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Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Headway participant.
Life Cycles were workshops that explored each of the four seasons through a range of creative practices and soup recipes! In collaboration with Headway Cardiff and Pedal Power, we delivered our vibrant workshops throughout the year in the Pedal Power community café in Pontcanna. These sessions fused the distinctive essence of each season with elements of creativity and food.
At the outset of each session, chef Taz prepared and presented a seasonally inspired soup, highlighting the nutritional advantages of utilising seasonal ingredients, herbs, and spices to create affordable, flavourful, and health-boosting meals. While enjoying a bowl of the heart-warming soup we introduced the creative techniques we would using to create the mandala for that season. To draw inspiration to help shape our mandalas, participants were encouraged to explore the natural environment of the gardens and trails around Pontcanna Fields, either on foot or bicycle.
Chef Taz - Pedal Power Charity
Our Spring mandala beautifully embodies the Earth element, symbolizing the emergence of new life and the optimism of nature's renewal. To capture the vibrant hues and vitality surrounding us, we employed flower hammering techniques, creating exquisite watercolour-style prints from the natural pigments of the flowers, and we used saffron water to paint the hand-made crocuses featured in the design. Enhancing the intricacy of our mandala, we incorporated pressed flowers and microgreens to add a delightful definition to our piece.
To complete our creative and culinary experience, our "Vibrant Spring Vegetable" seasonal soup included spring vegetables, microgreens and saffron.
Our Summer mandala embodies the Fire element. As we exchanged stories about what summer signifies to each of us, we mindfully crafted vibrant 'picnic plates' outdoors in the garden, collecting fallen flowers, twigs, berries, and baby salad leaves from the cafe. We delicately fused our organic found materials with paint and printing techniques, and presented our unique mandala’picnic plates on the café tables for customers to appreciate. Subsequently, we digitised each mandala, enabling the creation ofdifferent sized elements that collectively form our larger mandala.
Ingredients from our "Refreshing Pea & Mint Soup" were sympathetically integrated into our final design, adding an extra layer and texture to our mandala through dried peas and mint leaves.
Our Autumn mandala captures the essence of the Wood Element, portraying the natural transition as plants gracefully fade and fall. The background of our design features pressed leaves gathered from the Pedal Power garden. The central wood slice symbolises the cyclical process of nature and emphasises the need to prepare for winter food scarcity. Lentils, pulses, dried citrus, berries, seeds, and spices integrated into our design, echoing the tradition of preserving food during this season. Our mandala incorporates a variety of ingredients, including lentils and spices from our "Spicy Store Cupboard Lentil Soup". Crafting our mandalas, the aromatic, textural, and colourful elements of the ingredients added an extra layer of sensory connection to our final piece, igniting conversations and eliciting memories of Autumns past.
Our Winter mandala embodies the essence of the Water element, conjuring the tranquil stillness of chilly winter mornings adorned with frost and ice. To convey this, we decided to use a Cyanotype methods to produce our unique blue image. Choosing from a variety of bike parts, seasonal items and garlic cloves, an ingredient also used in our "Immune Boosting Seasonal Soup", we designed our mandala. Placing all our items onto the canvas, we exposed the design to UV light, which triggered the chemical reaction to create our cyan-blue image. After washing and allowing our mandala to dry, the image was digitalised to allow for a repeat pattern of the cyanotype to be manipulated, producing a multi-layered snowflake design as our final artwork.
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