Here at Watts Gallery – Artists' Village we run an extensive Learning and community outreach Engagement programme.

The programme aims to continue the Art for All by All vision of our artist-founders, George and Mary Watts. This includes activities, partnerships and projects that take place onsite, online and offsite with our community.

To paint a picture of where we were this time last year, we had hosted our summer activities outdoors and were planning our return to indoor activities. It wasn’t until Autumn 2021 that we welcomed our first school visits back to the gallery.

Since September 2021:

52 schools and 2515 school children have taken part in activities delivered onsite and online and 224 of these had their work exhibited in the Old Kiln, through our partnership with Delight Charity; Delight in Watts.

We’ve delivered 57 days of The Make Space family workshops in our Clore Studio across School Holidays and monthly Sunday sessions.

We’ve also hosted: Visits from Father Christmas, storytelling in Limnerslease, lawn parties and our first ever BioBlitz.

We supported 8 young people to achieve an Arts Awards qualification.

We’ve launched new products in our Shop, all from our collaboratively produced social enterprise, The Limner Collection.

Partnerships we worked with, amongst others:

• The Hive (formerly known as Park Barn Community Centre)
• halow (supporting young people with learning disabilities)
• Woking Womens Support Centre
• Surrey Minority Ethnic Forum
• Surrey County Council’s Youth Support Team

Offsite, our ongoing project continued with HMP Send – now in its 14th year - with weekly workshops and their annual exhibition ‘Our Time’ which takes place in prison. The exhibition had 288 invited guests across two days and 96 artworks sold by 8 exhibiting artists.

We returned to Compton Fête with lots of clay. Over the day, 144 people made a total of 123 tiles (that's the equivalent of one tile created every two minutes!).

Back onsite, adult workshops returned – including sold out sessions in pottery, wreath making, plaster casting, charcoal portraits, plein air painting and most recently upcycling.

Finally, we’ve welcomed three Artists in Residence: Sam Barrett, Ashleigh Fisk and Sarah Thien.

We also saw the homecoming of Chris Pavia’s fantastic work Beyond the Waves, from his residency with us last year.