Open for Art 2026: Dream Community Garden: a group diorama making session

Join Ruby for this drop-in collective-making session, bring only yourselves and your imaginations for this hopeful reimagining of an outdoor space to serve you and your communities. This workshop explores the value of dreaming and creating together as the first step in collective action towards more supportive futures for all of us. Reflect through making in this gentle workshop on the needs that both outdoor and community centered spaces fulfil in our lives, how they might become more accessible and welcoming to everyone, and how we might balance this with care for our environement. Materials will be provided for mark-making, collaging, and constructing 3d models out of cardboard, clay, and natural materials.

This workshop is for all ages - adults and families - but all children must attend with a responsible adult. Drop in through the session and stay as long as you like.

All the events at the Open for Art Festival are free to attend, there is an option to add a donation to help support the festival if you would like to and feel able to.

If you can no longer attend please let us know as places are limted and we can offer your space to someone else.

About the artist

Ruby is a multidisciplinary artist and facilitator, working in sculpture, installation, and performance. Their work is socially and environmentally engaged, focused outside conventional gallery spaces, connecting to the land, and sewing seeds of community growth. They engage with storytelling and folklores, reconnecting with ancestral relationships to nature, and alternative ways of relating to each other. They engage with natural materials and objects, exploring impermanence, transformation, and the meanings held by them.

OPEN FOR ART

19 JUNE - 28 JUNE 2026

REFLECT This year marks 10 years of Open for Art — a decade of artists, makers, communities, ideas and shared experiences in Reading’s largest town centre creative festival. As we celebrate this milestone, our theme invites everyone to pause and consider how creativity emerges from people coming together — experimenting, making, and reflecting. Our theme for 2026 is REFLECT.

For 10 days, we’re inviting Reading to slow down and seek out pop-up art in shops and businesses, encounter artists as they work, take part in creative sessions, and join conversations about how reflection shapes artistic practice.

Come and REFLECT with us this summer.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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