shewhomust | The Ouseburn without a camera

It's a while since we've been to the annual Ouseburn Open Studios event: two years ago the snow made us reluctant to leave the house, and last year we were doing other things. Yesterday's visit was fun, but felt rather lightweight: perhaps because we started later than I had hoped (though we did pick up some tickets at the Sage on the way in), perhaps because I forgot to take my camera, and missed it.

Or perhaps there was no sense discovery this year: I saw several things I liked, mostly from artists whose work I already knew. I'd been keen to visit Northern Print, which we'd missed last time round, but the only things that really impressed me there weren't conventional prints at all, but Paul Scott's ceramic slabs bearing enlargements of the individual trees from the willow pattern. At Lime Street I liked Jim Edwards' cityscapes - but we knew this - though his series of painted crab claws came as a surprise. From Jim Edwards' strong colours to Helena Seget's pure white porcelain - though she too is using fragments of willow pattern (it's a meme!) - wearable collars and pages torn from notebooks rendered in fine silky white, maps in two parts for sharing: I bought some Chritstmas tree decorations for gifts (though I make keep one).

After lunch with Gail and S. at the Seven Stories café (where I disgraced myself by asking whether the iced biscuits were seals - they were dragons, of course, silly Shewhomust!) we walked down to the Toffee Factory, since I was curious about this new venue. Easier said than done, since the map showed the location of the building, but not of the entrance, and we walked the long way round and crossed a couple of main roads, only to find when we arrived that it was not offering open studios but a pop-up shop (to be fair, its website does make this clear). I was interested to note that the shop displayed several themes and techniques that I had seen in the Lime Street studios, and relieved that in every case, I liked the things I had already bought better than the versions on sale here.

But the building itself was worth seeing, and its lighting looked magnificent in the dusk. I took the photo by remote control (that is, I asked

durham_rambler to take it using his phone) and we walked back to the car along the river to the car. I enjoyed the galleries, and was pleased to have done some Christmas shopping, but this last walk along the Ouseburn was the most satisfying part of the day.