Season’s Greetings and Thank You!

Season’s Greetings and thank you!

First of all, we didn’t have a Christmas show image to share this year so we thought we would share last year’s - this fabulous shot of our sell out show ‘Mother Goose Fae Easterhoose’! [Image by Euan Robertson]. The angels are by Alice Dansey Wright and was part of our Saturday Art Club activities.

We’d like to thank everyone – our customers, partners, funders, supporting artists and friends of Platform – for all the amazing support over the past year. It is very much appreciated in what has been an unusual and unpredictable time.

Our online programme is now finished for the year and following an extended festive break, we plan to return with our new season online Taking Part programme in late January and which will run until the end of March 2021. You can find full details of the programme here.

What a year…

The Platform team has been busy since restrictions began in late March 2020, with a whole host of activities, programme and community outreach taking place online throughout the year.

We were delighted to offer support to artists and continue to engage with audiences by running elements of our Taking Part programme online from April onwards, with the majority of these taking a break for the summer and finishing around mid-December. We’ve run weekly art clubs for kids and adults with all sorts of fun and engaging activities taking place, hosted free music lessons online and held an online performance from our Platform Young Company performance group on Zoom.

Keeping in contact with members of the local community and those who regularly attended Platform’s groups has been key to us. We launched a mail art project with the local community, posted out hundreds of art and knitting packs, and provided art activities to a number of local community organisations to distribute to local families. We also hosted informal catch up sessions online with our regular group members and introduced a ‘cuppa & chat’ element to our Platform Singers choir sessions.

In the summer and October holidays we delivered a free food programme from our café, providing breakfast, lunches and creative art parks to children and their families in the North East of Glasgow. These meals were given out in The Bridge car park. This project was funded by Glasgow City Council’s Children’s Holiday Food Fund Programme and we welcomed thousands of local families along to both projects. Thank you to Glasgow Life for assistance and help with this.

We held some pilot outdoor shows with Sprog Rock in The Bridge car park for local school and nursery groups, which were warmly welcomed and great fun was had by all! Artist and community engagement was key and we commissioned artists Martin Campbell and Owen Clarke to lead on a project with local primary schools at Hogganfield Loch to transform the shelters within the nature reserve. We were also proud to be involved with the Black Life Mural Trail and Black History Celebrations month through displaying a mural by Etienne Kubwabo on the Studio window at Platform and holding graphic novel creation workshops for teenagers.

It’s been a full year despite the restrictions and we have been fortunate to keep engaging with so many of you online and to be in the position provide a varied arts programme for all ages. However we are, of course, still really missing all of our lovely customers and visitors to our building (which remains closed due to Scottish Government guidelines). We look forward to welcoming everyone back in due course.

For further information on what else we’ve been up to, please see our Latest section.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.

Stay safe and stay creative!

Best wishes from all at Platform