We have Gift Vouchers!
We're very pleased to be able to share our new gift cards with you for our workshops. What could be better than being given a gift of an experience, and what's more a new resourceful skill to learn & practise.
Click here to see the vouchers available.
What a first! Necessary Traditions festival weekend complete
What a wonderful weekend at the Arts Centre in Ōtautahi Christchurch was had! Over 40 practitioners of necessary traditions spent the weekend demonstrating their resourceful skills. The reality of how it was to have these extraordinary group of practitioners together in one place was beyond our hopes, it felt like putting the tinder to a flame and the burst of energy & excitement in spontaneous & furry collaborations was evident in these moments:
A doll of Alex Yerks (woodcarver) made my Hilary Jean Tapper on Sunday 11 November 2018.
A shoe upper woven of harakeke by Tracey-Anne Cook for shoemaker Louise Ayling.
A spoon carved by Alex Yerks dyed with black carrot by Arina Terekhova.
These feel like the beginning of many enduring & enlivening pieces of work that strengthen relationships that keep us all practicing our necessary traditions.
ANNOUNCING: the Fund for Necessary Traditions
As part of the inaugural festival in 2018 we are delighted to share with you this new fund which has been set up to fortify & grow the presence of resourceful craft in Aotearoa New Zealand.
This fund & it's impact is needed because as a society we are losing the ability to create what we need from what we have whilst caring for the local natural resources we rely on. To do this we need knowledge, skills & the practice of the necessary traditions which allow us to be kaitiaki or carers of the ecosystems we live within. This way we are all well & we are all connected.
Donations to this fund enable the following support:
- Experienced craft practitioners are supported to develop their practice so that it is inherently resourceful i.e. that it carefully uses & cares for local resources to create what we need from what we have. This involves partnership between science & craft.
- Experienced practitioners of resourceful craft are supported to teach & share their skills & knowledge.
- Opportunities for learning resourceful craft traditions are subsidised to reduce barriers to access for as many people as possible.
This work has already begun with the Necessary Traditions festival 2018 giving over 40 resourceful practitioners the opportunity to share their practice with the general public. We have been able to bring these practitioners together to create a support network & to strengthen the identity of resourceful craft, and have provided specific support to enable their skills to be shared through workshops, talks & demonstrations.
We look forward to evaluating the impact of this event on these practitioners and sharing this with you.
We also look forward to working with more patrons who wish to have a part in fortifying & growing the presence of resourceful craft in Aotearoa New Zealand. As a patron of Necessary Traditions you can choose to: be consulted with on a regular basis regarding the direction of the fund, listed as a patron publicly, receive updates on the impact enabled by your donations, be a part of events, gain access to workshops, give advice, & get to know the practitioners we support.
The bank account for donations is: Rekindle 12-3147-0442675-01
Please contact info@necessarytraditions.co.nz with any queries regarding this.
Would you like to support the Necessary Traditions festival as a volunteer?
Come and volunteer for the festival of Necessary Traditions!
Volunteers are needed to support the talented craftspeople and to host visitors, amongst other roles. If you'd like to offer up a few hours or a day we would love to hear from you. It's a wonderful opportunity even just to spend time in the beautiful Arts Centre.
Please fill in this Google Form here to tell us you’re interested in being involved or please email volunteer@necessarytraditions.co.nz
Our Resourceful Skills Workshop - thanks to Creative New Zealand
Thanks to grant funding from Creative New Zealand we have been able to develop new work & put a whole lot of energy into developing our Resourceful Skills Workshops programme this last year.
In later 2017 we received a grant from Creative New Zealand for this purpose & this has contributed significantly to the development of Rekindle as an arts organisation. This project developed our capability to work with an array of skilled craft practitioners including Stephanie Owens, Gregory Quinn, Benita Wakefield (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Kere, Ngāti Irakehu), Gemma Stratton, & Douglas Horrell.
This project has enabled us to curate & develop the Resourceful Skills Workshop programme, which comes as a result of these craft practitioners having time & opportunity to develop their skills to deliver craft workshops to the public.
We are delighted to share some images below of some of the work that has been enabled through this project.
A school holiday spoon carving class in progress being run by Juliet Arnott.
Images above by Johannes Van Kan.
Images below by Justyn Rebecca Denney.
Douglas Horrell carving a spoon from local Black Walnut. Douglas has been practising green wood-working for 2-3 years & now tutors with Rekindle. Image below is Douglas at work in our Arts Centre workshop.
Gemma Stratton weaving with son Marlo as she works on the back of one of the Orkney chairs that was made by the team.
Greg Quinn finishing a greenwood rake.
Benita Wakefield (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Kere, Ngāti Irakehu) weaving harakeke at Rehua Marae where she run some Raranga workshops with Rekindle. Benita is pictured below with her Aunty & Juliet Arnott.
This image above is Juliet Arnott preparing to finish a greenwood stool. This is a workshop developed for our Resourceful Skills programme.
