hanging art installation

Artists connecting neighbors through creativity at Clayton Community Centre.

Calling all artists!

Do you want to be the next Artist in Residence? Clayton Community Centre invites a visual artist to create a hanging artwork for our community living room. Your project will reference the Surrey Archives collection.

Current Artist in Residence: Loandbehold

Artists Doloris Altin and Elvira Monteforte

Join artist collective Loandbehold for free art demos and workshops. Add to a group art project and come celebrate the unveiling. Artists Doloris Altin and Elvira Monteforte explore the question “who can make art?” With their community art project, Spilt Milk, the answer is everyone!

Whether you think you are the creative type or not, you are welcome. Based on the book It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw, the project explores abstract shapes. We will play with cloud shapes and stoke our imagination.

Join the project: Spilt Milk

Free art demos

Visit with Dolores and Elvira as they experiment with recycled fabrics, glue, and other fun materials! Get to know the artists and learn about the project.

Hosted at the Community Living Room in Clayton Community Centre.

  • Tuesday, March 12, 11am–3pm
  • Friday, March 15, 11am–3pm

Free drop-in art workshops

Join the artists and your fellow community members to create cloud-like forms out of recycled fabrics and glue.

Hosted at the Visual Arts Studio in Clayton Community Centre.

  • Tuesday, April 30, 3–6pm
  • Friday, May 3, 5–8pm
  • Tuesday, May 7, 3–6pm
  • Friday, May 10, 3–6pm

Free community celebration

Join your neighbours to celebrate the installation of the artwork.

Friday, May 31, 3:30–5pm at the Community Living Room in Clayton Community Centre


Contact

You can reach the Community Art Team at communityart@surrey.ca.


 

Past residencies

Feel at Home with Keely

Artist Keely O'Brien led the 2023 Artist in Residence program under the theme ‘Feel at Home’. She explored the question "How can a Community Centre feel like home?" and highlighted Clayton's uniqueness and community.

artist Keely Obrien, a caucasian woman


Youth takeover

This spring, youth took over and engaged one of our spaces at Clayton Community Centre, designing and creating an art installation.

 
Yoga and Art

A collaborative workshop series with guest instructor Ritika Kalra. The workshops combined art and yoga to increase the participants' sense of well-being.

 
Books by my Bed

In a collaboration with Surrey Libraries, Clayton Branch, participants created self-portraits through book lists that were displayed within the library.

Community Art project with a stack of books on top of bedside tables

 

Heart to Hearth

This project turned part of the Centre’s lobby into a beautiful “living room”, complete with a family portrait wall. The portraits were adapted from photographs from Surrey Archives and tied Surrey’s past to the present day

Showcase of images that community members collaged and remixed, presented on a wall above a fireplace mantel
Learn about Bees with Jen
jen clark

Jen Clark is a local artist whose paintings explore how humans see the natural world. Her painting style is both abstract and realistic. She specializes in large-scale murals, including projects with the Vancouver Mural Festival.

Jen worked with the summer arts camp kids to create The Beekeepers' Mural at Clayton Community Centre. Each camper participated in a field trip to a local hive, where they met a beekeeper from the Honeybee Centre. Campers saw how the hive works and learned the importance of healthy bee communities. Afterwards, campers painted a hexagon tile that became part of the final honeycomb pattern mural. View the final project to see what is buzzing.

wide view of beekeepers mural
Play with Tamara
Photo of Tamara Unroe looking at the camera, a woman with glasses and white hair tied into two buns on top of her head, wearing a purple shirt and grew sweater

 

Tamara Unroe is a maker, a puppeteer, and a committed dumpster diver. She studied visual art at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and puppetry with Sandglass Theatre in Vermont. She has worked with artists and communities in Canada, Taiwan, Europe, and Thailand. Tamara builds large- scale puppets, shadow puppets, costumes, and sculptural installations, often incorporating found objects and sound.

In spring of 2022, community members joined Tamara to play with puppets, light, and sound. Check out the completed video projects below!

 

 

children watching shadow puppets
Strike a Pose with Claire Moore
Claire Moore

 

Claire Moore is a multi-media artist who lives and works near Crescent Beach. Her art practice ranges from small-scale sculptural interventions to large format oil paintings and her process is often collaborative.

Claire has collected poses from the Clayton Heights community—poses that reflect people's experience of the past year. Claire's drawings explore the many ways people have been impacted by the pandemic and how we hold these memories in our bodies. The collection of drawings, entitled Strike a Pose, is on display at Clayton Community Centre.

 

A long gallery wall with life-drawing images hung on it and two people walking towards the camera, looking at the drawings.
Tell Your Story with Jude
Jude Campbell

 

Jude Campbell is a Surrey-based artist who collects found objects and personal historical artifacts. She reconfigures these into multimedia installations to give voice to personal and community stories.

After meeting with local residents to listen to their stories, Jude used the text from these stories to create a hanging sculpture entitled COVID Reflections that hangs in Clayton Community Centre.

 

Image of a hanging sculpture made from acetate sheets rolled into cones and hung in spirals, painted in shades of blue with words stenciled on. Photo from underneath the sculpture looking straight up at it.