Cherry Styles (Growing Colour Together)
As a small-press publisher and gardener, Cherry’s practice spans art projects and educational activities in community settings.
Growing Colour Together is a project by WOVEN in Kirklees that we’re delighted to be supporting through artist mentorship and promotion.
This WOVEN in Kirklees 2023 project aims to create a district-wide, natural dye, colour garden. Everyone from Kirklees is invited to get involved, helping to create dye gardens anywhere and everywhere, working with six local and international artists commissioned to create events, installations and more for 2023.
Working in partnership across the district, WOVEN is giving everyone the opportunity to ‘have a grow’, use what’s grown to make natural dyes and learn about the environmental implications of chemical dyes and what we buy. A natural dye garden gives eco-friendly, natural dye pigments and stains for textiles, knitting yarns, and even artist paints and prints. We spoke to the artists involved…
What’s your involvement in the Growing Colour Together project?
I am one of the artists on the GCT project. Alongside Michaela, I’ve been working with the gardening group at Birkby and Fartown Library and the wider Birkby community.
Why do you create?
I have always made stuff, for fun, and over the last 10 years or so as paid work. Chronic illness forced me to slow down and think carefully about where I was focusing my, often limited energies. My practice took a bit of a u-turn, and I found myself working outside, processing some of that, with other people. Re-calibrating after the upheaval of the last few years has found me working on several community growing projects and beginning to really think about the links between gardening and artistic practice more generally.
Do you consider yourself to be part of an artist network/community, and if so, how does this impact your practice?
Yes. After moving around the country a fair bit in my 20s the networks I’ve been a part of have helped sustain my work and offered me valuable context, particularly throughout periods of illness. Being able to work with the community here in Birkby, where I live is particularly rewarding and has really shaped the work I'm making. It feels very reciprocal.
What changes would you like to see in the arts sector?
Accessibility as standard practice, embedded within projects from the start; with genuine compassion and space granted for those of us who are sick and disabled, both as artists and audiences.
Cherry’s links: