Open Community Studio

This is an open-studio style event, where you are welcome to bring your own project, come sit with friends and spend an evening in gentle creative play!
✨🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ All humans (16+) welcome.

Whether you are embroidering, watercolour painting, sculpting, scrapbooking, assembling, colouring with crayons, collaging, paint-by-numbering, or darning a pair of socks, you are welcome here!

You are encouraged to bring a project you're currently working on, bring a creative problem you've been trying to figure out, bring materials to share, or show up empty-handed and see what you can create from what is available!

The Intention:

This is a safe space for slowing down, breathing deeply, and connecting with your unique flavour of creativity in an encouraging and supportive environment. This is a space about the experience - not the product.

Wherever you are on your creative journey, whether you identify fully as an artist or have not even had the time to doodle in years, we all need creative expression in our life. Creativity is accessible to you regardless of skill or talent. We are all creative beings! That is part of our inheritance as humans.

The Agreements:

It's important to acknowledge the intrinsic vulnerability of creativity. As such, participation in this space is an agreement to hold space for one another in that vulnerability.

💕We agree to offer feedback kindly and share encouragement often.

💕We agree to offer that same kindness to ourselves and our inner critic.

💕We agree to approach our creativity as one big experiment with no right or wrong way to do it.

✨✨ Water, tea, and light snacks will be served.

Please note in terms of accessibility: we will be gathered on the second floor of the building, which does not have an elevator.

** Oldhand is a coffee shop, not a full-time studio space. We ask that you be mindful of that for whatever materials you bring with you, and are prepared to clean up behind yourself.

ABOUT YOUR FACILITATOR

Kendra Schellenberg (she/her) is an award-winning local artist and feminist weirdo who has spent over a decade working in the arts industry as a painter, sculptor, designer, and maker. An art-nerd to the core, she believes that creativity is a foundational part of what makes us human and an essential part of feeling truly alive.