Below are some of the amazing craftspeople who are or have been involved in the development of our Resourceful Skills Workshop programme, including from top right: Ruben Hamblett, Kerry Mulligan, Douglas Horrell, Emma Johnson, Trent Hiles, & from bottom right: Gemma Stratton & Marlo, Juliet Arnott & Greg Quinn. Not pictured are Stephen Brailsford, Stephanie Owens & Richard Hare.
Many of this group contributed to bring this furniture to fruition which is now found at Te Matatiki Toi Ora Arts Centre in the Boys High Building.
A good reason to buy your Necessary Traditions tickets before the end of Tuesday 23 October!
So a big reason for the Necessary Traditions festival is to enable people of all ages, and especially young people, to really experience the magic and the wonder of resourceful craft traditions that turn 'nothing' into 'something'.
To address this, we plan on gifting free festival tickets to a number of organisations & schools that support children & their whānau in the next 2 weeks to allow them time to arrange the support required to attend.
So to enable this, whilst also meeting basic festival costs, we need to have enough festival tickets purchased early, and of course for this we need your help! As gratitude to you for buying an early ticket we have arranged a discount of 15% until the end of Tuesday 23 October 2018.
So to buy your tickets with the discount you can click here to book your tickets for the main festival event & use the code NT*EARLY when you get to the payment stage.
Buying tickets early helps the Necessary Traditions festival find it's feet in this first year, and ensures we can make the weekend available to those who might not otherwise find this event accessible.
We thank you wholeheartedly for your support.
Necessary Traditions Festival Tickets are on sale!
You can buy tickets here and find out about the updates to the ever-increasing Necessary Traditions 2018 Main Event Line-Up here. Workshops will all soon be online too!
Rekindle founder speaks at TEDx Auckland
From wastefulness to resourcefulness -
Occupational Therapist & Rekindle founder Juliet Arnott gave this TEDx talk, seen below, in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand in late 2017.
“Resourcefulness is a complex interaction between our inner resources and Earth’s resources, upon which we desperately depend. It is made up of a set of skills that enable us to meet our needs and live lives we have reason to value without damaging this beautiful planet."
“Traditional craft has become so displaced, but it could not be more relevant. Craft is the skilled relationship between us and Earth. Craft gives us the means to harness and care for the resources around us - to create what we need from we have. I believe craft should sit at the heart of our education and training so that we can all really build the foundations of our wellbeing.”
“Resourcefulness is an essential and practical tool for human and planetary wellbeing. It brings to life essential concepts like the Circular Economy and Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’.
And we need to see this reflected in our Living Standards Framework to really address our wellbeing. So to find the wellbeing that we all crave, look to your resourceful self, make the most of what you have, and build your life on the foundation of a resourceful and caring relationship with Earth as this is the most essential and healthy relationship you and I have.”
For more information on Juliet's work on resourcefulness please see Volume 1 of the Journal of Resourcefulness, a free PDF is available here. Volume 2 is due to be published in late 2019.
Necessary Traditions - our festival of resourceful craft
We are SO excited about our festival Necessary Traditions which will happen this November 2018 for the very first time. This event is based at the beautiful Arts Centre in central Ōtautahi Christchurch.
Necessary Traditions runs across a week from 8th to 17th November, with the main event across the weekend on the 10th & 11th, more details about the festival programme can be found here.
The main event is on Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 November and you’ll see these skilled people demonstrate their necessary traditions at the stunningly restored Arts Centre –
Shoemaking / Letterpress and Typesetting / Windsorchair making / Rag-rug making / Blacksmithing / Growing your own food / Willow basketwork / Pin-hole photography / Sourdough baking with local flours / Stonemasonry / Soap making and other household essentials / Cup, bowl and spoon carving / Hand-painted Sign-writing / Kintsugi / Reforestation / Tī kōuka weaving / Darning and Hand-sewn button-holes / Preservingand Fermenting / Heritage building techniques / Making clothes from reused cloth / Raranga Harakeke weaving / Bookbinding / Ceramics with local pigment and clay / Reupholstery / Spinning, Knitting & Crochet / Felting / Greenwood-working / Loom weaving / Mandolin making / Leatherworking / Candle making / and many more.
Huge gratitude to our festival supporters:
More information regarding the full programme, tickets & bookings coming very soon. Please join the Necessary Traditions mailing list here to receive updates, or visit the Necessary Traditions festival website here. From 17th September 2018 tickets for the festival will be sold here on our online store.
Free classes in our workshop at the Arts Centre!
With huge thanks to the Enliven Places Project Fund at Christchurch City Council, we are able to offer a series of free workshops during some weekdays starting from 6th August 2018. This funding has enabled us to begin to deliver these free workshops (at our previous central city site) and now to continue this in our new space at the Arts Centre.
Longer term, we plan to continue to offer some free workshops during the working week so to make experiences of resourceful craft accessible to everyone. We hope these workshops will especially enable those who couldn't contribute financially to the costs of our other workshops, or those who have a need for something meaningful to do during the working week. We have another charitable partner supporting us to do this in 2019 and we're excited to share news of that soon.
So please keep an eye on our Resourceful Skills Workshop page to see the dates of the free workshops as they come up. Booking is essential so we can prepare for the workshops. At this time they are mostly on Mondays and Tuesday at 1030am, please see below for a map of where to find the workshop.
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