored their local community creating connections through acts of kindness and exchange, finding and sharing common ground.

The current digital landscape has put growing pressure on children due to the easy access to frightening and upsetting news as well as becoming victims of a selfie-culture, that scientists have linked to narcissism, addiction and mental illness.

Four local groups of children aged between 10-12, were paired up with four local charities to create and donate a gift carrying a positive and uplifting message of love.

Through 15 creative workshops facilitated by artists and social workers, over 100 children experienced the joy and power of making and giving together. It was challenging! Kids have learned new skills: how to work from a brief, sewing & hand sewing, to cut fabrics and combine colours, to pin and how to make an image with textile materials.

From being powerlessly exposed to the problems in the world, the children involved in “Bags of Love” sprinkled magic and hope in the community of Lewisham.

Partners:
Childeric Primary School, Lewisham & Greenhive Carehome, Peckham
Hatcham Temple Grove Primary School, Lewisham & St Mungo’s Charity for Homeless People
SIGNAL, Autism in Lewisham + & 999 Club, Deptford Syrian Vulnerable People Resettlement Scheme (Lewisham Council) & Telegraph Hill Festival

With thanks to:
Telegraph Hill Centre
SHP Single Homeless Project
 

Produced by hARTslane (Cristiana Bottigella & Tisna Westehof)
Coordinated by Cristiana Bottigella
Workshops led by: Tisna Westerhof, artist & Mary McInerney, social worker and art facilitator
Volunteers: Cadi Freud, Jazz McInerney, Matilde Strocchi, Flynn Richards
Film: Alex Abdolwahabi

“I really liked the conversation with the children, and love the picture of my daughter, I can look at it every day and smile.” – Moe, resident at Greenhive

“I felt nervous and then I felt happy that I made someone else happy!” – pupil

“They were so happy that someone that isn’t paid to look after them is actually thinking about them.”. – El Thomson, Service Manager, St Mungo’s.

“What a great project! Very friendly and accommodating. For once the focus was not on the Autism and their needs but on making and creating for someone else. We’d love to see more of this.” – Parent at Signal

“The workshops were lovely in that they allowed our families to socialise and mingle with local families over an activity that in itself was enjoyable and therapeutic too.” ‘This allowed them to genuinely be a part of local community events, not by virtue of their situation but as Londoners.” – Werisha Husaini, Support Assistant, Refugee Resettlement Lewisham





In collaboration with








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Art Education, Participatory

Post! Mail Art

Post! Mail Art

Part of EAST – OOST – OST
International Art Exchange Project 
(2018- 2021)

In collaboration with

“In current political challenging times, it is refreshing, humbling and hopeful to spread a message of collaboration and exchange across borders celebrating unity and diversity through creative expression by our next generation.”

Zoe Howe, Head teacher, Hermitage Primary School

East – Oost – Ost is an exchange programme in the field of art education for children from neighbourhoods from three European Capitals: East London, Amsterdam Oost and Ost Berlin. The creative programme of “share, connect and exchange” will last for 2 years and will culminate in the Amsterdam Kinder Biennale 2020.

Post! Mail Art was the kick off project!
In January 2019, hARTslane facilitated a series of creative workshops at the Hermitage Primary School in East London, where 25 pupils received Mail Art from Barbara School and Nelson Mandela School in Amsterdam and were invited to respond and make their very own Mail Art to send back. They learnt about the history of Mail and Mail Art, about life in Holland, some Dutch words and replied to their art pen-pals sharing common ground: school and family life in the urban city.
The children were challenged: they learnt about screen-printing, collage, decorating and illustrating. Experimentation and artistic freedom were encouraged to communicate via artistic post!



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Art Education

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Stitching Time

Stitching Time

A creative intergenerational project bringing together 2 diverse groups of our community: urban primary & secondary school children and residents of care homes specialising in Alzheimer’s care.

By exploring aging caring and memory, creating connections and a sense of purpose, the children have crafted personalised memory cushions that bring joy and comfort to the elderly.

Textile workshops led by Tisna Westerhof, Mary McInerney and Cristiana Bottigella.

Enjoy the the sweet little film by Paper-clip about spreading kindness in Lewisham, South London.

Supported by the 

PARTNERS:
Hatcham Temple Grove Primary School & Manley Court Care Home
Sandhurst Primary School & Beechcroft Care Centre
Brent Knoll Special School & Pear Tree Care Home.

 

SPECIAL THANKS TO:
Kim Neville
Martha Morgenroth
Lisa Solomon
Theophilla Johnson
Paige Hawkes
Cindy Almaroof
Remke Westerhof
Hana de Jong

 

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Art Education, Participatory

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Stromend Blauw

STROMEND BLAUW

Amsterdam

In collaboration with

As part of the EAST OOST OST international art education exchange project, hARTslane was invited to collaborate in the production and delivery of Stromend Blauw, a series of artist led creative workshops for 400 children at the Aldoende Primary School in Amsterdam.

 

The workshops, led by Tisna Westerhof, explored people and place and Dutch heritage through various art techniques like print making, collage, embroidery, textiles and ceramics. Each year group worked on a different brief to create an element that contributed to the Crockery of East, a Delft Blue inspired installation of a domestic kitchen and dining room scene. Children hand painted paper-mache vases larger than themselves, decorated their own paper plates and cups, screen-printed and embroidered tea towels and cushions; they crafted their own cutlery sets from clay, decorated vintage crockery using decal transfers and created a Delft Blue patchwork and dining cloth.

The complete installation will be presented at the first Amsterdam Kinder Kunst Biennale in 2021 at the OBA (Openbara Bibliotheek Amsterdam).

Stromend Blauw / Flowing Blue symbolises the connecting element of water streaming across London and Amsterdam. The project celebrates art education across borders, identity and heritage, children and neighbourhood.




“People in my local park have made & hung Tibetan flags and it’s absolutely joyous. It makes the heart whelm and spirit sing. Thank you whoever you are, I really needed that.”

“Found a sense of hope in my local community as artists come together for a common cause: to bring and maintain a sense of hope for the future with messages akin to those on Tibetan prayer flags – of peace, compassion, strength & wisdom.”

“I cycled past Hilly Fields and these Tibetan inspired flags with excellent relevant messages cheered up the place! Let’s hope at least some of them come true and change our attitudes!”

“Lovely to see the ‘Buntings of Hope’ dancing in the breeze at Hilly fields this weekend. The wonderful people at hARTslane have been facilitating workshops with local people to create this magical sight.”

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