A student from West London College has officially launched the new Park Royal Open Workshop (POW) as part of the recent London Craft Week.
Mariam Eish, who studies digital design at the College, gave a speech at the opening of POW, which provides affordable space to creatives starting out and has been working with the Absolute Beginners project at Park Royal since 2020.
Absolute Beginners explores how young people can learn to make basic goods in radically sustainable ways.
Last month, Mariam invited classmates Hona Saleh and Sara Dehbouzorgi to join a new Absolute Beginners project, working with Park Royal Clay extracted from the grounds of the new train station at Old Oak Common in Park Royal for the HS2 trainline. The West London College trio have been giving up their Saturdays to take part in the clay project, which involves making cups and plates to be presented to the project founder, HS2 on 19 June 2023.
Mariam said: “We work with amazing people in the project like Phil Root who is a university professor and a ceramicist, Tom James who is an artist and Absolute Beginners director – and Ayşe Köklü who is a lecturer in Art and Design at Goldsmiths University. They teach us the importance of sustainability in art and design.”
Hona added: “We learn how you can use anything in creating artwork from found objects like a bucket or a piece of discarded concrete or a rusted iron pipe, just left lying on the streets of Park Royal. They also teach us that you don’t need expensive materials to make art, you can use your hands to press the clay and a cheesegrater to smooth it.”
Sara said: “We want to study interior architecture at university, so finding out how to build the kiln was really insightful for us. The construction techniques we learned will help us when we make our models for the future.”
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